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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."
Are you sure about that? What have you got in the way of data backing up that statement? I'm not saying you're wrong - but I think it would help to know how you know that is the case.
That should create enough links (from Wikipedia for example) over time so that you show up first. On that website, provide links to Amazon etc, and offer a download of the latest version. Mention that folks who bought the dead tree version are entitled to a free download and that other folks should send $X via whatever your preferred payment method is.
Somebody who is interested in encryption knows about P2P so there's no way you can put the bits back in the bottle.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
First, O'Reilly isn't really my publisher, although I did contribute a chapter to the book Beautiful Security.
Second, I don't think that people are out to screw me personally. At least most people that is. But I do believe that humans take the path of least resistance.
Third, I think that students are already under a great deal of financial stress. The temptation to save a few dollars by grabbing a free copy of the textbook is very understandable to me. I just wish people would look at text book authors as the good guys because I think we provide much more information per dollar than the universities. Alas, I don't think I'm going to change people's ideas on that very soon.
Fourth, at some point the search engines and the web sites need to take some responsibility for what they display. I do blog about my book and I do use clean URLs to help the search engines do the right thing.
I think there's just something plain broken about the search engine results.
I have recently written a textbook, and I have written it for a series that I know will get widely pirated, because the pages are A4 sized and photocopy really well and it will appear as a torrent quite quickly.
I will not make a lot of money from the book - probably $5k per edition, but writing it will enable me to share my vision with a lot of people, and I regard that as a privilege. The more it is pirated, the more it will help my career.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
His strategy is to complain about it in high profile forms, thus getting highly placed google results. Results 2 and 4 when I search on his query string:
2. A Victim of Piracy Wonders How To Fight Back - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com May 14, 2009 ... The specter of piracy of my books materialized for me several weeks ago when I typed the four words âoewayner data compression textbookâ into Google. ...
bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/a-pirates-victim-wonders-how-to-fight-back/?pagemode=print
4. Slashdot | What Can I Do About Book Pirates? peterwayner writes "Six of the top ten links on a Google search for one of my books points to a pirate site when I type in 'wayner data compression textbook ...
ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/14/2037236
/...
Best of luck to you! It's quite a good reason to write a text book, but it looks like it may soon be the only reason to do it.
I think he's already found his solution. Now that he's been published in the NYT and on slashdot, Google presents searchers with Amazon.com, the NYT and slashdot in the top 10 search results.
Problem is solved, time to move on.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It might have something to do with the fact the book is $50 because the content is worth it. Printing and distribution are a very small fraction of the cost of a book and it is valid that these costs be removed from the price of an e-book. So you take the $50 book and charge $45.95 for the e-book.
Look into it some more, don't just assume that printing and distribution is extremely costly. As the author of a $50 book (http://www.amazon.com/s/&field-keywords=cd+and+dvd+forensics for example), I know the costs of shipping a box of 22 books from the publisher is like $10. The printing cost is also not significant. A book like CD and DVD Forensics might cost $5 to print in relatively small quantities.
Either the content is worth it or it isn't. The physical book is essentially cost-free as far as anyone is really concerned.
SO, how much did you pay the people that contributed to the books? I do notice you dodge actually citing many them.
I mean, if you should get paid for your effort, shouldn't they?
Anyways:
Who is your target audience? I grabbed the PDF, read the first 20 pages, and the last 5, plus some in the middle. The part where you talk about Disney.
Who is interested in it? It seems to me at this time it is only interesting to people who where involved in some manner i the last 15 years, but since they were involved in IT during that time, they know the story. SO why would they buy?
Honestly, If Linux becomes a dominant force the book you linked to will be considered a gold mine to historians, but for people living through the time? I don't see it.
BTW, sine a downloaded the PDF to sample your works are you counting that as a lost sale like piracy? becasue if you are, rest assured I would never have bought it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Cory Doctorow: "[M]y biggest threat as an author isn't piracy, it's obscurity." (http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/14/why-publishing-shoul.html)
I suppose it's a different issue if the book is required for a course, in which case we delve into questions of monopoly prices and substitutes.
My sympathy level dropped by several levels when I found out he's making college textbooks.
Why? Because I've been through that ugly racket. Not one of my college textbooks was under $250. All of them were written "by the professor", or co-authored by same, and then required for their courses so that they had a captive audience to "sell" to. "New editions" came out every other year, the only difference between which was the numbers inside the practice problems and the page count (altered by resizing the font). The full textbook + labbook + "labpack" (a set of components that could have been bought for 1/10 the cost at the local Fry's, but for which they "assessed" the fee without giving us a choice to look elsewhere) set for my courseload actually came out more expensive than in-state tuition my first semester.
For every "change" or "new edition" that actually included new research in the field, there were 100 more that were nothing but crap-ass "planned obsolescence" maneuvers designed to squeeze students for every penny by destroying the used-book market. One of these asstard professors actually forced people to hand in the back cover of their book with the final exam or take a zero grade, in order to make sure that there were no second-hand books on the market.
I would have loved to see a book available for $50. I'm impressed that it retails for that. I wish you well as a writer. But I have much less sympathy for you based on your line of work, having been abused by your peers.
And there's nothing you or anyone else can do about that except adapt.
Actually, I kind of like the old model. I like being able to plunk down $10 and see a movie that cost $100m to make. I like being able to pay $100 for a textbook from a leading expert who's not just doing it to advertise other services. I'm a content consumer and I like the old model. It's far from perfect, but it's better than watching videos of people's cats riding Roombas on YouTube.
At the beginning of your semester, go to the school library and check out all your texts. Most colleges have their current in-use textbooks available for checkout at the library.
Take the books home, and scan them with a flat bed scanner.
Take the books back to the library.
If you're feeling generous, put your PDF files up on a bittorrent site.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Sorry, submitter, but Slashdotters believe absolutely everything that they didn't make should be made available to them for free. If anyone makes them feel guilty about it in any way, they'll invent bad guys to make themselves feel like good guys, such as the MPAA or RIAA. "The RIAA made me do it!" You may as well accept that the leeches of society are going to pirate your book and think nothing of it, because that's the kind of personality that the internet breeds. Just read Slashdot comments for a sampling.
Okay, the book is ten years old. Seeing how the book is in the tech field, the author shouldn't expect to see that much income from it ten years out. There are exceptions, sure, but in general, I get your point. What I'm interested in is the rest of your statement:
isn't this exactly what is the problem with copyright? People sitting on their asses, demanding to get paid, while blaming piracy for not getting money for some work created ages ago.
Does this apply to, say, works of fiction, too? If you were to write the Great Gatsby for our time -- a book that wasn't particularly well received when it first came out but whose appreciation grew over the years -- would you feel you had the right to get paid for it 10 or 20 years later when your book finally starts getting the recognition (and sales) it deserved?
I'm not surprised that someone may have written a better book. I would just like the book to be treated fairly.
The book that's being cited in this thread is being given away for free. This gives you a reasonable estimate of the fair value for your book.
I do a little writing myself, and am slowly coming to terms with the idea that authorship as a viable career is very nearly dead.
There have always been good people able to write good books who haven't been able to afford to live on what an author makes. That figure has just about dropped to zero, meaning that in future most non-fiction will be written by people being paid for other things (university lecturers, think tankers, etc.) or hobbyists. Fiction will be written by the well-off or well-patronized or hobbyists.
It's the new reality authors are facing. Musicians are facing it too.
Music and fiction and non-fiction were all produced before the age of commercial publishing. They will continue to be produced in the age of electronic publishing an ubiquitous copying.
The reality is that equilibrium market price of a good whose marginal cost of production is zero... is zero. That's fact, and what's fact is by definition fair, if the term has any meaning at all.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I tend to be like you. Since many places don't handle returns if something isn't up to par, it's often necessary to try before buying. The problem is that we are in the minority. Most people who "try before buying" never actually buy, even if they like the product and use the product. I believe I remember a study (don't have the source) where they found out that roughly 10% of people who tried and then used the product actually went back and bought the product. That leave 90% of people who do this stealing the product. Not a great model for business.