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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.
Well David, you are passing up sales while preventing absolutely nothing.
Learn to live with it, the pirates always win.
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.
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 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?
Pogue was quoting Steven Poole. Those nasty words weren't his own. See Pogue's weblog post and the dimwitted douchebag's weblog post.
That explains the weight problems in the States! DAILY exercise people, daily!
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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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/
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.
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!
Hell, I'm a Microsoft MVP Award Winner for many years in a row and even I'm not daft enough to understand that free, open source, and closed source have their places on the planet. It is sad when there are zealots on either side. So many of the people who know nothing about open source software (to which I also contribute) are as hell bent on being right as those on the opposing side of the fence. I guess the difference between me and, well, most is that I freely admit my sentiments openly and honestly and back them up with factual information.
Yet, on the other side of this we see people who do stupid crap... They simply can't (or won't) understand that open source means that you are free to do as you wish with it up to, and including, not using it.
On the other side you have those people who insist that everything must be open source and if it isn't then there's something evil going on with it. There are too many people making judgments based on little evidence.
To the first folks I say, come on over to my house and you can chill on my lawn, party, spend the weekend, and all of that.
To the latter I say, just because I let you in my home to have all the free stuff you want (assuming you don't steal it from me) but if I say you can't go into my bedroom then you must accept that it is off limits.
Where am I going with this? Well, you have someone who obviously has an agenda. He obviously thinks that one can't be paid from their "free" work. The reality is, just with me, that I get paid quite often to work on free, open source, software to improve it or to integrate it with their current setup. He, probably, doesn't and he, probably, isn't smart enough to realize that there is a world beyond proprietary. Take what you can from him, as you seem to be doing, but what you do take from him I would automatically consider suspect given his prior inability to comprehend simplistic realities.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.