We are two weeks into the month of September now. I think this might be a reasonable amount of time for some readers to have completed this book if they started early this month. At least I finished it last week. I'll leave this thread pinned for the rest of the month and next weekend I'll create the poll for the next book of the month. That poll will end on the last day of the month and the cycle will continue.
Feel free to include as many spoilers as you want in your comments as the post itself is marked as containing spoilers.
I'm hoping someone else could get started or else I will have to. 😅
Jazz Hands ♫ ♪ ♪ ♬
Libraries have existed for centuries and somehow books are still being sold. Philosophically I believe information should be free and piracy is functionally the modern equivalent of libraries.
Piracy is a service and access problem. When the only subscription you needed was Netflix to get all the best content I didn't pirate TV. That landscape is changing rapidly and I'm back to flying the Jolly Roger for any shows or movies I might want to watch. I'd genuinely prefer not to pirate if it means supporting the creators, easier access and a fair price.
That said I do support creators I like and I've happily spent money on everything from YouTube memberships, patreons, Kickstarters, podcasts, etc. I tend to prefer ways of supporting that cut out the egregious publishing industries, in fact that's a large part of how I became a fan of Andy Weir in the first place.
As far as discoverability goes, I think it's easier than it's ever been, we're far past the need for publishers to get content out there when it comes to indie books, music, videos and games. Though I do agree it can be hard for people starting out. There has to be a perfect storm of quality + viral success, but that's not much different to landing a publishing deal.
In a perfect world I'd like to see an open standard for multimedia. I should be able to browse for media on a protocol similar to federation or HTML, where I can connect to that protocol with a media browser of my choice, and the monetization is set by the creators instead of the platform they're hosted on. That's a bit of a pipe dream, I know, but it's always felt strange to me that I need a dozen different locked down apps for each service when I'm functionally consuming the same type of media across all of them.
At the same time we are inevitably moving toward a future where automation will render obligatory employment obsolete and impossible for everyone, so we will need to figure out how to take care of more than just artists. I do think that would play a massive role in how we look at copyright all together.