Goodbye Old Paint

“I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”

“I’ll publish a follow-up here wiping the slate clean and singing the praises of CBS if it donates what might have been an expected outcome of a successful lawsuit—around $20,000 (or about seven seconds of ad time during a primetime episode of “CSI: NY”), an entertainment lawyer with decades of experience told me—to these three institutions, divvied up equally: Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts; the Authors Guild, which advocates for the rights of writers; and 826 National, a nonprofit volunteer tutoring organization I work with that provides in- and after-school educational and literacy support to underserved children.”