I haven’t read the Twilight series for a number of reasons and had no plans to start any time soon. After the wellspring of negative reaction to Breaking Dawn, the series-ender, I can’t say I feel as though I’m missing anything.
A number of people hated the book so much, though, that they’re returning the already-read copies to the bookstore.
“Technically, reading a book and returning it is theft of knowledge,” read one post [to Amazon's discussion board of the book], while the original commenter, a former bookstore employee, wrote, “I don’t advocate making a habit of buying new books, reading them, and returning them. But once in a while… I do think mass returns are a useful form of consumer protest.” Another poster recounted, anecdotally, returning the book at Borders: “They took back my book with no problem. Got into a discussion with the cashier about how I was the 15th (!!!) person to bring my book back today.”
I’m not quite sure where I fall on this debate. I’ve paid a lot of money for books that I’ve not enjoyed. I’ve even occassionally paid money for a book I hated. But I’ve never ever returned a book once I’ve read it. I can understand, though, how if the series you’ve been enjoying for so long all of a sudden veers into some grotesque sort of Mormon tribute to the sanctity of childbearing in a marriage–no matter if the baby is half-vampire or not–that you’d want a way to make your displeasure heard in the most noticable way possible. And since I NEVER advocate book-burning under any circumstance…
Eh. I don’t know. I just don’t think returning a book you’ve read is honest.
[Via Booksquare]
That’s a completely useless form of protest. Isn’t their complaint really with the author? I believe so. But returning the book hurts just about everyone involved with the book more than the author herself. Including the booksellers who aren’t exactly treading solid ground financially these days (with the exception of Amazon, of course). These “protesters” are just not bright people.
I totally agree on the honesty angle. You can’t return a CD if you don’t like it, and a book is no different. Take it to a book (or CD) reseller and let someone else pay you back for some of the time you lost reading the book.
We live in a society that’s afraid of risking anything, even the time and money invested in finding out a person doesn’t like a book. Plus it’s stealing.
I don’t know why people think they can’t email or send a letter to an author.
I did write an author once and tell them that I wanted the 3 hours of my life back I spent reading a book.
I will say, though, that I don’t have a high opinion of a lot of the Twilight fans.
Well Breaking Dawn wasn’t what I expected, BUT I did like it. There are an equal number that did. I guess that I’m too old to get totally wrapped up in a book series like the younger kids….but it is one of my favorite series.
I’d never return a book I’d read to the bookstore…unless there was something physically wrong with it (aka pages missing).
I am betting we’ll see a LOT of this book show up in used bookstores over the next couple of months.
That said, I’ve read books so bad that I refused to take them to a used bookstore or donate them to Friends of the Library just to save some other poor fool from enduring the book.
It is not “theft of knowledge.” Owning a book is buying a perpetual license to do with that copy of book as you will — including loaning it out to others to “thieve” knowledge. The property isn’t in the content of the book, it is in duplication rights and rights to the duplicate. It is about controlling instance access, not experience.
To say reading a book without buying it is “theft” would make loaning books and libraries illegal — not that the Kindle and ilk aren’t moving that direction. The thing is, pay-per-read or even Kindle style DRM licenses would be OK if they were markedly cheaper than the physical book, but they aren’t. The reason they aren’t is because the publishers are still in the way. For my book, Charlie and I split about $4.50 on each sale, the editor gets $0.75 and the rest is eaten by the system. If we could sell zero marginal cost e-books for $5.50 for a non-transferable license rather than the $50 MSRP or $35 street price, that would be fair. At the same time if a $7 paperback on Kindle was $1 or a $25 hardcover for $3, all the better. Until that pricing model changes, though, this idea that “knowledge” is what you are paying for when you buy a book is dangerous. What you are buying is dead tree and the right to do what you want with said dead tree. The fixed cost of the “knowledge” is almost incidental.