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What Can I Do About Book Pirates?
peterwayner writes "Six of the top ten links on a Google search for one of my books point to a pirate site when I type in 'wayner data compression textbook.' Others search strings actually locate pages that are selling legit copies including digital editions for the Kindle. I've started looking around for suggestions. Any thoughts from the Slashdot crowd? The free copies aren't boosting sales for my books. Do I (1) get another job, (2) sue people, or (3) invent some magic spell? Is society going to be able to support people who synthesize knowledge or will we need to rely on the Wikipedia for everything? I'm open to suggestions."
Ask for money for a printout.
Any thoughts from the Slashdot crowd? The free copies aren't boosting sales for my books. Do I (1) get another job, (2) sue people, or (3) invent some magic spell? Is society going to be able to support people who synthesize knowledge or will we need to rely on the Wikipedia for everything?
Here's a thought: Have you noticed a recent substantial decrease in sales or income that isn't characteristic across other publishers (maybe based on the recession)?
... not sure if those actually work though.
You seem to already have the negative caged-animal attitude that suing the shit out of everyone is your only option. It's not. Just acknowledging that there are some individuals out there with no respect for your IP is also an option if you're not being sent to the poor house when normally you'd be raking in dough.
My advice would be to try to not sue anyone unless you're absolutely sure no one is buying your book and the social norm is to screw Peter Wayner by pirating it. You have every right to litigate just like I have every right to try to sue my parents for not giving me a better education when they sent me to Catholic school. It's up to you whether or not you sue book pirates.
Why are you taking up the cross and not your publisher, O'Reilly Publishers. Isn't it their job to deal with this and your job to write books? Let them be the big bad evil here.
If you are unsatisfied with the Google hits, maybe you should blog about your books and provide links to them? Or ask your publisher to get an Search Engine Optimizer (SEO)
My work here is dung.
You must be new here. Many of the worse case offenders live here. It sounds like you are pretty much damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you really think you can take on the pirates, good luck. If you figure out how, please don't tell the RIAA.
You're falling into the trap of noticing these two things:
A) Book sales are flat or downward
B) I found links to pirate copies
and correlating them in your mind without any evidence or proof that B is actually related A. Piracy is item #374273 in a list of 1,000,000 possible reasons why sales might be flat or falling. If you can't prove any real loss from B, then what's the point of wasting time/money pursuing it?
Here are the questions I'd suggest you ask yourself:
The downloaders are probably unlikely to buy your book at retail anyway, but they do bring you more exposure. Given that they are not costing you much income, how much time/money do you want to invest in pursuing them?
The people offering the downloads are probably working on the assumption that you/the publisher don't care. Often, a simple contact from the author/publisher will get the result you want, as they prefer the easy route.
My usual course of action is to ignore the downloaders. I usually drop the people offering the downloads a nice note saying that they're publishing my work, and if they'd send me half the money they made and stop it, I'd go away. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't but just go away. Those who continue, regardless, I see if the site is in the USA then send a DMCA notice. I also proactively work to ensure my own/publisher's sites are the primary matches for my publications.
Most importantly, I don't lose any sleep over it, or invest much time in it. It's not a big loss to me, and the intangibles I gain from it are worth more to me as a specialist writer. I figure an hour of my time is worth $25, and if it won't earn me $25 in royalties, chasing these people is time badly spent.
IMHO
"I am so sensible, sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.
At present, the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law, and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
On which side, indeed, should the public sympathy be when the question is, whether some book as popular as 'Robinson Crusoe,' or 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller, who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?
Remember, too, that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find, that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."
So these laws finally went through, and the pirates are here. Surprise!
Consider voluntarily opting out of the over-zealous protections offered by current copyright law. For example, check out O'Reilly's Open Book project. Among their options are the Founders' Copyright, where works return to the public domain after 14 or 28 years (instead of the current lifetime + 70 years). Even better, given the technological revolution between then and now, consider even less restrictive licenses that would enable your customers to get even greater benefit out of your works.
Yes, this option requires that the public make some "nice distinctions" by recognizing that your works are (would be) more freely available than the typical work, and that they should correspondingly pirate them less. If you take this path, remember to proclaim your moral highground loudly and proudly, so that people notice. Also, encouraging your coworkers, fellow authors, publishers, etc., along the same lines and increasing the number of works so available will help the public to more often encounter and understand this issue, and again reduce the incentive to pirate your works.
Let's see the "I don't believe in imaginary property" crowd come out with their memes â" and see them getting a new one ripped out by people, who finally realize, that Intellectual Property is not just about stealing other people's MP3-recordings.
Or perhaps your ilk will be ripped a new one by people who realize that authors don't need copyright any more than musicians or any other artists.
The business model of "write/record first, ask for money later" is fundamentally flawed no matter who tries to practice it.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
The overwhelming majority of people won't buy things they can get for free. If you look at the music industry, piracy runs rampent even though there are now drm-free, cheap, easy to use sources that allow you to try before you buy(itunes, lala, etc).
Sue the world. People whine that the RIAA is suing it's customers, but it's not. Most the people it sues are buying little to no music. I don't agree with the extremely haphazard manner in which the RIAA vets its lawsuit targets nor some of its ideas about damages, but the general idea of suing all the copyright infringers is legally/morally sound. Moreover it (kind of) works. I have heard people say they don't want to illegally download for fear of lawsuits semi-frequently.
The only way to be sure that nobody wants to steal your book is to write a book nobody wants to steal.
A limited market for an esoteric textbook, imagine that.
And the swappers that are passing it around aren't interested
in buying it (or probably any other technical literature for
that matter), imagine that?
This is like kids passing around copies of Photoshop or Autocad.
They are NOISE.
They give the false impression that there is a market where there isn't one.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
A bunch of kids with exaggerated senses of entitlement who have never had to work for a living are not going to agree with you.
Book pirates? I'd pay the ransom dude, those guys are serious business.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Having recently bought textbooks it seems the best trick is to give the audience little choice in the matter. Publish new editions every year with enough changes (actual new content, relocating chapters, new title, new typeface, new cover, new layout, new publisher etc.) that it makes using old and new editions in the same class all but impossible. Bundle the book with exclusive online content and make sure the professors require its use. Offer an electronic version but with the severest DRM available and charge the same price as the print version, and of course for a limited license (good for 18 months, say.)
Also, counter-intuitively, keep the price in the how fucking much?! range. Once you've spent $150 on a textbook, the idea of being the nice guy who spends his weekends scanning it in so that everyone else can get it for free becomes far less palatable - "Why should I be the only sucker who paid for it?"
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
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I really think you're interpreting data in a way which is totally unsupported here. You're seeing something that you perceive as a problem - free copies of your work online - and understandably turning it into a reason that you're not making as much money as you think that you should.
1) Royalty statements that show few sales? Compared to what? Have you considered other reasons that sales are dropping off? I assume you're talking about "Compression Algorithms for Real Programmers"; you didn't name the particular book, but that seems to be the only data compression textbook that shows up on Amazon under your name. It's a decade old; admittedly, my CS courses were a while ago, but I don't think I ever used a ten year old textbook. And when I need info for my own work, I assume a ten year old book is worthless. It's the nature of our industry.
2) I must be missing something, because I'm not sure that I understand this at all. What's your theory? That your book, the longer it has been out of print, should go up in price - except that there's a free alternative? If I understand you correctly, I think you're TOTALLY misinterpreting what "give it away for free" is supposed to do. If I downloaded a copy of your book, and I liked it, I'm not going to buy it used from Amazon, for which you get nothing - I'm going to buy it from YOU, to give YOU money, or do nothing at all.
There are dozens of viable alternate scenarios here - you're assuming a total counterfactual. What would sales for Free For All look like ABSENT the free downloadable copies? Maybe the prices would be plummeting. We don't know, you certainly don't seem to have any data - again, all you've got is a knee-jerk reaction (an understandable, very human knee-jerk reaction, but a knee-jerk reaction nonetheless) that connects "torrent available" with "less money."
I'm sorry - but you really need to show me that, on or about the time that torrent became viable, people stopped buying your books. Blaming a torrent for your loss of income, in the worst economy since the Depression, doesn't seem reasonable.
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All authors — be they literature writers, musicians, programmers, or scientists — need copyright just about equally.
This is not about a "business model". It is about the concept of Intellectual Property, which, in itself, does not have much to do with "business".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Take the books home, and scan them with a flat bed scanner.
Who has time to scan the couple thousand pages in all of the books for all of the classes in which the typical college student is enrolled? Even with a relatively quick scanner, that would take forever...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Sorry, Peter; harsh reality time... ...but your book "Compression Algorithms for Real Programmers" is really a light survey work, something that someone would maybe read if they were a manager of a team that worked on compressions software and wanted to be able to know (generally) what their employees were talking about when they talked technical, and not what I would call a textbook.
A textbook is something you put on your shelf and use it as a reference work. It's something like "Technical Aspects of Data Communication" by McNamara, or "Advanced Engineering Mathematics" by Greenberg, or "Algorithms in C++" by Sedgewick -- where it's about the only place you can go for something that you'd use in a day to day setting.
I did technical editing/fact checking for Prentice Hall on "UNIX Internals: The New Frontiers" by Vahalia, and that is also a survey work, but it's also what I'd call a textbook. It's something a lot of the kernel engineers here at Apple own and put up on their shelves (and it wasn't evangelism by me that made them do it -- they did it on their own). It has chapter end information, it has technical footnotes that lead to useful papers, and it has student exercises. If you want, for example, to go look at algorithmic tradeoffs for kernel memory allocators as part of your job, you'd probably actually look at chapter 12 of this book; doing so will at least get the list of the seminal papers on the subject that you should be asking Citeseer to find for you.
I really doubt that people aren't buying it because they are pirating it, but if they are pirating it, it's definitely not for use as a reference work, and probably not for use as a textbook, unless you've managed to convince some "Informations Systems" or some "Introduction to Computer Science" professors somewhere to require it for the class, instead of writing their own textbook and requiring that instead (which is usually how introductory college textbooks roll).
It's anecdotal, but I have to say that absolutely none of the QuickTime engineers, and none of the people I know who are working on codecs for the iPhone, etc., have your book on their shelves for reference (or, after a brief verbal survey, anywhere in electronic form, such as for their Kindles, either).
It's far more likely the the blame for your lack of sales is a result of the general economic downturn, rather than electronic piracy.
I'm sorry you aren't making the money you think you should be making off the book, but not sorry enough to go out and buy a copy of it when I can't use it as a reference or pass the bill for it back to the company as a work-related expense.
-- Terry
I noticed today that the bookstore at the University of Waterloo has a print on demand book machine. This thing will take a PDF file, print the pages for a book and have it bound in about 6 minutes. The big problem is a $50 set up fee plus between 5 to 8 cents per page if you print your own PDF. However, if course textbooks are printed the price drops. For example, a text that goes for $100 now sells to students for $70. In your case, this could be a very good way to start making money again. As always, the problem is pricing. I'm an economist, so let me explain using the jargon why I think the current situation will not prevent piracy. The answer is obvious: the final unit price is still too high.
The sales pitch I received tried to convince me that consumer surplus increased by $30 because of print on demand. What was not mentioned was that the producer surplus of the firm (O'Reilly and others) also increased dramatically. No longer does O'Reilly have to worry about shipping costs, wholesalers, retailers, inventory etc. They simply have to ensure that their PDF gets to the printer securely. We as consumers know this. We know that we should get more of a break if the producers are getting a deal. Let's face it $70 isn't cheap even if you have a job. (Also, O'Reilly isn't exactly a a brand I associate with quality anymore, either.) That $70 price tag is going to (hypothetically) encourage me to look for a pirated copy and read it on my laptop. If it was, say, $30-40 bucks then I would think again. For $20 bucks I wouldn't even hesitate...
So, in my humble opinion consumers ("pirates") are simply being rational. Everyone would prefer to have a proper book. No one likes getting gouged on price if they can't see the value added. Is the publisher really adding that much value to your book? What do they do? Proof read and edit? Most books today seem to have barely passed through either process, so it becomes hard to support the argument that much value is added. (In my humble opinion, O'Reilly is one of the worst on this count. Their newer books are often barely readable.)
But let's say we both disagree on this count. Instead, let's look at the history of publishing in the USA. For a long time, there was no copyright because the USA had a largely uneducated population and the government wanted to ensure that the population could have cheap access to materials for self-improvement. For example, Dickens would publish in the UK, and "bootleg" copies of his books would be circulating in major US cities within days after copies of his books were received from overseas. How did authors combat this? Often they would serialize their works in newspapers or magazines because they knew that they couldn't stop copies from being made.
Where does all this leave you? In a nutshell: innovate or die. If your publisher is smart, maybe you could both set your prices low enough so that:
Price = materials + labour + publisher profit + writer profit
is still low enough for consumers to want to buy. Since you are currently making nothing on this item, I would say there is tremendous room for some profit on this item right now.
Other options may be to rebundle key chapters with other "classic" works to make a useful course primer. Also, it may be that very cheap but out of date print-on-demand copies will sell well enough to encourage the publisher to pay you for a revised edition.
Up to you.
Yes, he DOES know exactly what he's doing! Go do a Google search for one of the unique phrases in his post such as "selling legit copies including digital editions for the Kindle" and you will see that he has posted exactly the SAME message on dozens of message boards over the past month. Slashdot - News for nerds, stuff that mattersOthers search strings actually locate pages that are selling legit copies including digital editions for the Kindle. I've started looking around for ...
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First off, the best books are written because something needed saying, not because some writer needed a perpetual income. Secondly, if a writer writes about things that people feel a need to read, the writer will develop an 'audience', which, in a way, is a perpetual income. Third, and most important, if you don't put in any effort, would you really appreciate what you take out?
In my experience, there's no free ride. You always pay, one way or another.
Words to men, as air to birds.
I always thought it was funny that they raised their prices to such astronomical levels. An ex of mine would always buy her books used, save 60-70% per book, and then sell them again at the end of the semester.
If you can make it convenient for a person to pay for the book they have to have anyway, at a price they'll gladly pay, sales would skyrocket. If a new book was $50 instead of $250, came with a PDF on CD-ROM and reprintable forms instead of some lame workbook, you could update it every year with correction, and who wouldn't pay that? The difference between $25 for a used copy and $50 for a new one would eliminate the second hand market. No one would wait around with cash at the bookstore for that difference, but they would if it was the difference between $250 and $70.
Not to mention the sales you get from kids losing their books, spilling bongwater on them, or throwing them away before they realize they've failed the class.
It's like music CDs. I see $5 DVDs all the time, even at grocery stores. Are you telling me they can't sell a regular CD for $3.99, and one with a Bonus DVD and high quality mp3s for 7.99? For $10 I can get many of my favorite bands on vinyl with an mp3 download coupon in the sleeve.
As a writer yourself I'm surprised you would show such a lack of appreciation for the reasons people write. I doubt many people write because they are "truly generous souls." In fact, one could argue that writing is one of the more selfish things you can do. Particularly in the market you're talking about though, this is a red herring. Nobody writes textbooks for altruistic purposes; they bring the writer plenty of other rewards apart from money, including tenure, respect, appreciation, and influence. And it has very little to do with an interest in pontificating -- you might write a monograph for that reason (and good luck making any money off of one of those, even without any piracy), but not a textbook.
If I were you, I'd post a rhetorical question on the front page of Slashdot and in the New York Times' blog section, pretending to solicit advice on how to sell your book in the age of digital piracy. Enough eyeballs will see the mentions of your book that they'll function as advertisements, and hey presto - sit back and what the sale* roll in. /* use of the singular is not a typo // how do you know the free copies aren't boosting your sales? Simple answer: you don't. It very well could be that nobody would be buying your content regardless.
People googling for your book aren't looking to pay for it.
You may as well be complaining about librarians not suggesting people buy books instead.
If I mow your lawn, then I get paid for mowing it and that is the end of it. A lot of jobs are like that. But not all. If I am your firefighter, I get paid each day, even if there are no fires. The day a fire breaks out and you need it controlled, you don't pay me anymore then you have done each day.
Doctors and such are slightly different as well, you don't just pay them for labor and material, you pay them for the cost they went through to get that education that made them a doctor. So their salary is not just the salary right now, but the salary they missed out on during their student years.
If I pay an engineer, I don't just pay him for the job right now, but for the ensurance that his work will continue to be solid long after the work has finished.
An actor I pay not just for the performance tonight, but for all the excersises.
A bus I pay not just for the overcrowded bus he is driving right now, but for all the empty ones in the off hours.
My rent for a house is not the total cost of the house, rather it is the cost of the house being build payed over several years.
AND THAT BRING US TO AUTHORS. The years of copyright are there because an author does NOT get paid his salary when he completes the book. Rather each book sold carries with it a small portion of his fee. In the days before current copyright an author was payed upon completion by the publisher and all sales after that belonged to the publisher. This is EXTREMELY risky for the publisher and easily leads to only those books being written for which someone is willing to pay the author his fee at completion or even during writing itself. Not all authors can work that way and if you value diversity neither would you want them all to work that way.
An author writes a book, then has to recover his salary he missed out on from the sales, sales that will NOT be instant on the day of publication. Do you really want books that might sell only 100 copies on day one to have to pay the author in full from their price? And then what reason would the author have to continue sales? That is the reason for copyright, to allow a content creator a period of time to recoup the costs of producing the material.
Copyright is no different from the rights of ownership that allow you to build a house and then rent if out over several years to recoup your costs and make a profit. If you want to get rid of it, it means the end of a lot of basic ways of doing business.
I myself have no problem with copyright (within reason), what my beef is with the RIAA/MPAA and the likes is that they wish to maintain their own roles of distrubtors/copiers and charge insane amounts of money for it while the content creators get peanuts.
Say a song writer charges 2 euro for a song, I got no problem with that. But if the RIAA charges that, it means the songwriter might end up with a nickle if lucky. THAT is the problem. Same with iTunes. If all the middle man were cut out the songs could sell for less and the artist get more. Win-Win, except for the leeches in the middle.
THAT is my problem with the current system, not the original idea of copyright. That is an essential if we want to allow content creators to make money from their work other then through a direct instant fee upon completion. If you want to be able to rent, you got to support propertly laws that allow this. And if you don't want to pay 20.000 for a book on compression, then you need to support copyright that doesn't mean this author has to look to single buyer for his work.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Maybe it's a dull book? Maybe it's a quick read? Maybe it's not advertised? Maybe it's NOT a best seller?
Book Publishing 101: Nobody makes money by publishing books that aren't bibles, yearbooks or church directories.
Nearly all the books that are published are vanity press editions that you paid to publish yourself, anyway. Some vanishingly small number of titles appear in the NYT RoB because you've already published a best seller, you're famous, you're infamous, you have no qualms about being exploited provided somebody ghostwrites "your book" for you. One in a billion people PER GENERATION are J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman or J. K. Rowling. Or Agatha Christie, if that's your genre. Make up your own numbers.
Just because people pirate your book doesn't mean people read your book. Book pirates are the literary equivalent of beachcombers, beach bums and itinerant metal scanners. They don't read. They collect whatever intellectual flotsam washes up on their tiny shores, in hopes it might be good. Some of them organize that data into well-encrypted volumes, never to be reopened.
If a few people did buy your book, congratulations. You've beaten long, long odds. And presumably you meant your reader(s) to find utilitarian or derivative uses for whatever nuggets of hard-gleaned technical wisdom you passed on in your book. If noble information-sharing was not your intent, then your book should have remained a journal, a daybook, a diary, a log, a laboratory notebook — and you, member of the secret order of whatever guild you belong to, should be filing for a patent.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
If your book's already being distributed illegally, that means that a) you've got good info that people want, or at least a professor use your book
and b) people didn't care to fork out money for the paper copy, or they don't want a paper copy.
You can create your book, without the publisher and distribute on line without the cost of going to the printing press, for much less. I'd easily fork over $10 for a good digital copy of a book.
If I read a legal paper and electronic copy of your book for free (the electronic one must be readable on my 6" e-ink gadget) and I like it, and then you release the book as public domain or GFDL 1.2 but not 1.3 or later versions (but if the book is very great then I may settle with Creative Commons or other similar licences as well), then I could pay you whatever you want for the book, as long as what you want does not exceed a monetary amount I have in mind right now and aren't going to tell you. In short: You don't need to have copyright, you don't need to force people to support you for writing books. If your books are good, people will come to you to support you without any laws, copyright, or other things.
Hi Peter,
The information in books is nonscarce, in that it can be replicated at very little cost. It will be economically infeasible to try to stop distribution. The best way for you to get the upper hand is to come out as the legitimate, moral author of this; publicly and for yourself. You should set up a website and come out with a suggested fee for donations. There are other ideas too, like having previews and/or early releases for subscribers.
Of course you would still charge for the dead-tree book. Take a look at what Stefan Molyneux has been doing at www.freedomainradio.com. He lives entirely off the donations and subscriptions.
Hope this helps
Hugo