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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."
assassination works better
Nobody makes a living writing textbooks. Few textbooks ever pay out royalties beyond the initial advance. Piracy has not changed this.
Cars especially should be free. Limitation of mobility is the biggest negative externality. By restricting people's mobility, GM is making everyone else suffer, because lack of mobility ruins everything.
fallacies and assumptions.
"The kind of book I write, thick with equations that play to computer lovers, is also the first to be pirated."
based on nothing.
"he category sold 8% fewer titles in 2008 than 2007."
SO? gosh what could have happened in 08 to cause sales to go down. hmm.
"Iâ(TM)m not going to write more books if the revenues will be wiped out by pirates. "
so?
"there was no real uptick in the sales of my book when these pirated versions appeared."
Maybe they aren't being downloaded by people who would actually use them? maybe you are a poor writer? Maybe there just aren't a lot of people needing your book?
Add to that, they didn't down tick either. In fact it as if it had no effect on your sales at all. Surprise, pretty much what studies have shown for music as well. If you are good, piracy generates sales, of you are mediocre, then no change. If you stink..well nothing will help you.
How about you come up with some actual facts from some of the studies?
Bottom line: This is the new market realities, adapt or die. There is nothing you can do to stop it.
Nothing.
I talked about your ability as a writer. I just want to be very clear that I only list it as a possibility. I don't know the books you have written.
I do know, based on your blog, that you haven't actually thought out the issue, only knee jerked to what you feel is the intuitive problem.
Understandable, hell in 95 I started thinking the music industry would be gone by 2010, by 2000 I was sure of it. Howe3ver, is seems piracy has helped sales, and that people prefer to pay instead of get illegally distributed goods.
If not iTunes wouldn't have sold well over 2 billion songs.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
(1) get another job, (2) sue people, or (3) invent some magic spell?
directly to understanding:
I don't think that people are out to screw me personally.
The temptation to save a few dollars by grabbing a free copy of the textbook is very understandable to me.
?
I think there's just something plain broken about the search engine results.
Ok, I was going to see if you have metadata tags for search engines but .... I can't find your book on your publishers site even. When I search for it nothing matching your description comes up. How can you expect Google and Yahoo! to index your pages when your publisher can't? I'm not attacking you but I just spent five minutes trying to find your book by going to your publisher and going to Amazon but since you're not the main author, I'm having a really really hard time!
My work here is dung.
Amazon does a much better job selling printed versions. You can find used copies there.
Amazon
so google has done the right thing with regards to servicing the query.
Sorry, I disagree. At some point, it just becomes too blatant to be ignored.
Oh, I know that someone is buying. Otherwise the price would drop to zero. But my point is that the free copies haven't increased demand. If they did, the price should go up.
David Huffman did far more important work than you ever will be able to do. Do you know what he did with his work? He gave it away for free rather than patenting it or trying to extort people for money to use his work. People like you aren't even fit to wipe his ass.
Okay, maybe they're not perfect, but for the record I searched out the guy who complained about the errors on Amazon. Then I asked him to help me correct the errors. All of the errors that I've heard about are right here .
While I think everyone has a right to an opinion, I was very disappointed that the guy couldn't point out something really boneheaded given the tone of his comment.
I continue to offer financial rewards to the first person to report errors in my book. There's a printed offer in the front of each book. I circulate new rewards before I print new versions. I pay them and I haven't had to pay very many.
Could not agree more. The people in this thread are hitting it right on the head. I wish we could tag this question as "troll".
I agree 100% on the textbook market being BS. And throw in the professors who use shitty books when there are much better ones available for cheaper prices. Took a course last semester in Clinical Interviewing(yep, not a geek) and we used Clinical Interviewing in a Multicultural World, instead of a much better book called the First Interview, that was also about 1/4 the price. Why, because the Department chair is an under-qualified nigger who thinks anything with multicultural is better than something written by actual white people. I spoke with the instructor, gave him an electronic copy of the other book, and he agreed it was a much better book, but because of the department chair there was nothing he could do. Fucking nigger bitches.
Blaming a torrent for your loss of income, in the worst economy since the Depression, doesn't seem reasonable.
Sigh. Double Sigh. Yup. That's it. It's my fault. I get it now. Somehow if I can't dig up reams and reams of data for you in which you can poke more holes, then those sainted people who swap huge ISOs filled with "Great Science Textbooks" must be okay.
Right and that guy selling something that just fell off the truck might be telling the truth. And that girl in a tight dress who was raped was just asking for it.
If you repeat "maybe your book sucks" enough times, then you can feel okay about your hard disk filled with boosted MP3s.
Again, I'm just a poor player. The real question is whether anyone is going to fund UNIX Internals in the future or will the engineers at Apple be forced to glue it all together from thousands of little posts on mailing lists.
You manipulative TROLL! Have you had a look at some of the quality work that is freely online? It most certainly is not all funded by a book publisher, nor is it all scattered in thousands of little posts. There are MANY free books available. There are plenty more that are out of copyright and available for no money. Not everyone writes books for money. Perhaps there'd be less of a deluge of garbage books if only those that wrote because they genuinely wanted to write bothered. There is NO danger of what you're describing EVER happening. You might as well suggest that people will go mute if no one pays them to speak.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer