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No, David Pogue, Ebook Piracy Is Not a Given
adamengst writes "David Pogue recently wrote a widely read blog post in which he explains that piracy is the reason he doesn't make his books available in PDF format. But in this article, TidBITS publisher Adam Engst disagrees strongly with Pogue's opinion, using sales numbers from the Take Control series of ebooks (150,000+ copies sold since 2004 with virtually no copying) as proof that making electronic versions not only doesn't necessarily lead to piracy, it may be the best way of preventing illicit sharing."
...is making your eBook so crappy no one wants to read it.
"Oh Mr. Freetard, you work as a programmer, do you? How interesting. So do you perform all your corporate programming duties for free, and earn your keep by selling personally branded mousemats on the side?
"Didn't think so."
Well David, you are passing up sales while preventing absolutely nothing.
Learn to live with it, the pirates always win.
By "illicit sharing" does he mean my local library, where someone may have donated a copy?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your politician, and hitting them?"
I cant help but wonder if the lack of ebook piracy is more down to the fact that old fashioned paper books are still much more prevalent that eboook readers, and can be had for a reasonable cost. I'd say the day ebook readers go the way of the iPod, piracy will explode.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Macaulay on copyright law: http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm
Eric Flint on making books available online: http://www.baen.com/library/palaver6.htm
nuff said.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
I have a PSP and thanks to all of the rediculous DRM to prevent people from enjoying various media on the device of their choosing I have no choice but to pirate eBooks that I already paid for to remove the DRM so I can read them on the PSP. I found that hacking PDF's is impossible, but eBooks are easy to remove the DRM then convert to PDF so I can read them on my PSP. Because of their rediculous paranoia it actually encourages people to pirate to avoid all of the lame restrictions. Same with iTunes. I looked all over for a song and could only find it on iTunes. So I had to buy it there, then burn it to cd, then rip it back to mp3 so I could play it on my PSP. DRM is stupid. It just encourages people to download it without paying.
If you overlook "jackass" and "idiot", the parent has a very valid point.
It might not be green, but the best reader I've found is the book. Perhaps I'm in the minority. I saw somewhere that there are people in Japan who not only read books on their cell phones, they also write books on their cell phones. Perhaps they're more evolved than me. If I found a book online that looked interesting and was available in dead tree format, I'd buy it in dead tree format, or look for it at bookmooch.com.
That applies to reference books as well, like Mr. Pogue's. I've got shelves of them. But in the case of reference books, I wouldn't mind a searchable version as well. Hm, perhaps I should pay a visit to thepiratebay.org...
Loose lips lose spit.
There are these "libraries" where people file-share paper copies of books. FOR FREE!!!!
David better not release paper copies either.
If it is in digital form, and it is popular, it will be pirated. Period.
If there are eBooks that are not being passed around on P2P sharing networks, it is not because there is any increased respect for eBooks than music or movies. It is because nobody cares about the content.
If I were to publish an eBook on the mating habits of the German Cockroach, I would expect that it would not be heavily pirated. Equally, I would expect a photoeassy on the day in a life of a proctologist would similarly be immune from piracy. However, an eBook of any popularity would immediately be copied and passed around freely regardless of the wishes of the author.
Does eBook mean piracy? No, clearly not. However, anything that is popular is likely to be pirated regardless of any wishes of the author. The author (like Stephen King) can make the content available online free or not, as they choose. However, once it is in digital form the author loses the ability to control the outcome. This much should be obvious to everyone by now.
I didn't read any of the articles linked but I can say from person experience that, even though Practical Common Lisp is available for free on-line (HTML, PDF) I still bought my copy. It is worth every penny. Had it not been available on-line, it probably would've taken me even longer to convince myself to buy it.
"due to the way his technology sensibilities have been honed by years of being a Mac user. "
:-P
stopped reading right there
Even if nobody's pirating music from your neighborhood band, that says little about the overall effect of music piracy. 150,000 downloads in 4 years? That microcosm can hardly speak to the vast wealth of popular books sold every minute on this planet. And e-readers are only now starting to become popular, so the number of illegal downloads is bound to explode, as it did when mp3 players got big (Winamp, etc). Oh, to be in college now! Free music, free textbooks, and a political movement worth following...
I didn't RTFA... but i know as a fact that people would rather read a hard copy book rather than on a screen. I, myself, have downloaded many ebooks (and had some sent to me from friends), read them and bought them after if they were actually good. It's sad to see that some authors (and other corporations) that 'piracy' always leads to lost revenue.. Even if someone would never have purchased the product before. When will they learn?
Things will get pirated. It's undeniable. I'm also not familiar with Pogue's writing.
But 99% of what I need to read is already freely available on the internet not only because of books, but also forums about specialty topics, news sites and things of that nature. Years back, when I was looking to learn lisp I found the easiest/best book was available free (by Touretzky).
And several newer ones (and highly acclaimed) were freely available as well. They sold well when they made it to print.
The way I see it, good books/resources are already so widely available on the internet that authors are shooting themselves in the foot by not putting themselves out there on a digital format. It's rather like refusing to print books because the library offers them for free and they can be xeroxed.
They don't have to compete on price, but just be better than the free competiton. I know I would be more apt to buy a book on computer languages written by Touretzky. I know this because I have been a repeat customer of other authors I like from fiction to mathematical textbooks -- my time is more valuable than trying to cop a free book. If I know an author can entertain/teach me in the allotted time, I'll pay the price.
When you consider the average American moves every 7 years, the hassle of libraries, the expense/convenience of keeping a paper library, and the inherent advantages of a digital e-ink readers; these will become a major market soon especially for the younger generation.*
It's rather like artists/RIAA of the 90s saying they wouldn't put their music out as mp3s because of piracy, they'll stick with the good old CD. The format exploded despite the content providers liking it or not.
*(Although I have dealt with DRMed digital textbooks, I won't have anything to do with them. IMO, DRMed books are a million times worse than a DRMed song. Stallman was right on the money here.)
10$ says someone somewhere is thinking "haha i just pwnd you on slashdot Dave!"
Pogue was quoting Steven Poole. Those nasty words weren't his own. See Pogue's weblog post and the dimwitted douchebag's weblog post.
I'm guessing Cory Doctorow might have something to say in regards to Pogue's sentiments.
The link is to the main page for Cory's "Little Brother" which is hitting its 4th week on the bestseller list.
And there is a link to download the eBook right there on the page.
Cube On! (http://stores.ebay.com/PuzzleProz)
I've seen some lovely torrents filled with thousands of OCRed versions of paper books. All you need I'm assuming is an auto-feed scanner, some nice paper cutting equipment and decent OCR software.
In other words if your book is popular it will be pirated without too much difficult no matter what format it's in. If it's not popular than likely no one will care enough to pirate it no matter what format it's in. On the other hand if I can't easily get an non-pirated copy of you book then well the pirated version will be tempting simply because its more convenient.
Just search eMule.
Changing a document (or an audio or video track) to another format is not pirating, even if you circumvent copy protection in the process. If you were to copy the item and then sell it, or make it available via internet that would be copyright infringement.
If the answer is war, you are asking the wrong question
For someone that writes for New York Times as Technology Writer, he demonstrates remarkable ignorance in regards to what he writes about. It's terrifying to think that this loop is feeding his ignorance to the masses.
Here is what Eric Flint has to say about ebooks and piracy:
Baen Books is now making available â" for free â" a number of its titles in electronic format. We're calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online â" no conditions, no strings attached. (Later we may ask for an extremely simple, name & email only, registration. ) Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed. )
Why are we doing this? Well, for two reasons.
The first is what you might call a "matter of principle." This all started as a byproduct of an online "virtual brawl" I got into with a number of people, some of them professional SF authors, over the issue of online piracy of copyrighted works and what to do about it.
There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was with handcuffs and brass knucks. Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences!
Alles in ordnung!
I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow. My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:
1. Online piracy â" while it is definitely illegal and immoral â" is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.
2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.
3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market â" especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people â" is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.
In the course of this debate, I mentioned it to my publisher Jim Baen. He more or less virtually snorted and expressed the opinion that if one of his authors â" how about you, Eric? â" were willing to put up a book for free online that the resulting publicity would more than offset any losses the author might suffer.
The minute he made the proposal, I realized he was right. After all, Dave Weber's On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a "loss leader" for Baen's for-pay experiment "Webscriptions" for months now. And â" hey, whaddaya know? â" over that time it's become Baen's most popular backlist title in paper!
And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.
Sure enough, within a day, I received at least half a dozen messages (some posted in public forums, others by private email) from people who told me that, based on hearing about the episode and checking out Mother of Demons, they either had or intended to buy the book. In one or two cases, t
I forgot to add, that when you buy a hardbound book from baen, it includes a CD with an electronic version of every book they have published that month.
Needless to say, their hardbound book sales figures extend for a longer period of time than normal because of this.
I also almost exclusively buy ebooks and paper books from them now because of their policies.
I love reading great books and some are either way overpriced or the hold on them in the library is 50 plus long. If a book is on the shelf and I can physically pick it up , guess what , I'll read it in store for free. What's his answer to that ?? Turn down the lights in the book store to stop me from reading the damn book.
Write a good book, price it well and people will support you so that you won't have to pander to the copyright zealots.
Sorry to personally attack the guy, but having read "Hard Drive" 10 years ago I can say I don't think he's qualified to be a "techno-thriller" writer. I find it interesting that he seems to have such a following with that little understanding of how software works.
Perhaps he's gotten better at it. The plot itself wasn't awful, but every time he tried to say something smart it grated on my nerves.
Anyway, he might want to consider his audience (supposed techno-savvy people) when he decides on the publishing methods of his books. It could be that he's losing sales from people who really would buy and read his stuff (through some online sci-fi ebook portal or something.. If I had an ebook reader, I could see buying a few books to try while I was in an airport..)
Do we really need to point out the obvious -- that perhaps David Pogue's books are more popular than whatever this guy is talking about?
I don't get too many people copying photos from my site, but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of Ansel Adams' photos scattered around the net in violation of copyright.
If David Pogue doesn't want to risk a loss in sales because of piracy of ebooks, then at least he has simply decided not to make an ebook available, rather than jump on the pro-DRM bandwagon. He has to put food on the table and it's his reasonable right to make such a decision.
Of course, as many of the comments here already confirm, I'm sure this forum will simply end up twisting this into some sort of anti-Pogue, anti-DRM argument, making him out to be the same as the RIAA. I mean, look at WallyBeerDrinker and his knee-jerk comment about libraries (which I would normally agree with, BTW), or d34thm0nk3y.
As the internet becomes "everywhere" and distribution becomes virtually cost free, maybe the new production model or books for music is could be for the author to say, I'll write another volume in the "such and such series" if people donate $100,000 or whatever to support me for the estimated two years it takes to write the story.
Then once it's released it doesn't matter if it gets copied. Of course that would eliminate the concept of working for a few years and having income for the rest of your life. But people who build houses don't get paid a tax as long as the house is occupied either. So it's not like it's without precedence.
I've seen the numbers for books that are offered as PDFs and the sales relative to paper books is paultry.
Check out his article, which I found to be pretty intelligent.
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/readers-have-their-say-in-the-e-publishing-debate/#more-475
I have to say that his argument is fairly well reasoned.
I don't care if it's the actual 'Word of G-d' himself. I will not be told by the author, publisher, or the marketer, where, when, how or for how long, I can read the books that I purchase.
I've got your sig, right here.
Never.
The only form of "unbreakable copy protection" (in the sense used by the author of the article) is security thru obscurity. Ha!
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Makes me want to vote with my dollars... read a few of these and buy some of the dead tree format... Apparently the post above this one indicates that when you buy the dead tree version you get the electronic versions of ALL of the ebooks they've ever published as well.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
The problem I have with copyright and IP law in general is much less to do with compensating the creator (Why a creator should be compensated every time their work is used, when the work is only done once is a whole other issue). My main issue is that it gives someone the artificial right to control something they've created. If a plumber does a job for you he doesn't then get to tell you how the pipes may be used, or dictate when you can shower or use the toilet. (Perhaps I shouldn't give plumbers ideas). Why should a an author or other media creator, or inventor have this level of control? IP law lets the creator deny innovative use of his or her creation outright, or charge through the nose for it. The trouble is we've grown up being taught that this control is a right and all our laws are based on it. Not just for original works but also derived works. It's so wasteful it's insane.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
When reading a paper book these days, I often find myself missing the features of the e-book, like tapping on a word to get the dictionary definition, or changing the font size.
Speaking of font size... PDF for e-books is idiocy, lunacy, and the worst possible format I could think of. When the content is TEXT, why should you want to enforce a special formatting on the user? That's removing some of the great advantages of e-books, namely that you can change the formatting and fonts to suit the USER, and not be fettered to an old print style that's no longer relevant. Not to mention how extremely slow and memory hungry PDF is for leafing through, compared to just about any other e-book format.
So far, I've bought around 300 books as e-books, and I can carry them all with me at all times. That's convenient. And the device I use has a built-in backlight, so I can read in the dark. That's very convenient too -- the main time I have to read is after the wife falls asleep, but before I do, and something as bright as a book torch would not work, while a backlit PDA works just fine.
But PDF? No, thanks. Too big, too slow, too limited.
And Sony Reader? No backlight = No buy.
are the significant differences between fiction books and technical references. In the threads here someone mentions cheap paperbacks, being dropped at the beach, not worth stealing etc. All true for casual fiction. But much of this does not apply to what is mostly a reference book on some hardware/software.
For such reference materials there are two sides to this story:
A particularly good reference work that is about a particularly popular and long lasting subject would of course be worth getting in electronic form for free, especially if the 500-page tomb costs $50 and up retail (as such books often do). But I've bought my share of these and have (or had) bookshelves full of such reference works that I could often get my employer to buy, or claim as a deduction while consulting etc.
On the other hand, I've bought quite a few of these reference book and ended up not using them a single time. I could just as well wait until I had a question on a particular subject and taken pen and paper into the nearest Barnes and Noble and written down the answer. I bought these books "just in case" as I'm sure many people do when they get a new OS or new kind of gadget that they think they might need some help with. Would Pogue or authors like him be willing to give refund for unused copies of his book? I rather doubt it.
I think if Pogue as more of a humorist than anything else, his books pretend to be reference works, but like his NYTimes articles are generally more like stand-up routines, long on wit, short on actual information. He is probably a special case, and as such, might not want to be held up to a true usefulness test.
Light reading, not worth stealing? Sure print it in cheap paperback and let people drop it at the beach.
Hard info, repeated reference material? Might do better as a paid subscription service online. People would pay to get the info they need and the more that service proved useful the more they would try and us it. Furthermore, in this form, the more likely it would be that you could support the content with ads rather than subscriptions. That's the direction the world is going for technical info, which means that Pogue should milk his job at NYT for all it is worth. More people are using tools on the web now and expecting to find answers on the web as well, either included with the tool, or for free elsewhere. We aren't abandoning books to save the rain forests, we are abandoning them to use something better and more convenient. Just as I'd rather be typing this than writing it out in long-hand with a fountain pen, I'd rather solve my next puzzling OS X conundrum by doing a Google search than thumbing through fifty dusty books on my bookshelf. In the not too distant future, you will sell your "books" online, or not at all.
I followed the links after RTFA and ended up on Doctorows website, Started reading the blurb on his book "Little Brother", downloaded the palm ebook and purchased the audio book. I can't tell if I'm really interested in the book or if I just fell for the most frakin clever slashvertisement of all time.
load "$",8,1
A quick scan through the popular torrent sites will enable you to download up to 50,000 books in a dozen or so torrents. Even allowing for the quick scan through to delete the rubbish - that is still a decent sized library. SCRIBD/Baen/Gutenberg et al prove there is a market for ebooks. My own uploads to SCRIBD have had more tha 80,000 views in the last few weeks and they are nothing special... All these - 'smell and feel of a book' people are just Luddites. I love my dead tree library too - but its not portable. My Hanlin book reader holds several thousand books on a 2gb SD card - it is DRM free, lightweight, comfortable to read anywhere - including in direct sunlight, reads a multitude of formats and has adjustable font sizes. It turns 9,000 pages before a charge is needed and can be left on indefinitely - it uses no power to leave the display on for weeks as the screen is e-ink/paper. It runs on Wolf Linux and is the only practical way for someone like me who like reading (but is always traveling) to get a print fix... E-books are the future - like it or not - and sooner the better - especially for the text book industry which is well overdue for euthanasia...
because it is cheaper to create a PDF and sell that, than print out a lot of paperback or hardcopy books.
The #1 reason why people pirate a book is cost, but a PDF book is relatively cheap next to a paper book, and Lulu.com knows that and helps people self publish ebooks in PDF format for really cheap, cheaper than a paper publisher would charge.
I am a big Traveller fan, and Far Future and Marc Miller are putting Traveller V5 in PDF format and selling the CD. Actually they have T5 in PDF format on the Citizens of the Imperium forums only available to people like me who paid for T5 in advance and let us become beta testers for the new gaming system and allow us to give feedback on the new T5 changes. Oddly enough, the T5 PDF files, while not copy protected or even watermarked, never found their way to file sharing networks unlike a lot of old RPG and Gaming materials already have. Most Traveller fans don't want Traveller to die out, so they refuse to pirate the PDF files for T5 and Mongoose Traveller, despite a lot of the Classic Traveller, etc stuff already been scanned and put on file sharing networks already.
In some cases, piracy of the Classic Traveller materials got enough people interested in the new T5 materials to buy them, and some even buy the Classic Traveller CD set from Far Future to support Traveller and make sure that it survives to the new settings and new T5 system.
Besides Google has Google Books that has a lot of books available online for free and while you cannot read a whole book you can search through it enough to find what you need so that you don't have to buy the book. Even if their are partial previews, they allow enough info to learn what you need and you can search through the book, chapter by chapter, and in theory read the whole book for free. I don't really see a difference between reading a book for free in Google Books or downloading it from a file sharing network for free before actually buying the book later to have a hard copy and see if you like the book enough to buy it. In a library or book store you can read the whole book for free anyway. Then decide to buy it or not, based on how you like it.
In that way Piracy actually helps people decide what they want to buy, provided they like it enough to buy it after previewing it. I myself have bought books for $20 to $55 or more, then finding out later that the book was useless or I didn't like it, but I was stuck with it and out of money and had to buy a different book that was better. Reviews really don't help, as people are paid to shill for a book and write a good review even if the book is horrible. Besides the person who liked the book and wrote a review, might not like the same things that I or anyone else likes to see in a book.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
> making electronic versions not only doesn't necessarily lead to piracy, it may be the best way of preventing illicit sharing.
Wait, what "illicit sharing" are they talking about here? Are they trying to subtly give people the impression that passing physical books around among friends/family is in some way illegal?
Which is exactly what Pogue does with his books. They're on Safari. While not perfect - the site's a bit slow and clunky and it's really too expensive to justify ($40 / month for unlimited access, $20 / month for access limited to, I believe, 10 books) it is a useful reference site for computer related stuff.
It is more how I use his, and others, reference books. It's pretty rare that I want to read a reference book cover to cover and it's rare that any given computer reference book is really valuable for more than a year or two. If O'Reilly cut their subscription prices down a bit and sped up and cleaned up the site a bit, it would really be a great model for authors like Mr. Pogue, assuming he gets some sort of cut on the subscriptions.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Where is the mod-option "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense"?
"Windows XP for Starters - The Missing Manual - Pogue Press-O'Reilly 2005.chm"
Not that I know anything about der you snet.
Certainly enough people out there scanning books long before publishing them electronically was an issue.
Those who will steal, still will.
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
That's basically the conclusion I came to. For recreational reading, I don't want the bother of ebook. Paperbacks, or even a hardback is much more convenient.
However, a tech manual is a different matter. A good search function would be an improvement over the usual index. And if you were, say, an appliance repairman, who needed dozens of tech manuals available, then a Kindle-type gadget starts to make a lot of sense. A touch screen reader would be a bad idea though. Just leave regular buttons on it with a good backlight for those behind the refrigerator minutes, and it should be fine.
Wow, there's hope for him yet!
I seem to be missing any PDF's by this guy?
Not quite. Only a few hardcovers each year include CD's, and those CD's are generally of work by the author of the book. However, non-commercial copying of the CD's is allowed by the publisher, and they're all available online. So for several of the authors, everything except their absolute latest work is available online for free. This includes John Ringo, David Weber, Eric Flint, and others. David Drake has a lot of his Baen work available that way, and also offers some of his work on his website for free download. Of the four of them, Eric Flint has a pension from his union work, but the other three rely solely on royalties for their income.
That baen site is blocked at my workplace. Is it SFW?
"Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
I have to fully agree with Adam Angst.
I just recently bought myself a ebook reader (irex iliad), and i felt like re-reading one of my favorite novels, the empire series from Raymond E Feist.
I went looking on the net, and nobody was selling it in ebook format, so I ended up looking for a torrent and downloading it.
I would have definitely paid for it if I could have found it. In fact I'd even would have bought all the books from that author, just to have them in ebook format. So everyone loses, the authors and publisher lose money didn't i didn't buy the ebook, and i get an ebook of lower quality (since they're scanned and OCR is not perfect).
It is not our job to go after real pirates. Our job is to sue your grandmother and college student into the poor house as well as make you pay for the same media multiple times so that you can use them on multiple (approved) devices.
If the media is not in a format that your device can use, then we did not approve of the use of the device for the media. You should go buy an approved device to solve the problem.
If you do not appreciate our DRM that we use to ensure that you are only using legal media, then we suggest that you get a shotgun and hunt down the real pirates while you wait for your turn to be sued by us.
Thank you.
Windows is as solid as quicksand.
Yes. Cover art is not allowed to genitals or nipples, although some of the art does portray women in skimpy outfits.
Yeah I've gotten quite a few books from Baen. I actually avoid most other ebook sellers because of their idiotic inability to not stuff some sort of DRM onto their books. Well that and their inane desire to charge as much for an ebook as for a paper version.
News for content creators: Advertising sells.
Something related that bugs me: a music video is a bloody "promotional video" for the music it is made to. Doing your best to limit the distribution of that advertisement is just shooting yourself in the foot. Idiots.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
I have written my own book, and I too worry about piracy. There is no guarantee that once the ebook is emailed or sent out on CD, it won't be distributed illegally, cutting down on the profits. How can you stop a pdf file from being distributed illegally? You can't. Of course, if you were to go the "traditional" route, and have a book bound, that would eat into your profits, but would deter pirates; who would want to spend ages at a scanner or a photocopier copying a whole bound book? Or, you could go even more traditional, and do what I didn't do, which is get your book published by a publishing house. But the money you get out of them unless you are an established author is pitiful; based on what another author receives, its about 6%. The publishing house takes most of the money. No, the odds are stacked against ebook authors, and even more highly stacked against self-publishers. The fact that magazines, google books etc. won't even look at your book unless you have an ISBN (which are sold at extortionate prices and in blocks of 10!) doesn't help.
My web domain.
So, his work is already available digitally.
What exactly is preventing piracy in this situation that wouldn't in the case of an eBook release?
Make ebook available - Minimum sales = 1.
Don't make ebook available - Maximum sales = 0.
The point - piracy isn't going to cost you more than sales no matter how you work things out. The only way is if piracy displaces paper sales, but you can usually get popular books off the internet anyway.
a five year copyright is enough to get the unit cost for recouping investment down. Five years is too long to wait if you want the product.
Software could be longer as long as it is supported (i.e. bug fixes and security updates).
Who is this guy anyway? I just found some of his articles on the NYT through google & find his reviews uninformative, sort of like a dummies guide to electronics, with a lot of dramatics and no substance. Even my high school cousin can give better information about some of the stuff he reviewed. He can keep his books in his closet.
So yeah, I have a load of books I would like to be able to search. I purchased, according to them, the content. So surly I can now go and pirate the content in another format to make it searchable?
Is this true?
If I want to have a book, right now that means I want it on paper, because electronic readers aren't good enough for me (I don't have one anyway). Photocopying is not a good option, although I've seen it done. So you pretty much have to buy the book the book or take it out of the library. But fast forward to a world in which electronic readers are prevalent. It's almost impossible to believe that illicit sharing wouldn't be rampant.
The only reason e-book piracy isn't rampant is because e-book use isn't rampant.
The reason you don't hear about ebook piracy is because of the lack of reporting, no other.
I own a ebook, and just casually googling to find books to buy I've found TONS of pirated books on the web. Often these come up very high on google too.
This is not new, either -- about a decade ago I recall someone posting a book on USENET. The author also read USENET and was very upset, naturally.
Those arguing that "alternate" ways of selling ebooks will work have to deal with Steven King's experiences. He started writing a book making each chapter available on the net with no DRM but merely a request to pay him a small amount. He never finished the book because too few people paid him. Steven King is one of the most popular authors ever, and yet even he couldn't make it work.
And just to forestall someone using the Baen Free Library as a counter-example, notice that there are very few books on that site, other than Eric Flint's own. The other books seem all to be quite old and out of print.
Slashdotters often make comparisons with RIAA and the music industry. However, the differences between the music and book markets make the comparison rather doubtful. For instance, when is the last time you saw a musician extensively praise his recording label? Yet in almost every book you will find the author thanking their editor, and often other people in their publisher's organization. The Writer's Guild of America is VERY aware of ebooks, to the point that they were threatening a strike over the issue once. With the music industry it is the RIAA pushing for DRM, while with the book industry it is usually the authors. Very different.
Steve Jobs seems to agree.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
Well the first thing I did when WH Smith enabled their electronic magazine service was try to crack it (not easy, it uses encrypted PDFs). So people definitely have it on their minds!
Having said that though the main reason was to try and read the mags on platforms other than Windows (they use some proprietary Windows software). I don't really mind the paying for magazines bit.
($40 / month for unlimited access, $20 / month for access limited to, I believe, 10 books)
I've not looked into Safari for a while, but I believe that the cheaper plan allows you access to a sort of "rolling bookshelf" of up to 10 books at a time (though I don't remember what restrictions, if any, there are on how often you can change the books). Just thought I'd point that out, as your post could be read as saying that you have access to a specific 10 books (which would be pretty useless).
It's official. Most of you are morons.
No, no it isn't.
Besides, putting a book out on paper or DRMed ebook is no guarantee that it won't be pirated, the nature of digital distribution means that it only takes one guy with a scanner or one hacker to enable the rest of the world to copy it freely.
For most authors, I think the major problem is becoming well-known to your potential audience. The example of Cory Docorow is apt for my own sake, I would never have heard of the guy unless he had given away some of his material for free.
Yes, but you'll lose a lot of free time. :)
I usually read on my Palm, but I once was looking for a familiar looking character. I downloaded the previous books in the series in HTML and grep had the answer in a couple of seconds. They don't do PDF because it sucks for novels, but do supply RTF if you feel the need to print it. Their business model is 'unique' to say the least.
Baen offers a better way to do what you want - http://www.webscription.net/.
- All books Baen publishes (though not some earlier ones without electronic originals)
- No DRM. At all.
- Multiple formats
- Permanent access. HD crash? Just download them again.
- Reasonable pricing.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I have a Sony Clie that I use as my exclusive Ebook reader. Sure, it's not as nice as the Kindle, but the thing was $20.
My PDA is 1/2 the size and weight of a Terry Pratchett paperback, it self book marks, it self lights(unlike the cumbersome book lights) and I can carry hundreds of books in my pocket. (It wasn't since my cargo wearing days that I could carry at least one book, if wasn't a hardcover.) It also has a built in dictionary. Even the screen is easy on the eyes.
And if I lose it, I'm out $20! I mean, 30 minutes of work.
Any old PDA, many Cell phones, even the PSP, Nintendo DS and iPod can be used as an Ebook reader. It's still hard for a non-technical user to get an Ebook into a format that can be read, but anyone who reads this forum can figure it out no problem.
My Clie can only read mobi and HTML, which means I've got to basically crack anything I want to read on my clie. However, unless it's a reference, I prefer my Ebook to any other format.
Ebooks really are the future of books, they just need the MP3 format for books. Whatever format that everyone can use on their multifunction device. Even audio books get more releases than Ebooks, and none get released in a format that most people can use, just single use devices like the Kindle.
Almost all books are available electronically; either for sale or from Usenet/torrents. If I'm looking for a book, I want the ebook version; it's what I bought a Reader for. If you sell an electronic copy without DRM for a reasonable price, I'll buy it, and I won't share it. If not, alt.binaries.... And the stuff I get from there, I'm likely to pass on to friends.
In a pinch I might buy DRMd content, but only if the DRM is known to be broken. I'd rather not though. I played the DRM game years ago with Peanut Press and I now have about 10 books I paid for that I can't read.
So Engst says that piracy is not the reason Pogue doesn't do PDFs. Got it.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
You're exactly right—the reason I don't own a Kindle now is that their content is so tightly controlled as to make it nearly worthless. I can't read a Kindle book on my computer, or any other device except for the one Kindle I bought it for. I might pay 50 cents to rent content under those conditions...but Amazon wants a lot more. As usual, DRM taketh away, but giveth nothing of value. That's not capitalism, it's self-destructive stupidity.
What gets me is that Amazon shows complete ignorance of how readers think and act. They could potentially make tons o' money with this product, but their DRM paranoia has crippled their thinking.
I read a lot of fantasy and SF. When I find a good author, I loan the book to my friends. If my friends like the book, they buy every other book that author has written (often from Amazon); they watch for new books by that author, and buy those too. They loan books to me; I do the same thing. The DRM idiots look at this, and what do they see? Piracy! If they could, they'd stop me from loaning or giving books to my friends. Well, with DRM, they can do exactly that. I hope they're happy.
If Amazon were smart (and pigs could ice skate), they might do something like this: First of all, let Kindles talk to each other—make it possible to transfer a book from one Kindle to another. When you transfer a book, it gets wiped from your Kindle, just like you don't have a book that you've given away (or sold) any more. That means you could loan or sell your Kindle book just like a paper book. Amazon would get the advantage of letting readers help market their product, just like they always have—and people who buy Kindle e-books would feel like they actually owned something. Give me, in addition, a contractual guarantee that I'll always be able to read the eBook on some device, and I would seriously consider the Kindle concept as a supplement to my collection of paper books.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
I love to read - especially SciFi, but I would never buy an electronic book.
I have a stack of about 10 books I want to get to right now and I don't think I'm unusual.
The cost of the books is not the issue - I don't think I've ever passed over a book that looked interesting due to cost - it's time that is the scarcity.
The main benefit that eReaders provide - the ability to store many books - is not a problem for most people and they add the issues of poor readability and a fragile/expensive device.
I think audiobooks are the only technology that addresses reader's actual problem - trying to fit in more books in less and less free time. (If you are willing to give up the actual reading part).
I think eBooks are and will always be a solution looking for a problem.
The easy way for him to find out would be to make one available as a PDF and see if it gets pirated.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Speaking as someone that has personally scanned well over a hundred books (I have no life... seriously... sadly), all I can say is: never underestimate the length a person with OCD will go.
OK, so "Book Scanning and OCR for OCD Sufferers" wouldn't be a good title to put out there as an e-book, but y'alls too small a market percentage to base a sales strategy on.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
FYP to make it accurate.
Why would I bother enlightening you on the link you misunderstood when
a) you've proven time and again to be a colossal asshole
b) you posted a link, and with all authority, proceed to openly and egregiously misread and misinterpret it in a basic, fundamentel way
Well? I just felt like telling you you were wrong, I couldn't care less about demonstrating that it's true since you're such a cunt you'd deny it till your death.
You're just wrong, no discussion or persuasion necessary. However, since you're being a huge dick, circumvention is allowed for purposes of interoperability. Had you read YOUR OWN FUCKING LINK with any kind of comprehension you'd know that.
SO, you're still wrong, only now you know why. Proceed to be a twat and try to pretend otherwise.
Engst's conclusions are spot on. I've published DRM-free screencasts and PDFs for almost 2 years and have had many people tell me that they found me on BitTorrent, then became a paying customer.
Keep the business personal, provide something of value, and trust your customers.
http://peepcode.com/
From folks I know in the publishing industry who deal with questions of whether e-book piracy is a problem, the emerging consensus seems to be that not only is it not a problem, making e-book versions available very likely helps print version sales. Baen Books goes so far as to make copies of some of their books available for free in its Baen Books Free Library. As nearly as they can tell, this has helped boost sales for paid books. Pogue is definitel WAY off the mark on this particular call.
Piracy is armed robbery at sea. Copying and distributing w/o permission is nothing like armed robbery, on a boat or otherwise.
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In some cases, piracy of the Classic Traveller materials got enough people interested in the new T5 materials to buy them, and some even buy the Classic Traveller CD set from Far Future to support Traveller and make sure that it survives to the new settings and new T5 system. In the early days of Baen's Webscription service (and before their free CDs became a regular event) I saw more than one request in one of the book-pirating newsgroups for one of the newly-released Baen titles generate quite a few pointed replies to the effect that the original poster go buy it from Baen because 'they do ebooks right.'
I think most observers would agree that when ebook pirates (who get most books at zero cost and virtually zero effort) are willing to come out and castigate someone in their midst for not wanting to pay a reasonable rate for something that they'd otherwise steal at a higher price-point, then Baen is on to something, there.
Just one observation from the peanut gallery.
You repeat the mantra: "Free market".
However, can you please find anything revolving around the definitions of "Free Market" that establishes artificial monopolies, and artificial scarcity in the form of copyright law?
Copyright law is not part of the free market. In fact, it makes the market less free by imposing further restrictions on people's actions in the market.
Without copyright, in a true free market - the financial incentive to create these closed systems would diminish and they would be unable to compete with freedom alternatives.
What do you mean by saying that my ideals do not fit the real world? The vast amounts of Free Software that exists despite copyright law proves that it is unnecessary. Can you even imagine how much more free software we would have without copyrights restricting software?