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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."
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."
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.
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 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?
This is certainly true. However, what most people (especially business execs) rarely understand is that piracy usually indicates an unfulfilled market.
Not everyone steals for the sake of stealing. Some steal because it's the only way to get it, or at least the only way to get it in the form they want. If you find a lot of people pirate your products, then you can probably make legit customers out of most of them by altering your distribution and control methods. Carefully consider your price points too, since the true value of something is what people are willing to pay and not always what you think they should pay.
=Smidge=
Yes, those movies do get pirated. But I highly doubt someone downloading crappy movies would ever consider pirating a book that they would have to *gasp* read! :P
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.
Same here. Though he looks like a retard himself going ga-ga over Apple and iPhone at every opportunity, I used to ignore it for his other interesting write-ups. You are right on about him not seeing the parallel, and he conveniently forgets everything about open source movement where geeks have contributed enough, for free.
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.
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.
Corollary: If DRM makes it too hard to steal to get it in the form they need it, then people will seek alternatives to both buying legitimately and stealing, then the companies start to loose their user base. I've phased out Adobe products and Microsoft products for exactly that reason. Both are gradually providing less value to me per dollar and both make it too difficult to get a working copy, so I've moved to OpenOffice, Gimp, and Inkscape. If Apple ever DRMs there OS (and I paid full price for a family pack of 10.5 so I own two more licenses of than I can use), then I'll phase them out too.
Just callin' it like I see it.
I believe the idea is to protect creators for a reasonable period of time during which they can profit solely from their labor. The idea was to offer an incentive for the creation of art, literature, music etc. in the first place, which seems reasonable to me. The problem is that for the last several decades the big dollar content owners (not necessarily creators) have lobbied for and gotten unreasonable extensions to copyright periods. Mickey Mouse should have been in the public domain long ago.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
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.
RTFA, Poole wasn't talking about piracy. At all. He was talking about how a "pay what you like" business model is only viable for established names, while everyone else has to set a price. Poole doesn't have a problem with eBooks as a concept. Actually, neither is Pogue for about 95% of his article.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Here's the problem, though: What's the true cost of digital reproduction and distribution? Now, if we're talking physical goods you certainly have a case. It costs fractions of fractions of a penny's forth of electricity to make a copy of even large data files, and bandwidth cost aren't a huge burden either.
With software, there is really only a one-time cost of production and maybe long-term support. With music and video there is ONLY the one-time production costs.
=Smidge=
Of course, the monopoly pricing example is much simplified and valid only as a model for demonstrating why selling more copies cheaper isn't interesting when you have monopoly rights; more but cheaper still means less total revenue. In the real world you have many other aspects, for example, if you're making a 500% recordable profit you're not spending enough. Most organizations tend to accumulate waste until they make the minimum acceptable profit; see the music industry as a typical example, they can fail to make a profit selling hundreds of thousands of units of something where the costs of producing and distributing it should be less than a nicer used car. Spending money is rarely a problem; only competition enforces productive spending.
Now, if we're talking physical goods you certainly have a case.
Well, the application of monopoly pricing models is valid in either case; all goods contain amortized costs, it's mainly a question of how much of the total it is. It's interesting to compare the financials of, for example, the pharmaceutical industry with the auto industry. The more actual competition there is in a segment, the more the costs tend to be producing the actual product. The less competition, the more costs tend to go into marketing and administration.
With music and video there is ONLY the one-time production costs.
So the trick becomes letting the production costs be recouped, while still maintaining competitive pressure. Monopoly rights obviously don't work, as they inevitably result in an ever increasing level of waste, to the point where the one-time production cost is fairly minor in the expenditure of the revenue. Full competition may be a bit harsh, altho open source and creative commons et. al, have demonstrated that production costs can be cut to miniscule levels with appropriate measures. Perhaps it would be good enough.
Personally I tend to advocate freeing up the whole copying thing and simply putting a 'sales tax' on revenue derived of copying (ad's on download sites, on the price of CD-writing kiosks at your supermarket or book printing at your bookstore, etc). Then hand that money to the creators of the copied materials to offset the production cost plus some, perhaps with a ceiling on payouts, handing them forwards down the long tail, to maximize the amount of material financed. Easier to manage, less incentive for piracy, less incentive for draconian legislation and it opens up for a huge host of services that simply cannot be produced due to monopoly rights today (oh, and it would make it vastly simpler for the creators; simply publish your stuff and as people start downloading it, you'll get paid depending on revenue generated by your work. It could even work for open source or other free things). It would also put the actual budget for 'IP' on the public books instead of hiding the costs and pretending that what amounts to privately held taxation rights aren't a cost to the economy.
Anyways, there are many ways to solve the problem of one-time costs of infinitely reproducible goods. Monopoly rights may, for economic reasons, be the one of the worst and most wasteful ways.