Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho

About e-books and piracy of books in Portuguese 2008

Interview with O Estado de São Paulo about e-books and piracy of Portuguese-language books, 2 August 2008.

 

Let’s say that the internet is a medium where we read and write, which made the book today what music was for my youth: the great reference of the time.

Extremely positive. It is forcing people to develop a new language, making them read more, since they need to write. And writing more, having publishing alternatives, etc.

In several ways: facilitating research, allowing access to many jobs that would normally be in drawers (today they are hosted on servers, that is, a “drawer” that anyone can open), democratising literature, allowing everyone to express, in their own way, what they feel.

There are portal initiatives – but any governmental or similar initiative goes head-on against the culture of the internet – which is free and anarchic. Nobody there is guided by initiatives, but by the pleasure and responsibility of saying what he thinks and what he considers relevant. Sites like book-crossing, good-reads, etc. allow a very important exchange of information.

The book was a technology that took millennia to develop, and as such it should stay for a long time – easy to carry, doesn’t need a battery, is light, and can be used in public transport. I only read news and blogs online – it is not pleasant to read an entire book on the computer screen. Media like kindle are great for technical books, but they don’t replace paper.

It depends. I think for fiction, the book will remain the best alternative for the next fifty years. For technical books, electronic supports will be used more, mainly because of the weight and the amount of volume that can be stored.

Of course not. It is, above all, a way of publicising the work. With the help of my readers, I managed to create a “Pirate Coelho” website that can be accessed from my blog, www.paulocoelhoblog.com. There I put all the translations I find on the internet, thus facilitating the work of pirating my books. I do not have the rights to translation, so I can’t put it on, but I can help pirate reading of my books.

(to complement this part, see the links on the repercussion of my attitude, which went completely unnoticed in Brazil):

CNN
Newsweek
New York Times

 

Details

Language: Portuguese Publication Date: 2008

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