Tag: hypocrisy

Why Readers Should Be Paying For My Books.

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Further to yesterday’s post about illegal book sharing sites, I thought it a good idea to state plainly where my books should— and should not—be found. 

My books are all available on reputable ebook sites: Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Google Play, and the like. 

They are not legally available anywhere for free. 

As I have openly stated previously, I do not believe in making my books available for free, nor do I accept books for free, because I strongly feel that authors should be paid for their work just like everyone else. 

Creating something excellent takes time, energy, and commitment. When a creator asserts their copyright and other creative rights over their intellectual property, it is their legal prerogative to place a purchase value on that work.

If a work of art, a book, a song or a movie are worth enjoying and owning, they are worth paying for. 

Indeed, I find the concept of someone claiming to be a lover of books, yet avoiding paying for a single one, hypocritical to say the least. 

To prosper by catering to those people? Despicable.

A new low in “reality television”.

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When I was a teenager, the dating show ‘Perfect Match’ was at the height of its popularity. Since then, we have seen a long list of shows that have varied only in the degree of tackiness, such as ‘Please Marry My Boy’ where the mothers of single men selected a bride for their sons to the considerably more sordid ‘The Bachelor’. I honestly didn’t think it could get much worse than that… until tonight. 

I’ve just seen a promo on TV for a show called ‘Married at First Sight’. The premise of the show is that a number of couples are ‘matched’ by a psychologist and a neurologist, and meet each other for the first time at the altar where they enter into legally binding arranged marriages. They have never met; they don’t know anything about each other; they don’t even know one another’s name. The show is openly advertised as a social experiment. 

Seriously? How is this allowed? Can this really be legal in Australia, where arranged marriages that are quite acceptable in other cultures are frowned upon?  I am incredulous at the hypocrisy of this is acceptable in our society when the right to marry is denied to loving, committed couples who happen to be gay: hasn’t the loudest, most popular argument against legalising gay marriage is that “it debases the sanctity of marriage”? Surely, this ‘experiment’ is guilty of doing exactly that. Let’s face it, heterosexual couples haven’t done such a great job of maintaining the sanctity of marriage up to this point, and this program is most likely to hit a new low in that department.  This really only serves to reinforce my belief that we are guilty of huge double standards in this department. 

It must not be forgotten that these are real people with real feelings and the rest of their lives ahead of them.  I can’t imagine how my gay friends and family must feel about the sanctity of marriage being turned into a game show but still denied to them.
It seems that “reality television” is about to reach a new low. Are we really that desperate for entertainment?