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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."
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.
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
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).
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
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
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."
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...
man, I feel like mold.
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.
business execs) rarely understand is that piracy usually indicates an unfulfilled market.
.. up to 10 dollars, and a per unit production cost of 2 dollars.
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
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).