The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

So I know stealing is wrong but I've noticed a lot of us do not have access to Wiccan books or cannot pay for them so I went scourging around the Internet and found about 50-ish or so Wiccan Books or Related Topics I do plan on reading them then when I have the money (and time) buying some of these books do you think it's wrong that I'm doing this? Or just wait to buy the books and read them then because I know half the experience in having that book in your hands

Don't you have a library option? Even if your local branch doesn't have the titles you want, interlibrary loan is not that hard.

So I know stealing is wrong but I've noticed a lot of us do not have access to Wiccan books or cannot pay for them so I went scourging around the Internet and found about 50-ish or so Wiccan Books or Related Topics I do plan on reading them then when I have the money (and time) buying some of these books do you think it's wrong that I'm doing this? Or just wait to buy the books and read them then because I know half the experience in having that book in your hands

 
It really damages the authors, so yeah, that's a big wrong in my book. (I know a bunch of authors, though more in genres outside Pagan stuff.)

Publishers make decisions about future books (both from that particular author, and about similar topics) based on sales, so every time someone downloads a book instead of buying it, you're reducing the chances of similar books in the future, or from the same author. If you actually *like* the stuff you're reading, that's not at all in your interest.

The other thing is, there is a *tremendous* amount of legitimately free material out there on the Internet about these topics. Some of it is lousy, some of it is great, and finding it is probably going to be more work than downloading an illegal (and unethical) copy of a book.

But at the same time, part of being a witch, for a great many people, is being aware of the interconnection of the world around you, and ignoring that just because you want a book is actually *damaging* to your study, in my opinion.

So, what can you do instead?

First, look for that free info. If there's topics you're interested in, asking on a forum like this one about good online resources can be a great place to start. (Or just browsing the forum and looking at old posts). That will let you use your book money to fill in gaps you can't find online, and make the most of it.

If you have access to online book subscription services where you are, they can be a great resource.

Ditto if you're able to access Amazon or other online booksellers, they often make some materials available for free briefly, or at deep discounts, and you can monitor the current discount lists and see if there's anything interesting to you.

Libraries are also great. If you're a long distance from your nearest one, you might see if there's a library in your region that will consider loans by mail (some libraries do this), or if there is a school, college, or university that's easier for you to get to that might be willing to let you do interlibrary loan or access resources.

(In the US, where I live, state universities - the ones supported by taxes - generally provide some access to members of the public, without them needing to be associated with the school. Some schools also have 'friends of the library' programs where you can get additional access for a yearly fee, and if you read a lot of books, or if what you're looking for is heavily academic, these can be a really good deal.)

You might also investigate book swap sites, where you can swap books with other people, and thus be able to read more books than you can afford yourself, by reading things and then passing on the ones that you don't need anymore (not necessarily Pagan titles: the way a lot of those work is you list books, when someone gets your books, you mail them out and get credit on the site, and can use that to swap for new books.)

Not to be a purposefully contrarian butthole, but this seems terribly wasteful in terms of packaging and fuel miles. And the author still isn't getting paid.

The thing about used books is that the author has *already* gotten paid. And the publisher has already gotten some useful sales figures. (And also gotten paid, because publishers, and artists and so on also often add value to a book beyond the author's, whether that's editing or diagrams or whatever, and that matters too.)

You have a point about the fuels, but that's an issue for print books in the first place. The other part is that a fair number of studies have shown that people who download illegally made copies *don't* often buy print copies, as far as anyone can track. (There are some weird subsets where studies found they do, but they are usually technical books.)

I can, almost, see the argument for "Let me do a complete evaluation" (I do something similar on music subscription services: I pay my monthly fee to listen to stuff, recognising that the payment to the artist is not always what I'd like, and then the stuff I like, I buy.) But music is a lot harder to evaluate without actually experiencing it, and in this model the artist does get paid, just not as much as I think they should, until I buy the album, and the artist also made the choice to have their music available on the service. (Which authors of pirated books don't get to make.)

As to evaluation, honestly, doesn't that apply to a lot of people, basically anyone who doesn't have a local bookstore with a great selection of Pagan books in their physical community? Which is, really, most people outside a few urban locations?  

(And the distance thing - well, I've seen people argue that a 20 minute trip to their local bookstore, when there is one, is Too Much Effort. Which really just shows that people will draw the line in vastly different places. At least several of the people I'd heard this from had several different transportation choices and had stated they had no health issues that would make that kind of trip a problem.)

In other words, almost all of us rely on the same things: reviews from other people, excerpts available online (from the publisher, author, or things like Amazon Look Inside or Google Books), and so on.

A link or two of possible interest: Elysia, who is a senior editor for Pagan and Wiccan books at Llewellyn did a great essay a few years ago (2012) about piracy and the Pagan book market in particular, and there's a whole bunch of comments from authors, Pagan store owners, and more. It's here: https://www.llewellyn.com/blog/2012/01/myths-about-pirated-books/ .

Another one, focusing on piracy of Young Adult titles but with some good specifics is here: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/63357-the-piracy-problem.html . It points out that one of the impacts of authors is that sending takedown notices can be amazingly time consuming and take away time they would much rather spend writing new things.

It's stupendously wasteful and I don't understand why it's held up as a paragon of virtue by a lot of people.

Because there's also a tremendous amount of waste in *print* books, when you consider the number that are eventually pulped. Assuming that your average used book doesn't get shipped more than a couple of times, I think the math on "which is most wasteful" is more complicated than you're implying for most books for most people.

(Also, at least in the US, Media Mail tends to go by slower shipping methods - train or very tightly packed trucks - rather than more resource-demanding options.)

I am not sure why music would be harder to evaluate than books. In my experience, it is the exact opposite.

For me, if I'm interested in an album, I'm interested in either the whole album or the artist in general. Being able to preview individual songs (or the 30 second portion of individual songs you often get) doesn't give me enough data to figure that out. And I don't think I'm *that* much of an outlier, so being able to hear a full album, a range of what a given musician does, is really helpful.

In comparison, reading an individual chapter from someone gives me a feel for their writing style, how solid their research is (if that's relevant), their general command of the language, but it's not going to tell me if the whole book is going to fit together as an argument or explanation, or how the book handles half a dozen complex issues. Those are things I need to get from reviews or reading the whole thing.

I would like to point out that there are a lot of places that are not the US. Y'all are heinously spoiled in terms of cost and availability of materials. I'd have to get on a plane to make it to the nearest relevant bookstore. Other areas of Europe are even worse; I'm only two hours away from an international airline hub.

First, as you know, I spent almost 4 years living 45 minutes from the nearest largest town, with health issues that meant that *driving* to a different bookstore than the (nice but small) independent in my small town were really tricky. (No easy public access transportation until you did that 45 minute drive to get to one of the bus lines.)

And because I a) worked in the local library and didn't want my co-workers knowing what I was requesting and b) same problem with the bookstore, I couldn't use either of those routes either.

More to the point, though - right now, I work somewhere where I am regularly (on the order of at least half a dozen times a month) providing reference resources (including scanning articles and individual book chapters) to people outside the US.

(In the last month or so, this has included Iran and Pakistan, both of which have real issues with content that can be mailed to or ordered by people in the country, even when what they want are professional materials related to the specialised education niche I now work in.)  

Those people figure out what books they want to read, or what would be useful, by a combination of accessing reviews, reading the catalogue records I (and other people) send them, and otherwise using the material they *can* get to figure out where to put their priorities. So I'm pretty sure it's possible and functional, even when it's a lot less ideal than anyone would like, and when it's not those people's preferences.

I don't see what that has to do with this.

My point about the distance comment is that some people will use it even when it's patently ridiculous. Any tool can be abused, and people use the "Hey, it's free, I'll just read it that way" even when getting a copy legitimately is only a very small amount of effort, if it's available for free.

You have some legitimate complaints, I'm not arguing with that - but I think the answer to that is *not* "Get the book for free online". (I'll come back to that.)

Anyway, this is why a lot of the business model has been moving to make it available in as a frictionless a way as possible, so that the author, or artist, or musican (and all the supporting roles) get paid, because it turns out that many people will pay if you do that in a reasonableish way.

I am one of those who do not. I find that reviews often do not line up with what I actually receive, Amazon Look Inside is often terrible, and seriously...fuck Facebook.

Ok, with you on the last.

There are reasons I've mentioned Google Books - for the books on there, the excerpts are often much more extensive than Amazon Look Inside. It will be missing pages every so often, and you may also want to try the search tip below, but you can often get a much better sense of the flow of the book.

(Also, Amazon Look Inside often works better if you try searching for a phrase that you are fairly sure will show up in the book, but is not incredibly common - so, for example, a common herb name, rather than 'witchcraft', or a name of someone you know is mentioned, or something like that, rather than relying on the few sample pages they give you. You won't get the whole chapter, but you can usually get chunks of what you're interested in.)

Looking at reviews is also a skill, and it's one I've found very worth building, but I agree, some changes in online reviewing make it hard. (there's a lot of weird culture about critical reviews in a lot of review spaces: I generally find reviews in places other than Amazon and GoodReads much more helpful than in those locations, though I still use them to get points to investigate further.)

Also, I am inclined to think that a lot of online things that are called reviews are not really so much reviews as personal responses. Those can be really helpful if you know the person responding, but they really aren't if you're looking for a nuanced impersonal review.

I used to comment that there was a particular movie reviewer in Minnesota where I'd fairly automatically go see the movies he didn't like for particular reasons, and avoid the ones he did like, and that worked out well. Which basically is the point that once you get that calibration with particular review sources, that can help a lot.)

In case it helps anyone else reading: I generally look mostly at the 2 and 4 star reviews (on a 5 star system), because the 1 and 5 stars tend to be either "I hated this" or "I loved it" without a lot of details, but the 2 and 4 star ones tend to be a lot more usefully explanatory about why they're not 1 and 5 star reviews, and give me a really good idea of a book's possible pros and cons, and whether those things matter to me.  

Other things I do - and these are things that even very basic Look Inside usually shows you if it's an option - are looking at the table of contents (gives me an idea of the author's priorities for the book: if a book is one chapter about religious stuff and 10 chapters about magical stuff, that's a big tell for the kind of book it is, you know?)

Looking at the index (if there is one) or the bibliography or other end matter, also very helpful in figuring out what kinds of things were covered.

So stop devoting time to it and write new things. Push your publisher to adopt a Netflix model. Start a Patreon account. Do direct sales.

That's rather a lot to ask of many authors. (I mean, it's not like most Pagan authors aren't also working day jobs. Most authors of any stripe.)

Some authors really thrive with the Patreon model, or with doing supplementary stuff, but I also know a lot of really great authors who find trying to do that kind of independent marketing, ongoing social media presence thing really amazingly exhausting and overwhelming, in ways that have a major impact on their quality of life, health, and social relationships. (And that's before we get into issues like harassment, the chance of acquiring stalkers or other really unpleasant online interactions, and so on, where the chances go up rather starkly the more active you are online.)

And if I like stuff they write, I want them to write more stuff. If they like the other parts, great, but if they don't, I don't think it's good for anyone to demand that from every author, as the cost of keeping their head above water. (This is, as numerous authors point out, why they pay agents and publishers in the first place, so they can focus on writing, rather than all the other stuff that goes into publishing.)

I do think that pushing publishers to explore new models is great (and many of them are, but they also have to justify the risks on the business end, and that means that in a fast-changing world, they're always going to be a step or two behind independent actors in the field.)

I think writing and encouraging them to provide more useful previews is definitely valid and worth doing (and a lot of authors already do this, if you go look at their personal websites: it's not uncommon to see the first chapter available, or some other substantial chunk, or other things that give you a pretty good idea of whether their content is going to be interesting to you.)

And I think we can definitely do better, as a specific collection of Pagan communities, with providing a wider range of review resources. (though, mind, every time I've attempted to tackle it in the last five years or so, I've felt overwhelmed by how to do it right. It's really not easy.)

But none of that still adds up to me being comfortable with downloading pirated books. I understand why people do, but that doesn't mean I'm going to say "Oh, yeah, sure, do what you like." Because at the end of the day, it's still hurting individual people and individual publishers and individual resources I value and like.

While I am quoting Jenett's post, this is really directed to everyone cause Jenett probably knows all of this already.

I'll like to recommend Scribd here. I tried Kindle Unlimited when Amazon started it but did not like it as most of the books available seemed to be from their self-publishing branch. Nothing wrong with that, but it was not what I was looking for. After my freemonth, I canceled.

I recently decided to give Scribd a try when I heard it had a large number of the new Cthulhu mythos books that have been published over the past decade -- that are too expensive to buy (especially unseen as some are truly awful) and very hard to get via inter-library loan as many of the titles simply aren't on many libraries purchase list.

 
Interestingly enough, it was the Cthulhu mythos books that got me to try Scribd out...and then delete my account.

Randomly missing pages isn't cool. Especially when you're already a hundred pages in. Double when it's more than one book that has the same problem.

Randomly missing pages isn't cool. Especially when you're already a hundred pages in. Double when it's more than one book that has the same problem.

I haven't encountered a single book with missing pages -- at least not yet. Do you remember which Cthulhu books had missing pages and I'll be sure and check them for missing pages before I start.

So I know stealing is wrong but I've noticed a lot of us do not have access to Wiccan books or cannot pay for them so I went scourging around the Internet and found about 50-ish or so Wiccan Books or Related Topics I do plan on reading them then when I have the money (and time) buying some of these books do you think it's wrong that I'm doing this? Or just wait to buy the books and read them then because I know half the experience in having that book in your hands

 I personally think Pdfs are more effective in this day and age, as far as the whole stealing thing goes that is at your own discretion, i personally find pdf files to be perfect, i keep a usb drive full of books, its like a digital book of shadows, frankly its far easier to carry a laptop and a usb drive with 30 or 40 books on it than carrying 30 or 40 books