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."

Comments

Freetard?

[E IS mC(Square)]

Point to note: Mr. David seems to be pissed off with all the Geeks shouting free (without him realizing the difference between beer and speech, of course). He wrote:

"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."

I like dead trees

[fyoder]

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...

Re:I like dead trees

[maxume]

I grew up about 5 or 6 miles from a paper mill. It was pretty much the industrial base of the local community, situated about 2 or 3 miles from the town. We rarely smelled it, but a big part of that was that it was downwind during prevailing weather conditions. My impression was that it also added a great deal of scrubbing and whatnot when I was about 4, so it was much better as I was growing up than it had been.

People weren't real excited to eat fish that came out of the river it was on, but there were fish in the river.

It isn't that it is free of effects, it is that the effects are due to production of enormous amounts of paper. The environmental harm contained in 1 book (and thus in the several dozen that most people carry around) is very small.

Re:I like dead trees

[shadwstalkr]

They aren't more evolved than you, they just have better phones in Japan.

Free made a buyer out of me...

[Kernel Corndog]

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.

Real-World research has proven Mr. Pogue wrong...

[Marful]

Baen Publishing (Baen.com) has been offering most of their books FOR FREE on their website for years.

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

Re:Reality, learn to live with it

[WolfWalker545]

But how many of the people who get a pirated copy would have paid for a reasonably priced copy if it was available? My wife's book is available on one of the Baen free CD's at baencd.thefifthimperium.com, and has been for a while, but the royalty statement she got today still has Webscriptions royalties... There have actually been cases where people tried to upload Baen ebooks to pirate sites and were shot down by the pirates because they feel that Baen, by charging a reasonable fee, is doing it right, and that pirating their stuff is like killing the goose that laid the golden egg. It's when publishers try to charge more for an electronic copy than they charge for a print copy that piracy is considered ethical by some of the piracy groups. Since my wife is an author, I get the dead-tree versions of all Baen books free. But I still buy some books through Webscriptions for the convenience, and to make sure my friends get paid for their work (of course, some just email it to me, just like they can request electronic copies of my wife's work). I don't understand how any business can survive by treating their customers like thieves - if the customers aren't already, a sizable percentage will either decide they may as well be thieves, or just walk away and refuse to deal with that business again (it's been a LONG while since I bought an album from a major label, for example).

"unbreakable copy protection"?

[urcreepyneighbor]

From the article:

Actually, authors like me are lucky; our work is, at this point, pretty much protected with unbreakable copy protection. That is, our bound and published books can't be duplicated infinitely and distributed by the millions online. 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.

Never. :)

The only form of "unbreakable copy protection" (in the sense used by the author of the article) is security thru obscurity. Ha!

Control of work vs being paid for it

[syousef]

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.

Re:Control of work vs being paid for it

[pintpusher]

A better analogy is an architect/builder or a design/build construction firm. The design/build team "creates" a house, or in the case of a tract development, "creates" many copies of the essentially the same house. They then sell these houses. The people who buy these houses can do whatever the hell they want with them, including, if they want, any of the following:

* sell the house
* modify the house
* give the house away for free
* take measurements of the house and build, sell or give away a duplicate.

and probably some more...

All this can be done without any recourse by the design/build team that "created" the house. Once the house is sold to the first buyer, all bets are off.

Now, I don't suggest that this is necessarily a great analogy (and the plumbing one isn't either, IMO), but I think it shows the problem with IP. The reason this analogy fails is because the cost of "creating" the initial house is fully recouped in the first sale. In the case of IP, generally that is not possible. If it takes an author a year of full-time work to write a novel, it is hardly reasonable to expect the first copy to sell for $30, $50, $75K to compensate that author for a year's labor.

In the past, this was no big deal because only a few could actually afford to typeset, print, bind, and distribute books in the first place. And in that situation, copyright works, more or less. When the cost to distribute copies falls through the floor, as it has, then there needs to be another way to compensate authors for their labor.

I certainly don't have a solution to this problem, but I think that since the reality is that most people prefer to read paper books over electronic ones, at the moment, the right solution is something like what Baen has done. DRM just won't cut it. You have to rely on the fact that people really prefer paper, and that people are generally reasonably honest.

And the cost per copy needs to be commensurate as well. While I think it's great that some authors get stinking rich, it's much more reasonable, and probably better for society, for authors to make a modest, but comfortable living from their continued efforts. That means that they need to earn a decent living for continuing to produce works. With the ease of modern distribution, and the potentially huge audiences now available, it doesn't make sense to sell a few copies at really high prices. That only encourages piracy. Much better, I think, is to sell the copies very inexpensively, gambling that you will sell lots of them and get a reasonable income come it. This could also offset the softening of demand that is inevitable because of dead-tree book pricing these days.

I think all this has been said before...

What just happened?

[fishthegeek]

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.

Re:piracy is a given regardless

[WDot]

I can't agree enough. Why am I not allowed to download German or Japanese MP3s on Itunes just because I'm in the US store? The only way to get it is to pay 5 times its worth by importing the CD, or play some stupid game where I import a foreign iTunes gift card.

How about anime series and films that just don't get picked up by a licensing company? Just because I watch fansubs doesn't mean I'm not willing to pay for the series--QUITE the opposite in fact. And seriously, I'm sick of anime licensing companies packing DVDs with figures and other collectibles to jack up the price. I pick up a box thinking I found a box set of a series, only to find out that there's only one DVD and a bunch of fluff.

Putting aside foreign stuff for a second. I want all of the Dexter's Lab episodes and Courage the Cowardly Dog episodes on DVD or mp4. I can't get them in this fashion unless I get some burned bootleg DVD on eBay. Why? The series "Reboot" only offered the first and third seasons on DVD. How does that make ANY sense?

Or how about old Lucasarts adventure games? They aren't exactly rushing to put them out for digital distribution. Id, Epic, Eidos, Take Two, and other companies are offering their back catalog on steam, yet I have to rummage through garage sales to find Maniac Mansion.

I pretty much have my pick of music that was made in my country, and even some of the more popular foreign stuff. But I want access to EVERYTHING I'm interested in, not just what business deals and International Copyright Law say I can buy.

I don't pirate because I'm "sticking it to the man." I pirate because I tell the man "Let me give you money!" and he says "No."

Fully agree, and my recent experience confirmed

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

My own book

[BigBadBus]

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.

Re:Not a big market for piracy surely

[Beijing Monster]

e-Books are not there yet. Paper is simply better. When eBooks do get into the zone of usability then we have problems. Right now the technology is not friendly, the price point is high compared to paper and there is no good way of making sure the author gets the return he/she should expect. A real big problem is that the culture is wrong. The expectation is that you can go a torrent site and help yourself. Fixing/improving the tech is not the whole answer. You have to change the way people think of intellectual effort and intellectual rights. The way things are going it does not look as though the author is going to be respected or rewarded anytime soon. In fact the dynamic is all going the wrong way. I respect the Baen approach but wonder if it really, really is working. I was given the other day the entire works of Eric Flint the energy behind the Baen experiment. I took the download because I wanted to check out the Sony e-Reader I had just acquired. I did not feel all that guilty because I had every page and CD Flint had ever produced on my bookshelf (bought and paid for). And my own conundrum? A final thought is that I have seen the distortions wrought upon the copyright system by big corporations, and the nasty way they limit fair use of content. In areas other than books I have no real problems in stiffing the major corporations. They stiff the authors/composers/performers, and they stiff me with DRM and regionalization that renders my laptop useless since I source my DVDs from three or four markets. I own legitimate copies from the UK, Australia, US and Europe so why can't I play them on my laptop without getting locked after five plays? Its even worse for a Mac user because the chances of unlocking the player are almost nil. So screw them, culture or no.

Re:piracy is a given regardless

[Znork]

business execs) rarely understand is that piracy usually indicates an unfulfilled market.

Monopoly pricing always creates an unfulfilled market; revenue is maximized at a pricing point far above the fulfillable market.

A classic economic example would be this: You have ten customers who would pay 1, 2, 3 .. up to 10 dollars, and a per unit production cost of 2 dollars.

Set the price at 10 dollars and you get 1 customer paying ten dollars; $10 in revenue. Lower the price, $8 gets you 3 customers, $24 total revenue. $7 gets you $28. Subtract 4 times $2 for unit costs and you get $20 profit. Try $6 price, that gets you $30 income minus 5 times $2, the same $20 profit.

Turns out $7, with 4 customers would maximize your profit. That leaves the 5 people between $2 (minimum production cost) and $7 unfulfilled. In a free market, competition would force prices down towards $2, maximizing the total wealth in the market. In the monopoly market, the wealth created by fulfilling the market is lost (well, unless the potential customers pirate the material).

Re:Required reading IMHO.

[Is0m0rph]

Tor as well with their free Ebook mailing list. I read primarily Ebooks and I want to read them in text format on my phone or DS so I don't buy DRM ebooks which leaves me little alternative but to download them. But in Tor's case they've been giving out DRM free ebooks every week for a while. They are usually the first book in a series. When I had a work trip coming up last week and a paper book was more convenient to read on the road I went out and bought several of the second books in the series I had read for free. The science fiction/fantasy publishers like Baen and Tor have a good grip on the situation.