Well, not really. But if you’re in SFWA, and you got Andrew Burt’s push poll about Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” feature in your mailbox last week, and you haven’t answered it yet, read this before you do.

For example, one questions asking how much of a work one would want to have accessible to Amazon browsers is phrased this way: "What percent would you want blocked of your work to prevent piracy?" I'm not a professional pollster, but I know a push poll question when I see it, and I don't like it any more when it comes from SFWA than when it comes from a political party.

My response to the poll, incidentally, was that I wanted all of the book available for Amazon shoppers to browse. I want this for many reasons, not the least of which is simply parity of shopping experience to bookstores, where one can go up to the bookshelves, crack open a book, and read as much of it as one wants to see if one is interested in making a purchase. As it happens, I don't buy very many books online because I can't open the book and see the text, and with new writers especially, I'm not going to buy without checking out the book first.

Bingo. Thank you, Mr. Scalzi. Via Tim. In fact, let’s quote Tim, too:

I’ll just add this note, for the vast majority of SF writers who worry about their books being pirated: Yeah, you wish. You wish there was such a demand for your work that people were pirating it in sufficient numbers to affect your sales. You wish there were hordes of unscrupulous people ready to cash in on the vast crowds clamoring hungrily for your book, and that there was sufficient demand for your works for pirates to turn a profit on it.

The more I think about this, the more irritated I get. In fact, I’m sufficiently irritated that I’m going to go order a Creative Commies T-shirt right this minute.

Why is it that people whose stuff no one would want to pirate are the most obsessed with piracy?

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Update: See also Cory.

I’m sure Mr. Burt is a great guy and all, but I’m glad he didn’t win his SFWA presidential bid.

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Update #2: Charlie Stross puts it well, if bluntly, on sff . private . sfwa . electronic-piracy, in a thread responding to Ben:

The fact of the matter is, once we sell our wares we lose all say over what happens to them. We can't control whether a reader buys a copy at full price in a bookstore, shoplifts it, or buys it for ten cents when it’s remaindered. We can’t control whether they like the book, hate it, or use it as toilet paper. It’s out of our hands.

We profit no more from the honestly-bought copy in the second-hand store than the shoplifted copy or the pirated ebook — so why don’t we declare a jihad against second-hand bookstores?

Bluntly, we don’t do that (or declare war on libraries, for that matter) because we grew up with them and we recognize their utility to ourselves both as readers and as writers trying to reach new eyeballs.

This is why I believe the whole fuss over Amazon and Google is a storm in a teacup — indeed, getting worked up about them is counter-productive because it alienates customers, makes us look like idiots, and primes people to ignore us if or when a REAL threat to our income emerges.

Yes, digital lowers the bar and makes piracy easier, so there’s an argument to be made that, e.g., emailing somebody an e-text is different, maybe in some fundamental way, from lending them a book. But I can’t help noticing that it seems like those of us with Interthing-related day jobs, who you’d think would understand that, often seem to be among the least sympathetic to that argument . . .

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Update #3: Also, further down the thread, Ben:

Excepting King and Rowling, I expect we all have plenty of new potential readers to win. I think what we should be worried about in the brave new electronic world is not the spectre of it being suddenly much easier to pirate . . . it's that of it becoming suddenly much harder to browse.

Somehow this all seems like it’s coming from the same psychology that led the voting poor of Alabama to vote down a tax increase for the rich.