You separately lease ebook rights to an electronic publisher to post it online for a period of time.

A reader comes along who pays a fee to download it onto her iphone. She reads it in transit, to and from her job. She likes it enough to swing by a bookstore on her way home and grab a paper copy to give her Aunt Zelda who is not an iphone kind of gal. Two sales. One purchaser.

Aunt Zelda likes it so much she lends her copy to her next-door neighbour who reads it and so do her two kids. The paper copy has now been read 4 times. One purchase. That fall, the paperbook finds its way to the Victoria College secondhand book fair. The mileage on this book has clicked  into its 5th reader’s hands. We can no longer keep track of its readers. Maybe you’ve got the book now. Maybe Amazon.com does. This happens.

This also happens: A couple of copies of the print book fall off the truck on the way from the warehouse. Another copy is slipped under a t-shirt on the way out of the book store. It’s called shrinkage.

It’s useful to keep these sorts of journeys in mind whenever you get antsy about the risk of downloaded e-versions being copied and passed on. Downloads of ebooks can be controlled pretty tightly. Sometimes they can be made to evaporate electronically after a few days in someone’s hard drive. Or hours after it’s been viewed, like the latest generation of nonreturnable DVD rentals.

New ways of  thwarting pirates are invented every week but, like the high seas, pirates on the digital take can never be entirely eradicated. They’re sea lice. Part of nature’s plan, however  exasperating.

The odds of literary fiction files being swarmed by electronic sea lice are low but they can’t be completely ruled out. Nevertheless, we keep on sailing. The most important part of this story is about where it started.

With the writer.

I keep harping on this dream I have. That the writer is at the centre of the publishing world, not on the margin of a thin, flat crust of bread. That the writer is the creator, without which the rest of this story can’t get told. And no one gets to play their role in it unless the writer does. For which, the writer must be fairly compensated.

The centre must hold.

The centre must Hold Its Rights.