[Buddha-l] Good resource site shut down

[Richard Hayes]

On Mar 16, 2012, at 1:59 AM, Christopher Fynn <chris.fynn at gmail.com> wrote:

> Considering what academic publishers pay to their authors against the
> prices they charge for their books - who are the real pirates?  

In 1988 I wrote a book on Dignāga that, to my astonishment, some people still read. It's available on Amazon for $266.83 (although a used copy can be snapped up for a mere $250). It was published by D. Reidel, who sold the rights to Kluwer, who sold the rights to Springer. All efforts to get permission to make an affordable Asian edition available have failed. The price keeps going up. I have never received as much as 1¢ in royalties (about which I don't care at all, since I have an adequate income from selling my labour to the state of New Mexico). I was pleased to see the book made available on library.nu and urged people who inquired to download it from there as soon as possible, because it was obvious the site could never last in a anti-intellectual capitalist universe. 

Inconsistent critter that I am, I myself never downloaded anything from library.nu. I could never quite manage to find words for the principle I thought the site was violating, aside from the second Buddhist precept. If people want to make their own work available by putting PDF or ebook versions on their own websites, I'll happily download such material, but when a third party puts material on a site and bypasses both authors and their publishers, then it is pretty obviously adattādāna—taking what is not given. 

Robin Hood may have stolen from the rich to give to the poor, but for all that he was still a thief. And that makes him a rather poor moral exemplar. 

Richard Hayes