'Paul...' It gives their speech the air of a wise old head talking down to someone who's obviously new in the world. Yeah, that annoying. 11: I've done it too. I taped music when I was in college, I used to have a pirated word processor program. I stopped doing that when I realised it made me a hypocrite. I wasn't a war criminal when I did it, and neither were you, illegal downloader reading this. We were both just doing minor wrongs that, across populations, add up. 12: Some authors with smaller profiles have benefited from 'alternative revenue streams' like befriending illegal downloaders and asking for their 6p afterwards. I'd say that their success, which I wouldn't at all begrudge them, is a question of having gone from nearly nothing to a tiny something. And stemmed from an emotion that only stretches so far: making guilty people feel better. I don't know if it'll fly as a career. (Which is not to say, I emphasise, that I'm decrying the quality of the work involved.) 13: Of course, obviously, hugely, there remain, considering e-books only, a number of problems in terms of satisfying both reading public and publishers. The market isn't where digital music's is. These problems have formed the meat of almost all discussions about this subject, to the point where I hoped I could get through this post without mentioning D.R.M. or 'the agent model'. Because these discussions are mazes full of mirrors, the source of much of