Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Are We About To Enter The Age of Book Piracy?

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the ebooks-are-for-me-books dept.

theodp writes "The speed with which the 4MB e-mail hoax purporting to be the new cookbook from the Naked Chef streaked across the Internet suggests to Slate that a new, disquieting era for the publishing world may be in sight. Indeed, the latest Harry Potter tale made the rounds on the Web just hours after the book went on sale, its 870 pages apparently scanned in and distributed by rabid fans. The old argument that no one likes reading on a computer has pretty much eroded. Just because publishing people can't conceive of book piracy doesn't mean it can't happen."

4 of 494 comments (clear)

  1. article -1 Troll by HBI · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Book piracy is too much of a pain in the ass. Plus, people want to own the book and feel it in their hands.

    Like someone wants to have a stapled stack of recycled copier paper in a fuzzy inkjet font. Even worse is the suggestion of reading it off the screen. The whole concept is just silly.

    In the case of music, I seriously doubt most people get the mp3 and then buy the CD. I would suggest in this case that anyone interested in reading an 870 page book would go out and buy it, or at least borrow it from the library.

    --
    HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
  2. Now it's getting pointless by Phoenix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Piracy against the RIAA is still ilegal, but considering the way that the RIAA screws everyone (the artists included), it's understandable.

    Piract against the Movie Industry is again ilegal but it can be rationalized when you consider some of the dodgy things they want to try and pull against the consumers.

    Piracy against the book publishing firms makes no damn sense. They don't screw the customers, price increases for books have been very slight and can be explained by the normal rate of inflation (my personal average is $1.50 over the past 10 years) and if you really want to read the book for free there is a *legal* way to do it. Just go to the local library and check it out

    There is no "robin hood" rationalization for this, there is no way to justify it, this is just a bunch of cheap fuckers who can't be bothered to fork over $18 on Amazon.com for a pre-order.

    In my opinion it's *now* a case of the consumers (the ones sharing the books on the web) screwing the authors. Remember, JK Rowling was a starving single mother when she wrote HP:ATSS...Think about *that* when HP #6 comes out

    --
    -- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
  3. Hopefully, no by JimDabell · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hopefully, "book piracy" won't suddenly catch on. I suspect it will slowly rise, but a sharp increase will only prompt publishers to have a knee-jerk reaction and jump towards some kind of lock-down attempt. A slow increase will give publishers time to think about the most sensible way of altering their business model in the face of copyright infringement. Some have found that giving away electronic copies is profitable.

  4. It's copyright infringement by Sardonis · · Score: 5, Insightful
    That's the correct term for it. You're annoyed at that? Tough. I'm annoyed at people that use the suggestive and emotional word "piracy", so that it will sound very unethical; the implication being that since they argree with the abuse of copyright in the first place, they'll try to make copyright infringement sound as harful as possible.

    Freely adapted from the parent post.