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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.