I recently purchased the e-book versions of the first two volumes in George R.R. Martin’s epic A Song of Fire and Ice fantasy epic, even though I already own them in paperback. I wanted to re-read them on my PC and Amazon was selling them for a reasonable price. I paid for the same material twice because the cost of the electronic versions was more than offset by the convenience of owning that format. And it’s perfectly legal. According to NY Times ethicist Randy Cohen, downloading a pirated version of the book would have been just as ethical because I had already paid the author for his work. So I shouldn’t feel too bad about downloading the pirate scans of some comic books that I had also purchased in print form and wanted to read again. It may have been technically illegal, but the NY Times says I’m still a good person.
If publishers would simply make all of their content available in affordable, open digital formats, there’s no telling how much additional money they could wring out of me.
