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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.
Thanks for the book? and for the links..
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.
Just look through the comments for any story relating to MPAA or RIAA, substitute movies/albums for books. There you go.
People pirate your books because they are not good enough to pay for, because they aren't available in high quality open digital formats without DRM, you charge to much, you need to release the book as open source for free, and then make money on lectures and going on tours, and you can have a web page with a link which allows people to donate money directly to you without middlemen, and you can make money on advertisement.
There you go.
What Can I Do About Book Pirates?
Book pirates claim the partial income of several thousand authors yearly. Once book pirates get underneath the floor boards of your house, nothing gets rid of them. If you have book pirates, you'll notice tiny white dust particles near crevices and creases in your books and book shelves which are actually book pirate eggs. They will hatch and form book pirate larvae that can go weeks without books and still survive which makes extermination difficult. Once infected, a typical book enthusiast has nine to ten days before cells throughout the body are infected with the book pirate virus. You cannot cure book pirates but you can control them. There are means of prevention--a vaccine has been developed for book pirates type one and type two but there are several strains too rare and foreign to address. Book pirate build up occurs around the search engines and torrents of the internet and with them come social stigmas. Regular flossing and lawsuits will also help prevent book pirate and book related decay. If you or someone you know has book pirates or shows book pirate symptoms, get help, get tested and abstain from group readings.
My work here is dung.
educate yourself.
How many people ahve downloaded the book? bear in mind it's the distribution that's the crime here, not downloading.
If it is a physical site, send them a violation letter.
There are a lot of people that have the same issue you do yet still make money.
Maybe the real problem is your book isn't very popular? or that your ego feels it should be entitled to wads of money for simple writing a book?
If you find out lots of books, meaning substantially more then are sold, are being distributed offer advertising in the book.
Maybe the value of your book to most people isn't above free?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Nobody makes a living writing textbooks. Few textbooks ever pay out royalties beyond the initial advance. Piracy has not changed this.
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.
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
you'll have to go on tour and hope to make money with a percentage of the gate and through book, cd and t-shirt sales at your shows. INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE!
sorry, just trolling.
Write your next book using incredibly abstract language and concepts, so as to be useless to non-academicians. Then charge over $100 in order to milk this very limited market, who will hopefully never get organized enough to pirate the book.
It's what other people seem to do. Seriously, any book with a title like "... for practical people", or "... for real programmers" will get pirated. Surprise! That's the "practical" way to get technical books!
Take heart also that many of the pirates would probably not buy the book if that were the only option.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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?
Free versions of things help to bring you to your audience. It's more likely to increase sales rather than hinder them - more people will be exposed to your book than would otherwise have been the case. If they don't buy this one at least they know you're there and what you're on about, and that makes them more likely to purchase your next one. It's advertising that you don't have to pay for.
If this wasn't the case then why do software companies, and game companies in particular, routinely release free "demos" of their products before the final "pay for this" release?
Do some SEO and send DMCA takedown notices to the sites linking to/hosting the content. If the sites do not comply with your takedown notices file a complaint with google to remove the offending content from their search results.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
I doubt it's pirates. Your decline in sales is most likely due to students re-selling your used textbooks. Change a word (or two) and release a new edition to put a damper on used textbook sales. Students will love that. Probably so much that they would actually start to pirate your book...
Work with Google to rid search results of links to the pirated version.
I am afraid there isn't much you can do about this. Ask the RIAA about their success in prosecuting [music] pirates. It's not worth the efforts, unless you have ten times the amount of dough at the RIAA's disposal.
My advice: Find another job. A university would be a good start for you.
A few thoughts.
I once talked to someone who has written a few computer books and the input I got was that she was not getting much from the books. She mentioned that what the books did help with was stablishing yourself as a subject matter expert so you could get paid more when doing consulting/work in the field you wrote.
To that regard one possibility may be to do nothing about the pirated copies and/or let your publisher deal with it.
I also recall reading recently comments from a couple of publishers (including the owner from stardock) who basically said you loose more trying to fight pirates than by worrying only about paying customers. There will always be people willing to download some material for free that they would never be willing to pay for.
The print version needs to weigh a ton
In an online store, offer a low cost trolley to wheel the book around in
The digital edition needs to be 100Gb in size
In an online store, offer a low cost memory stick to house the book
Sue.
My ancestors invented the corndog. Everywhere I look, people are eating corndogs and not giving me money. Do I need a magic spell?
Yes, I am a carnie.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
What model would that be?
That's YOUR job to figure out, not mine. I got my own business model to figure out.
But I can tell you the future for publishing in any form - music, movies, TV - is one where free copies of everything are everywhere. And there's nothing you or anyone else can do about that except adapt.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
For established legitimate users? Perhaps an official sale will come with an entry point to a protected site that offers additional value?
A legit purchase that gives the customer the opportunity to ask the author a question might be very attractive.
Also the questions would give you grist for future revisions or alternate titles.
Anyway, if you wrote a book you are a subject matter expert. Perhaps you should make the book a kind of advertisement for advanced services in the field. So the more its passed around, the more benefit flows back to you.
Probably not the magic bullet you wanted though...
I'm not a lawyer, but I can tell you a few things that have worked for me repeatedly over the years. These all apply to the people redistributing your work, not the people receiving it from them.
A cease-and-desist letter beforehand will sometimes do the job. Actually having a law firm draft this for you isn't a bad idea, and it's a lot cheap to pay them for this by the hour than to retain them for a civil suit.
Also, consider contacting hosting companies, registrars, DNS providers, and net block providers for the sites in question. If they have physical addresses listed on their websites, try contacting their landlords, too. Most leases contain a clause about eviction for using the premises for illegal activity. A law firm can probably help you with this, too, as the DMCA has certain requirements.
Report anyone in the US who is doing this for money to the criminal authorities who investigate such things, like the FBI, Postal Service inspections office (mail fraud), or the Secret Service (bank fraud). Chances are they're committing some act of fraud as well as copyright infringement, like claiming to be authorized to sell those copies or collecting money across the Internet claiming to be an agent of yours.
As others have said, all of these really should be handled by the publisher I'd think. That's the purpose of having a publisher rather than distributing the work yourself. They are supposed to take care of the business side of it.
Then you should spend your time writing some. Really stop playing video games, watching TV, going to the movies, spending time with your friends and start making and giving away educational materials. NOW DO IT NOW.
So do you like being told what to do with your time, knowledge, and effort?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This may not be applicable to you but recently I was looking for several e-books and found the price stupidly high, I can buy a paperback for £3.99 but an e-book costs $16.00,to me this makes no sense, producing a paper based book and distributing it is surely more expensive than producing an electronic version, don't the publishers get the book in electronic form from the authors anyway? Where are the costs? Off topic, I also find extremely frustrating that most books I want are not available in electronic form, and some that are are restricted to the U.S. and Canada, I could understand this for new books but not ones published in 2004. I have resorted at times to downloading torrents of books I own already as paperbacks, this probably isn't legal either but it satisfies my moral code
Clearly you've suffered enough : )
What you are missing is that not every download is a lost sale. People who download would probably not have bought it in the first place -- they would have bought a used copy, borrowed from a friend or roommate, or checked it out from a library. This is the fundamental fact that RIAA/MPAA don't understand either. Think of it as free advertising. After checking out a book from a library, if I've found it really useful I've then gone on and purchased a copy. I've even replaced a used book with a new book when a new edition came out because it was quite good. I never would have bought it in the first place had there not been a cheaper option available. This goes for downloads as well.
(1) get another job.
Maybe. If you can support yourself writing, you're way ahead of most writers. I doubt the publishing industry will be brought down by pirates though.
(2) sue people.
Let your publisher do this.
(3) invent some magic spell?
There isn't a magic spell, but there's a magic formula. Some percentage of people will always pirate. Some greater number of people are also buying the book. Keep cashing your checks and realize that some people are going to steal your book, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
It must suck to see your work traded freely. I would be angry too. I first started noticing digital piracy of games back in the 8-bit computer days. It's fascinating to see that virtually no progress has been made in stopping it since then.
There really is nothing you can do.
You can't sue anyone. Unless you can find somebody actually making copies of your books and selling them for their own profit of course. However, that is quite rare compared to a person receiving a digital copy online without paying you. Let's say this consumer was supposed to pay you 20$. Even with fines and penalties you will never make a profit going after the consumer. Look at that RIAA for proof of that. Even if you do get a judgment there is no guarantee that you will ever get any money from it at all. The average consumer in the U.S will never have "deep pockets", which is the first thing you consider when you sue somebody for damages. My example, the RIAA, was never trying to make a profit either. It was terrorism, plain and simple. The idea being if that all the consumers are terrified of downloading illegal non-drm'd content, they ultimately win. It has not worked out that way has it?
Ultimately it will come down to if we live free in cyberspace, or if we live under a totalitarian fascist cyberspace where the consumer/citizen has absolutely no control over their own electronics. All systems are locked down with signed code and centralized authentication systems that verify all content is properly licensed. Violations are punishable as felonies under various laws.
I don't think there is any middle ground either. At least consumers are proving that they will not choose the middle ground, and will choose drm-less content and so-called hacked personal electronics that allow them total control over their own cyberspace. So what are you left with?
You can either support dying business models (financially, not just in principle) and the fruitless attempts to lock consumers hardware down to control them, or just give up.
I know that is not what you want to hear, and I support your copyrights (for a reasonable period of time) and the idea you should be paid for your work. I just don't see a way to actually protect your copyrights without "killing" the free internet, destroying freedom, etc. Which is sad.
So, absolutely, I think your only real option is Number 3, the magic potion.
P.S - I think you should at least take this to heart. The people that can pay, and want to pay you for you hard work, DO PAY YOU. I have pirated a buttload in my lifetime, but everything I have enjoyed and has turned out to be a valuable tool that makes me money, has been PAID FOR. I know a lot of people say that, but it really is true for myself and a lot of other people that I know about. In a very real sense, piracy is for the young and poor people of the world. People, that were never going to be paying you anyways.
If your book is worthwhile, you can consider looking for opportunities to give lectures on the material to those interested. In some cases you may be able to use the opportunity to sell copies (perhaps signed) after the lecture. Is there an opportunity to sell it as a textbook?
If your book is garbage, or not particularly useful, nothing's going improve your sales. In that case do go find another job, or write a better book if you can.
You say: "The free copies aren't boosting sales for my books". How on earth could you possibly know that? Purchasers of your book aren't exactly going to walk up to you and tell you they pirated it first then worked out it was so invaluable that they bought a copy.
You're asking some pretty basic questions. Ones that I would not expect a seasoned author to be asking. If you thought you were going to get rich writing one book, you were very foolish. Learn and move on.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
You don't say if you think people would buy your book even if piracy didn't exist. How much time/effort/resources do you put into advertising or promotional activities? It appears to be a text book; how many professors are using it? You have to convince people that this book is valuable to them before you can expect them to pay you for it. If you look at successful businesses, the one thing they have in common is the ability to "sell" their products.
For all I know the book could hold the deepest secrets to the universe. However we have to know it exists before we will buy it. BTW, I can't help but feel the slashdot question was a thinly veiled attempt to get free advertising. Congrats. Hopefully the editors will be more selective next time.
If there's no financial motivation to write an educational book, who is going to do it? Are the best and brightest minds going to take time off from their paid jobs to write a book that isn't going to produce any income? People still need to feed themselves and their families. If good books don't make decent money for their authors, then what's going to happen is that the only people writing books are going to be the people who don't have other employment and need whatever money they can get, which obviously aren't going to be the best and brightest minds.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The first step is to wear long pants. Next, make sure you have a sturdy belt that is difficult to remove.
Oh, wait... *book* pirates.
Never mind.
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
/...
I have an account to O'Reilly's Safari - I don't know how authors are compensated but having your book on there would make it widely available.
its not as if you don't have services to offer, no? if anyone wants to use your intellectual creations to their fullest, surely they should go straight to the intellectual creator?
the idea that you can constrain who gets your intellectual creations is the backasswards way of thinking about how to maximize your profit. you shouldn't constrain who gets your intellectual creations at all. you should maximize the exposure your creations get, cementing your reputation, and creating a golden calling card for anyone who wants to expand upon your efforts with your help
of course, they might not want your help. as if anyone who would buy your book wants your help either. but here's the important part: for every one person who wants your help, who bought your book, there are ten people who want your help, because they got your book for free. free=maximium exposure. and then the income from those ten revenue sources and work sources outmatches the income from all of the book sales
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
People downloading your book probably aren't going to buy it anyway. They live around the world in places where (1) the book isn't available (2) it costs too many for them.
You've got your story posted on the NYTimes website and here at slashdot. So you've got your name and that particular search term listed on two sites with very high Google pagerank with in effect pushes the other links down. This seems like a good start in making it harder to pirate the books in question.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
...or most notable "vicitm" of book piracy. In the 19th century, Americans waited dockside for copies of popular English books to arrive and an American edition would be published within hours with no royalties paid to the author. An excellent example of this was the 1823 release of Sir Walter Scott's Peveril of the Peak. The reverse also happened to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, when 1.5 million copies appeared overnight in England at 6p each without any payment to Stowe. In consequence, Sir Scott and Ms. Stowe are household names, while you, alas, are not. Somehow the world, literature, culture and commerce survived literary piracy in the past. Not only survived, but the output from that time to this has increased exponentially. I'm sure we'll figure out how to get by this time too.
Learn to market so as to increase your potential customer base(hey, you're doing this one already!)
The electronic edition of your book is only $10 less than the paper version, is your publisher a moron? Get your electronic rights back, put it up on amazon yourself, charge your royalty rate+fees(or more, assuming your publisher is screwing you like most authors) and sales will increase.
Take a note from other textbooks and put out a new version and fix some of those glaring typos your editor missed.
Write on a topic relevant to people with money/expense accounts.
Write a new book and stop expecting some work you did a decade ago to keep bringing in money.
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.
As in the case of all negative externalities, reducing ignorance is a justified use of taxation. A true free market cannot exist in practice, so governments have the responsibility of resolving market failures.
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.
My advice? It is a level playing field, so stop trying to run uphill.
1. Spend a little time creating a new and improved version of your book.
2. Use blogging and give copies to book reviewers to create some hype about it. You want to creat e some interest - especially if you give a few copies away to those who are well known in the field.
3. Release your new book on your own personal website, in conjunction with the printed version - but sell it at a reasonable price for a PDF version online. Also, offer your previous version at a micropayment level - maybe 50 cents or for free.
Here is the tricky and uncomfortable caviet: the more popular your book becomes, the more money you make for each revision and update. But you got to get it popular first. If you also decide to create a fan base of your books, the more likely they are to buy your next improved version or an entirely new book.
Suing people who have pirated your book for free will not only kill your reputation as a reasonable person, but it puts you into the same 'scumbag-money-hungry' league as our infamous Potter author did with the guy and his popular fan-based website. Extremely unethical and definitely not the right thing to do. You might as well apply for a job "like fries with that?".
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
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.
For one, I'm not going to pay for whatever copyright scam people are running. I'm however willing to compensate you for your effort.
If you make your book available for free on your site and I like it, I will donate.
If you strike a deal with a publisher (flat fee price, no royalties) and release your book in deadtree format, I might buy it. It shouldn't concern you if I do it or not. You've already gotten paid.
If you make your book available in a DRM free digital presentation, with convenient ways to pay and download, then I'll use that instead of going to a torrent site, especially if you provide further incentives like corrections and updates to your book. Most people aren't that selfish, if you say "download this for a fair price of $x, support the author", then a lot of people would choose that over free alternatives.
There are a lot of other ways to get paid for _the effort of writing_ your book, not for the effort of exploiting a government granted monopoly on the distribution of information, that people are happy with.
Let's face reality: copyright is already dieing, I and a lot of other people don't give a flying fuck about it, any behaviour that tries to uphold it just pisses us off. Don't assume though, that noone is willing to pay for your work unless it is enforced by copyright. I'd also wish if you'd stop using the word "piracy" to refer to the activity when someone doesn't wish to observe your government granted monopoly on information assembled by you.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
...in other words, even if it's been pulled down 1,000 times, there's a good chance nobody wanted your specific book.
I really believe there's nothing, ultimately, to be done about the masses distributing copies of, well, everything. On the other hand, freely distributed doesn't mean not paid for: plenty of folks who saw Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long blog did so where there was advertising, or bought the DVD (I did). The last Harry Potter book was available online before release, and did that really affect sales in any way?
Some folks won't pay. Wouldn't have. Some would have, but they won't if they can avoid it. In any case, there's no way to stop them. Stopping the search engines assumes that a solution could be found that wouldn't be worked around: don't be silly. This is the way it is.
Cute, but the glaringly obvious difference you're ignoring is that cars have a high marginal cost: every additional car on the road represents an additional investment of raw material and manufacturing labor. You can't just look at someone else's car and quickly make your own for free.
If we ever manage to invent Star Trek-like replicators that can produce cars at virtually no cost, then it'll be sensible to make analogies between free cars and free digital media.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
The free copies aren't boosting sales for my books.
With all due respect, there's no way you can possibly know this. Even if you spent a great deal of money trying to find out whether or not this was so, you'd be unlikely to get a reasonably solid answer.
In general, people grabbing such unauthorized copies fall into two classes: (1) wouldn't have bought it anyway, and (2) will buy it as a result of having first seen the "free" copy. You lose no money either way.
A much bigger problem is that when I do that Google search, I'm directed to much newer compression textbooks, and a search on Amazon barely rates. That's what's killing you.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Offering the e-book free will probably not solve anything. Offering it really cheap might help.
The book is just published and sold at to high a unit price. You have to find a price point which strikes the best balance between per unit profit and number of units sold.
If the book is too expensive that gives people much more incentive to obtain it by other means.
Nowadays, only textbooks which will be sold in VERY limited quantities can be sold at high prices (up to many hundreds of dollars). Any books which rely on achieving modest sales must be priced for its intended audience.
Your book seems mostly geared towards programming students and programming graduates who want to expand their knowledge. Both these groups have no money. Then there is the seasoned veteran who wants to add some skill, he might buy the book.
Summary: make it cheaper and monetize the e-book version. If the dead-tree version can turn a profit at a lower price then think it through.
The e-book could be priced at a slightly higher price than the profit margin of the dead-tree version.
Even lower. Each e-book sold is one e-book not pirated. That really IS profit
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.
and I wouldn't worry about it if I were you.
(1) People want printed copies of the books that are absolutely most important to them personally. This won't change for some time to come, if ever.
(2) People will buy print and electronic copies of your books anyway. Despite the incredible outcry, the piracy market is not bigger than the retail market by any stretch of the imagination, especially in the case of books.
(3) Most of the time, people who pirate things (including books) wouldn't have purchased your book anyway. There are three reasons people pirate: [a] they want it now, easily, and refuse to wait for anything but a download (i.e. convenience dominates their decision), [b] they refuse to pay for it but they wouldn't mind having it for free if it's available that way, and [c] they're willing to pay, but they'd like to save a little money if they can.
Group [a] doesn't apply to you if non-infringing ebook versions are available, since that is more convenient than piracy in most cases; [b] was never going to buy your book anyway so long as you're selling it and probably wouldn't be its best advocates even if you offer it for free, since they don't see it as a great value (the reason they're not willing to part with money for it); [c] is a very small group of people, given the risks and costs and complications of piracy that are well-known today, including needed specialized software, unstable and unreliable download speeds, the dangers of getting virii and trojans from "those" sites if they're running Windows, and the legal issues surrounding piracy which these days are publicized in media all the time.
I don't feel as though any of my six books (also technology textbooks) underperformed as the result of piracy, despite the fact that you can get most of them at bittorrent search sites today. I'd advise you to just sit tight. At most, put up a website for your book and encourage people to buy it, explaining that while there are free copies floating around, you're a real person and more likely to write in the future if they buy it. Maybe put the same thing in your dedication or acknowledgments next time. If they like the book and your writing style, they'll buy it to ensure that you produce more.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
If there's no financial motivation to write an educational book, who is going to do it? Are the best and brightest minds going to take time off from their paid jobs to write a book that isn't going to produce any income?
"Textbooks [that have already been written] should be free" != "there should be no financial incentive for writing textbooks".
It's a fallacy to assume that the only way for authors to earn a living is to charge for copies of works they've already written.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Almost makes me wish I'd done the same for my books... though I likely wouldn't have, I'm not a marketer by nature and would have bored of the task quickly. (My publisher has long been vexed at my inability to do basic promotion, leaving the task entirely to them. But hell, I just like to write 'em.)
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Book pirates? I'd pay the ransom dude, those guys are serious business.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
You do realize that the NUMBER ONE link on google is google books displaying most of the full text for free right? And it contains links for where to buy it. How is this broken?
My Babylon
I'm waiting for the "Imaginary property is stealing" memes - didn't you know that home photocopying is killing the book industry?
How many sales can you expect from a (quoting summary) "wayner data compression textbook."
Sometimes I wonder if people who write books wonder about what kind of sales they could possibly see from technical books, especially given the nature of the internet and the fact that information is now easy to get. Cookbooks also have the same problem where people go online and get recipes and whatnot for free instead of buying them.
Seriously if you want a job with a steady paycheck you REALLY should be looking at another industry, being a writer is not going to be lucrative for most people despite what seeing prominent writers and authors on TV or advertised on the net.
This stunt on slashdot may get you more sales, you never know.
The worst thing someone can do when writing something is sit in obscurity, any press will get attention for your book. The fact that you got published on slashdot will at least generate SOME interest now.
I am a working developer. I used to buy technology books on regular basis, but these days (not in many years) I don't, I don't use the ones on my shelf either.
It isn't because I am stealing them either.
It is just that any question related to coding/algorithms/standards/methodology/etc.. has been pretty much asked and answered online. I can google it faster than I can reach for my book shelf. The only books I would buy would be for reading. Not reference.
I don't envy your position.
From my own experience, printed books have an additional value that electronic copies never can provide. People who obtain illegal copies would probably never buy the original anyways. Or if they like the book much they still might get the wish to buy it to get the additional value a electronic copy cannot provide in any way.
Same here with me. I have for some time when I had not much money at my hand downloaded quite some DVDs or copied them from movie rentals. Nowadays I started to rebuy the good movies ... despite I have the "illegal" copies at home. But I want to have the additional value of the original cases.
Only with some of the DVDs I bough I am not quite content ... because the first thing they tell you is are lies about copyright infringment is theft (wich factual is a lie!). And I just bought them with my money!!
You cannot stop unauthorized copies of your work to appear on the internet. So don't even bother to sue people for this (the content mafiaa tried to do this and is failing to do so) as long as they do not provide your work for money (I have no respect for this kind of copyright infringment; nobody should make money with unauthorized copies of your work). If your work is good then you will find enough people who see the additional value printed books have in addition to some electronic copies. Don't worry, see the number of unauthorized copies as an indication on how good your work is and free adverticement! If noone would bother to share it on the internet even less would bother to buy it.
All the best,
- Martin
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!
So here's what I'd do if I was in your shoes. I've never written a book, but I've read a few so lets try.
1) Are you sure it's piracy that's killing sales?
I just looked over at my bookshelf and the last book I have purchased on any topic related to computing is circa 2006.
I write software. I do *not* pirate books. I can simply find the information I need on the web for free from other sources (blogs, forums, communities, the manufacturer of the software).
2) Remember that not every downloaded copy of a book is a lost sale.
I can understand someone wanting to take a look at the content of the book before deciding to spend $50. Maybe they did and they didn't like it. I'm not saying they acted morally, that's not the point. The world is what it is and this is how a lot of people behave.
You mentioned in a comment that this is print on demand which I'm going to guess means I can't walk into a Borders or Barnes&Noble down the street and take a look at your book to see if I'm going to benefit from it.
I might consider finding a way to peek inside before plucking down the $50 bucks.
3) Some of those downloads are lost sales.
Do you offer an electronic version (preferably one that's not tied only to the Kindle)?
Again, back to my first point, if I'm reading about something related to computing I'm usually doing so in front of my computer on a web site that I do not pay to access.
I haven't read your book, but I have read a lot about data compression and there are so many free resources that spending $50 on a book covering this topic is something I wouldn't ever consider doing.
I might spend $10 (PDF, electronic, not physical) if that's a topic I'm interested in and I know I can get an unrestricted electronic version legitimately.
I don't know how the publishing industry works, so maybe the last option isn't available to you. If it isn't and you really want to continue writing on technical topics, you may want to find a better publisher.
"God is dead!" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead!" - God
People are free to do what they want with their time, knowledge and effort. That shouldn't infringe on our rights to copy the fruits of that and use our own time, knowledge and effort to further spread it.
For better or worse, the subject line is the model of the future. Oh, and make sure you can read it on a phone.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
It's obscurity.
I hadn't heard of your books, or you, before. But thanks to your this article, lots of nerds now know about where to download your books :-)
I noticed on your website that you're selling print-on-demand copies for $40. You can't be making much money from that, if it is textbook-sized. Also, you're encouraging people to buy used copies, which will contribute $0 to your income for each sale. It looks to me like you care more about your book getting read than you making money off it, so why are you worrying about pirate pdfs? Unless, of course, you're just Slashvertising. In that case, well done, since your biggest threat is obscurity.
N.B.: I downloaded the Free For All pdf from your website, but the letter spacing looks awful on my Ubuntu 8.04 computer.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
When I went to the docter I told him "when I press on my chin it hurts, when I press on my knee it hurst. When I press on my stomache, it hurts. What do I have?"
* You have a broken finger.
What can I do about the pain?
* Stop pressing things.
So if you are worried what you see when you do a search, stop doing that search. Sure you can blame those evil downloaders, but perhaps it is just that those people interested in your book now already have bought it and have it o their shelf. And there also is a second hand market. Why would I pay 46.82USD on Amazon if I can buy one used for 3.77USD?
I assume the text has not changed while it was in the hands of somebody else. Also perhaps other books on the subject are just better and perhaps many people can just google for the information.
Prize yourself lucky you sell any books at all and feel flattered that it is good enough to copy. The time you gain by not loosing sleep over it you can use to write another book.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
...during a recession. ...in the middle of a recession.
Seriously though... "Introduction to Data Compression" would seem to me to have a very limited audience to begin with. It's the type of book I'd buy used if I needed it for a class or would try to get my employer to purchase for me if I needed it for a project.
While I'm sure some will read it for personal intellectual advancement, it was never really going to be a best seller, was it?
I'm not sure if the limited audience/highly technical nature of the book works against you or for you with respect to piracy but definitely don't assume that every pirated copy is a lost purchase.
On the other hand, 50 bucks is a lot to spend on something I might need but really wish I didn't, and since your target audience probably knows better than most how to get it for free, perhaps you are screwed.
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."
First, it's going to humorous to hear slashdotters support you when they oppose the RIAA but that's another story.
/. claim is appropriate for musicians.
Let's use the model many at
1. Musician makes music
2. Musician gives music away online
3. If music is good, musician is a popular draw at concerts or hired to write music or songs or something similar and makes money
4. If musician is not popular, repeat 1 or get another job.
Now, let's apply that to you.
1. Write a book
2. Give book away online
3. If book is good you get job offers, consulting gigs, speaking engagements or something similar
4. If not good repeat 1 or get another job.
This is the model that the Internet is molding. If you have to resort to suing people (RIAA tried and failed), or inventing magic (like macrovision also tried and failed) to force people to buy your product, you had better get another job.
Sorry if this sounds harsh but this is where we are going. Like it or not.
I see this as a larger ongoing issue as we move into the future. Something that can not be addressed in a simple forum but it is worth looking at and needs to continue to be an open discussion as we move forward. The answer must involve government, ease of use, and providing new value to the customer. The problem comes with the conflicting communistic view of information/knowledge (ownership in common) and how do people who create or further information get compensated or encouraged to produce such essential works in our society. We have hit what is called a disruptive technology. The technology to replicate and distribute information and full books has outpaced the conventional distribution chains. Let's look at what "sustained" the record/music industry. While the RIAA looks to demonize the mp3 player the IPod and ITunes have sustained the record industry even if the revenue is redistributed in a new way. Without a viable legal alternative in a convenient way, no one would pay for music at the levels we see today. How does this relate to your problem? We see the Kindle and DRM as the answer to your problem. Although much like the Rio was the leader in the MP3 player the Kindle may not be the ultimate solution but it will become the standard in some reincarnation. The Kindle and the online BookStore model will become your only answer as a superior technology with DRM and respect for copyrights must prevail. We also must look into government subsides such as CD-Rs are taxed in countries such as Canada hoping to offset the distribution of intellectual property. Instead of rejecting and fighting this new disruption to the industry you must learn to adapt grow and move a disruptive technology to a sustaining technology. No one is going to want to read text on a computer screen or a laptop when they could read it on a full sized kindle for $10. You need to look at how much revenue you are making per book and cut out the middle men. Direct E Book publishing to the kindle. Think to yourself, could this book be published and I could be compensated fairly if we removed all of the physical constraints and printing. Finally in the short run, look into SEO optimization of your legit web sites. It seems as though the pirates are better at technology then the good guys/capitalists :)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The majority opinions here range from it being daft to charge for so called "intellectual property", to the more conservative view that you can't practically do anything about it so you might as well make the best of it.
You can't afford to sue, doing so probably isn't going increase sales as much as it costs anyway.
And personally I wouldn't pay $40 for that. I have no idea how useful it is. I know I can get some useful information from online resources. I have no idea whether this would give me details to implement a decent arithmetic compression scheme, design a full lossy media compression format, or just give an overview of the types of compression that are available.
I'd be tempted to download a copy just to see if it did solve my problem. Having downloaded it I'd find it hard to justify buying it.
Give a couple of chapters away for free. People can use that to determine if the book is worth buying.
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Ultimately you can control when, where and for how much you work. You just can't control what people do with the output of that work - trying to stop pirates is as futile as trying to stop people from applying the knowledge they gained from your reading your book. So look for ways to capitalize on the pirating instead of worrying about fighting it. Look for ways to make the pirates help you.
For example, you are now a published expert in the field and apparently knowledgeable enough that people want to copy what you have written. There are ways to capitalize on that, for example:
1) Sell your consulting services for obscene rates. As a consultant myself I've found that the more you charge the more highly regarded you are, the trick is getting to the point where people will even notice you in the first place - seems like you have been noticed already, so using your authorship as a credential should mean something in the right market. Depending on the gig, you may be able to bill in the $400-$500/hr + expenses strata.
2) Similarly, teach. Put together a course that is a day or two long - charge $500-$1000 per head, you can even just use your book as course materials. Look for opportunities to do private engagements - a single company brings you in to run a course for a handful of their employees and public engagements where you advertise for 6 months ahead of time and take registrations (with a non-refundable reservation fee that goes towards the final price) and then rent a classroom yourself. If there are any conventions for industries where your book is relevant, get yourself set up to run a session at those too. There might even be a market for guest lecturer at universities that teach from your book.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Didn't RTFS
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Send Google a 512(c) takedown letter. duh!
And what he wants to do is to get paid to write books. You have the right to not pay him but you don't have the write to not pay him copy his book and give it to others.
You are taking his choice and freedom away from him. It was his choice to put those conditions on his work.
If you don't like then don't read his book.
So NO YOU ARE TOTALY WRONG UNDER INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT LAW!!!!! NO YOU DON"T HAVE THAT RIGHT UNDER LAW IN JUST ABOUT EVERY NATION ON THE PLANET!!!!!!!!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
of such a great collection of science books!
Uhm, Haven't you ever heard of the Streisand Effect?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Just sayin,
dimes
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I doubt you'll be able to charge $50 for a textbook much longer, book piracy or not. Such prices used to be supported by the difficulty of printing etc. People are going to be less and less willing to pay them.
instead of blaming pirates, look at Amazon's listing of used books. there are 11 copies that are cheaper than the new one from Amazon that you would get a royalty from. until those 11 copies sell (many of which are in new condition, many of which appear to be remaindered = new condition except for the black mark), you aren't going to sell many new ones. and some of those merchants are jobbers who probably have *multiple* remaindered copies that they will be selling. face it - any book that has that many high quality used (and cheap) copies isn't going to sell very many new ones. you don't have to think very hard to understand that it's amazon's used book/cd/dvd marketplace that is depressing a lot of royalties.
I disagree. I don't see why writing books should not be paid for. It is not an outdated business model. There are many books which would not have been written if the author would not have been paid.
The only thing is that one cannot prevent people from making books available unathorized on the internet. It is just impossible (see the epic fail of the content mafiaa).
There are good works written by people in there spare time but those people finance their lifes in different ways. But where would the writers be which commit their entire time to writing books if they would not get properly paid? It would be very sad if the business model for printed works would fail (and I am convinced it will not).
Still, a paypal account for voluntary payments/donations for unauthorized copies sounds like an idea. For good work I like to give a revard (I've done this for some open source projects when I felt like I have a dime to spare and I liked to supprot a good project). This idea might raise a few more bucks and also give the people who optained a unauthorized copy a better selfconscious.
But after all you cannot do much else against unauthorized distribution (except when they are done for financial profit of other people which I do not support in any way).
People in China needs piracy and illegal copies to learn what we learned. Without piracy (of books, of movies, of news clips, of everything), they don't even know what's outside their home --- because everything "legal" is censored.
http://www.ieaa.org/~adrian/
You obviously have a passion for the subject. Doesn't it give you some sense of fulfillment that your work is being read - pirated or not?
If the answer to the above is NO, then I think your best option is to get a new job. I'm not trying to be sarcastic here... Writing technical manuals/text books is just not the kind of career where one should expect to make much money. There has to be something else in it for you. You have to get some kind of fulfillment just from sharing your knowledge with the world.
As a side note... eldavojohn, drop the whole sue your parents for catholic school thing. Its way off topic. Trying to shoe-horn it into this discussion is, well, weird.
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.
Make them walk the plank. Duh.
... go talk to Cory Doctorow.
The Pirate Bay will remove the torrent if you ask politely.
If your website offers a inexpensive, non-DRM downloads of the book at a reasonable price, then people just pay the small amount rather than going to the trouble of getting copy at some temporary, hard to find, possibly illegal web site.
If, on the other hand, you do not offer downloads, and or make the download hard to find, or DRM'd, then that would be less convenient than a copy somewhere else.
In short, give the customer what they want, at a fair price.
Learn from the mistakes of online music.
I hope this doesn't come across as cynical or sarcastic, because I want to present this as honestly as I can.
If I had checked out your book from the library, wouldn't that have meant one sale for you (the library) but no royalties from me? Wouldn't that be the same net result as if one person bought your book, scanned it, posted it, which I then downloaded?
Now, the common rebuttal to this is: if I like a book I borrow from a library, I might buy it later on; but if I download a book I like, I'll never buy it.
True, I would never buy another ebook; but if I want a hardcopy, I have two choices: new or used.
Being a fairly cheap consumer, the first thing I'll do when I want a book is to pop over to Amazon and see what the retail price is and compare it to the array of used prices. If your book is $9.95 and used copies are going for $8, I'll buy new. However, if your book is $29.95 and used copies are going for about $11, I'll buy used.
So, in only one of those two scenarios, you get royalties.
Now, here's the kicker: even if your work wasn't out there as a pirated ebook, these would still be my basic choices, and I'd still heavily lean toward a used copy rather than pay retail price.
My take on this issue is that if we truly follow the anti-piracy arguments to their logical conclusion, we will have to institute a royalty-pay scheme in each library on a per-checkout basis as well as tax all used book sales so that this revenue stream goes into a royalty fund. In other words, selling, trading or just loaning books as we do today would have to be criminalized (a la "The Right to Read"). And the only way to effectively enforce these laws would be within a police-state.
Now I am NOT suggesting that because you want to be paid royalties that you are advocating a police state. What I am saying is this:
1. You will lose royalties with or without ebooks due to libraries and used sales.
2. To change our present system of book sales, societies in the free world would need to submit to a new kind of close scrutiny, one where even the lending of books becomes a government regulated transaction.
Rather than fighting a no-win battle, consider book readings, book signings, or simply lowering the price of the retail/ebook editions of your work as a more viable way to enhance your revenue stream.
Did you bother to look at these links?
Search for ANY piece of software, book, etc and the first few google search links may very well be those sites that generate "your search term.torrent" and "your search term.full.version.torrent" etc.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
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.
Piracy doesn't hurt sales as much as obscurity does.
Amazon's Kindle model is fundamentally broken: it's an outdated pricing model, outdated format, and outdated display technology for people who still pine for books. The book reader of the future is a web browser on an Android phone, iPhone, or tablet, and it's not going to come with DRM.
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.
The Short Answer: Why are Pirates coming up before you in Google? The answer is SEO, and the google algorithm. There needs to be an authoritative ranking and review system (citation) going into google not just an algorithm based on site design and linking (which is exploited). Until this takes place you need to invest in SEO optimized sites that will sell your books. These pirate sites are on and off page optimized to beat you on your own keyword. Finally maybe look to advertising and how these pirates are making money, if any (The Pirate Bay). The Long Answer: But more importantly I see this as a larger ongoing issue as we move into the future. Something that can not be addressed in a simple forum but it is worth looking at and needs to continue to be an open discussion as we move forward. The answer must involve government, ease of use, and providing new value to the customer. The problem comes with the conflicting communistic view of information/knowledge (ownership in common) and how do people who create or further information get compensated or encouraged to produce such essential works in our society. We have hit what is called a disruptive technology. The technology to replicate and distribute information and full books has outpaced the conventional distribution chains. Let's look at what "sustained" the record/music industry. While the RIAA looks to demonize the mp3 player the IPod and ITunes have sustained the record industry even if the revenue is redistributed in a new way. Without a viable legal alternative in a convenient way, no one would pay for music at the levels we see today. How does this relate to your problem? We see the Kindle and DRM as the answer to your problem. Although much like the Rio was the leader in the MP3 player the Kindle may not be the ultimate solution but it will become the standard in some reincarnation. The Kindle and the online BookStore model will become your only answer as a superior technology with DRM and respect for copyrights must prevail. We also must look into government subsides such as CD-Rs are taxed in countries such as Canada hoping to offset the distribution of intellectual property. Instead of rejecting and fighting this new disruption to the industry you must learn to adapt grow and move a disruptive technology to a sustaining technology. No one is going to want to read text on a computer screen or a laptop when they could read it on a full sized kindle for $10. You need to look at how much revenue you are making per book and cut out the middle men. Direct E Book publishing to the kindle. Think to yourself, could this book be published and I could be compensated fairly if we removed all of the physical constraints and printing. It seems as though the pirates are better at technology then the "good guys"/capitalists :)
"Imaginary property" is not stealing. Unauthorized copying of it is. Yes... It is much closer to stealing, than, for example, the right to sell pornography is to petitioning the government for redress of grievances. Indeed, had the 10 Commandments been a "living and breathing document", the "Thou shall not copy thy neighbor's work without permission" would've been found in there long ago.
This is irrelevant to the principle, and you know it. Please, stick to the matter...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
All authors -- be they literature writers, musicians, programmers, or scientists -- need copyright just about equally.
That's correct. None of them need it at all.
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 the context of this thread, it most certainly does. The submitter has chosen to employ the "write first, ask for money later" business model, which depends on copyright, and the difficulty of enforcing copyright is what led him to Ask Slashdot. He's not asserting some moral right to control the flow of information, he's just trying to get paid.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Ask for money if they pirated it. I have downloaded several ebooks because I wasn't sure if the book was worth paying. If by halfway through the book, I realize it is worth the money and not junk, I'll go to the author's site and pay for it. I'm sure this is not the norm, but I'm sure a lot of good-hearted people do the same. Just a thought - some money is better than no money!
Um, hate to tell you, but those of us opposed to the use of government force to prevent people from making copies already understand that.
So, what's your point? You'd prefer a scenario where no one had the right to read?
If a course is designed and taught around a textbook, then maybe the guy (or institution) teaching the class ought to owe a royalty to the textbook's author, since his course is a derivative work. I've been arguing for royalty-right as a replacement for copyright for years. But threatening students with jail time for copying textbooks is nothing but a price support for the textbook racket.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Talk to Ron Paul. He is developing an anti-pirate solutions right now.
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.
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
If you're writing textbooks, you can rot in hell. I know you're not the publisher, but you let them publish your books, and they in turn buy exclusive rights to universities like Pepsi and Coke do with their vending machines. It doesn't matter if the book is quality, only if it makes the university a buck on kickbacks and thats a terrible bastardization of education. As a college student (mostly) paying his own way, I hate you and you're damn right I'm gonna try to pirate your book (if I even need it).
If you aren't, then its pretty obvious. Supply your books for free or for very cheap online, and advertise a printed copy for sale. People value material objects... don't think that the interwebs will engulf your work and render it profitless.
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.
Allen Hatcher has a popular book on Algebraic Topology that he offers as a free PDF on his website:
http://www.math.cornell.edu/~hatcher/AT/ATpage.html
You can also buy a bound copy from Cambridge University Press for a reasonable price (<$40 for a 500 page book). I bought a copy -- as did most of my peers in grad school -- since a bound copy was much more convenient and well worth the price.
So the search comes up with 6 links to torrents. What it doesn't come up with is a link to buy the same book as an electronically downloadable non-DRM version with no bullshit.
There is very little you can do to stop the torrents. I am sure there are a lot of students that will use the torrent option. But you need to put them in the same category as students that choose to buy the book from an older student or use the local library: you make no money on those guys no matter what.
But you can make sure you do not unnecessarily push buyers that are willing to buy to download torrents. You need to supply the same easy and no fuss download options as the torrents. Forget about supplying a crippled product with DRM - it goes against the idea of supplying the better product and there is no point anyway as you discovered.
There is a small trick I have seen for textbooks: Make some extras available on your site that requires a unique code from the book. Block any code you find in pirated copies. You can detect pirated codes simply by number of uses.
I agree. Setup a PayPal voluntary donations link. I know I've contributed to people when the work they created was valuable to me.
I do not however like the "old model". There's a reason it's called the "old model". ;)
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 ...
slashdot.org/ - Similar pages
The YENRAB.COM BlogOthers 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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ReviseICT.co.uk ICT and technology news - ReviseICT.co.ukMar 30, 2005 ... Others search strings actually locate pages that are selling legit copies including digital editions for the Kindle. I've started looking ...
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Linux News Feeds | OpenSUSE Linux RantsMay 14, 2009 ... Others search strings actually locate pages that are selling legit copies including digital editions for the Kindle. I've started looking ...
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one hundred and tenth dot com | 110th.comothers 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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[RSS Tech News | akress.com]Others search strings actually locate pages that are selling legit copies including digital editions for the Kindle. I've started looking aro ...
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"Among downloaders of music and movies, the percentage of buyers is as high as among non-downloaders and with games the percentage of buyers is even higher"
The quoted result actually doesn't necessarily mean that illegal downloading doesn't hurt sales. The downloaders might be just as likely to buy some product but actually buy less than they would if they couldn't download.
Unfortunately, there is really no way to generate hard "evidence" on this topic, since that would involve comparing the real world with an alternate reality where it was somehow impossible to copy illegally and yet somehow everything not connected with this was "still the same".
And I want to get paid to post to Slashdot! Doesn't mean I deserve the money.
Authors do not arbitrarily get to put conditions on their work. The public decided to allow them to impose those conditions as consideration in a social contract. But as with all contracts, if there is a severe imbalance of power between those making the contract it may not be valid. In the case of modern copyright law this is very much the case, as it has been extended long past any plausibly mutually beneficial arrangement for the benefit of a small elite. There is no longer any moral duty to obey such an unjust law.
I'm not really sure I understand where your sense of panic or loss is coming from. You seem to think that suppliers of original content are about to become extinct based solely on the results of Googling your own book.
People who are pirating your book are not reading your book. People who are reading your book are not pirating it. Any engineer who seriously wants to learn about whatever's in your "Data Compression Textbook" is going to buy it and expense it to their company. They are absolutely not going to get on TPB and grab the torrent. I don't really get what you're worrying about here.
It's the same thing with everything else that is pirated. The people who are downloading pirated movies, music, books, or whatever are not the ones who would ever have paid for them if the pirated versions were unavailable -- it either costs too much or is of insufficient interest to that segment of the population to warrant the cost. The revenue you are losing to this channel is negligible. But it may serve as advertisement. If college students are downloading your book to learn about whatever unique data compression techniques you offer that aren't already freely available via standards documents or course materials, they may decide that they like your writing style and presentation (or not) and drive future sales when they actually have a career and money to spend on such things.
Apparently, you've never discovered new music or groups through downloading albums. That's the only way I find new groups that I like these days. And when I find something new that I like, I go out and buy it. If I don't, it gets deleted.
I haven't read through "all" the comments so sorry if this was already covered. This situation is suppose to be in the hands of the publisher, not the author. If you don't feel the publisher is doing enough to sell legitimate copies of your books find a new publisher. This is basically a trust issue w/ your publisher just like the price of the book. You hope they know what they're doing so you can reap the benefits of your labor. Basically you have to accept that a ton of people are going to pirate your book, and about 1/2 of them will never even read it (not that it will make you feel any better). What you need to concentrate on is the people that are, or are looking into buying your book. Those are the people that are going to put food on the table.
1. Get a reseller account on a web host (~$20/month).
2. Buy a bunch of book-piraty looking domain names.
3. Copy the site and nav code from existing book pirates, and build decoy pirate sites which "offer" your books.
4. Upload "pirate" copies of your book to them, which have the first chapter, and *polite* instructions on where the whole book can be obtained for the low, low price of $__.__. Put a coupon code in the pirated version if your resellers support it.
5. Just for laughs, put the decoy book on as many instances of p2p programs some slow computer you have lying around can run, so that it winds up sitting in other people's p2p directories. Do it on bit torrents as well.
6. Now try to pirate your books yourself, and keep seeding until the first few hits are always decoys.
7. Be content that anyone who tracks down, downloads, unzips, and examines 3 or more decoys in an attempt to not pay for your books... wasn't going to pay for them anyway.
The idea is just to make it marginally more work to casually steal your book than to casually buy it, and gently redirect the impulse to read it for free into one to read it for a just few bucks more than free.
Anyone who is in a business where the products can be reporesented by bits and bytes will just have to come to the realization that their world has changed radically. And that's just that.
The digital age has some seriously profound implications for society, one of them is, such products are now so close to free to copy as to be almost unmeasurable. Note I didn't say free to make the first edition, but this is replicator technology. The future got here, at least the first really large step towards a star trek type level of existence. The only way that such digital products can enjoy a high "per unit" cost like a tangible product forever is by strictly enforced and rather draconian laws, across the planet, that will force a tremendous amount of artificial scarcity into the market.
Now you have to ask, is this *really* the direction we want humanity to go in? How much do you really want to lock down computers and the net in order to be able to accomplish this goal? What percentage of the global population do you want to throw in prison, or deny them digital products because of excessive cost? (remember, not everyone makes real good developed nation styled wages).
And if they somehow manage to institute such a huge increase in the global policing forces, what about the next step, when gadgets can be made for next to nothing, then food replicated, then energy sources that anyone could theoretically get and use for next to free, and etc? How far exactly do you want to hold back such technology in order to lock in place "per unit" pricing on this or that?
Run it out a century or three, think about it, look at our rate of intellectual and technological advances, and think of the ramifications if we stay stuck in the 20th century with the business models and prices from then. Will that be progress, or will that be societal stagnation if true scarcity gets legally intertwined with artificial scarcity in order to maintain a century's ago "jobs"? How far do we go once down that path? Would you be willing to keep paying whatever 15 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity once there is some mr. fusion and we know that electricity costs could now be .000000000015 cents a kilowatt hour, but that older price got carved in stone by laws? What's the point of eliminating want and scarcity if it gets legislated against and it becomes a crime to actually use really radical new technology?
Ya, it sucks to think about having to find something else to do, but like we kept getting told, time marches on, this is a global society and business world now, some jobs are just going to fall by the way side as technology advances. How many whalers are left, a few dozen (most of them masquerading as "research scientists"), when there used to be tens of thousands of them maybe? Should society have just taken the whaling industry, shut it down but kept making everyone else shell out as much as they used to to them, even though they had switched to kerosene for their lamps or electricity?
My thoughts on this are, feel lucky you live in such an age and can enjoy the benefits "in kind" from others who also can offer really cheap and free digital bits, and try to work towards getting the tangibles next. Who knows, if we don't blow it, eventually everyone could be taken care of, cheap or free, for all their wants, and we could all just enjoy..whatever the hell we wanted to! Imagine an end to scarcity, don't be afraid of it or try to perpetuate it.
I'm in food production, tangibles, to make copies of this stuff still takes some serious work all the time, and each copy is still expensive to produce, you can't just do all the work once and get paid a thousand or a million times over and over again for it..but..when and if such a time as we can replicate food like we can replicate digital bits, fat city! I will *gladly* go find something else to do if that means we can eliminate starvation across the planet, I mean jump up and down from joy that has been developed. In the me
What Would Cory Do?
More practically, have you talked to Google, this seems like a clear opportunity for them to microtune their ranking algorithm.
(yes, I'm serious)
Jeez. Next.
It is much closer to stealing
By "much closer", you concede "not actually the same thing".
han, for example, the right to sell pornography is to petitioning the government for redress of grievances
Similarly, one might claim that buses are much closer to cars, than rhinoceroses are to bananas. But no one would claim cars and buses are the same thing, and whether making an analogy between them is fair or relevant depends on what's being compared.
Indeed, had the 10 Commandments been a "living and breathing document", the "Thou shall not copy thy neighbor's work without permission" would've been found in there long ago.
Leaving aside the authority or relevance of a document that occupies itself mainly with religious instructions such as "Thou shalt not worship other mythical beings", by "would've been found in there", you concede "it wasn't in there". Why was that, do you think? "If it was updated, it would've including this which wasn't in there to start with," you assert - even if that hypothetical scenario was true, how does that make copying and stealing the same thing?
Are stealing and adultery the same thing too, since they're also both in the Ten Commandments? What about worshipping other gods?
FWIW, I do believe there should be some kind of copyright law, but these kind of arguments are ridiculous, and do more harm to the argument than good in my opinion.
This is irrelevant to the principle, and you know it.
How is it irrelevant to claims about copyright infringement? Aren't you aware of the "home taping" claims that were made?
As to predictions... Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1841, against the extension of copyright http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Copyright_Law_(Macaulay) [wikisource.org] Only quoting the ending, but the speech as a whole is a very good read
"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 tradesman 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. If I saw, Sir, any probability that this bill could be so amended in the Committee that my objections might be removed, I would not divide the House in this stage. But I am so fully convinced that no alteration which would not seem insupportable to my honorable and learned friend, could render his measure supportable to me, that I must move, though with regret, that this bill be read a second time this day six months."
usually if someone really enjoyed the book, they want to support the author. This applies to the music industry as well, but to a grater extent for books. I don't think you have to worry about too much, provided your book is worth something.
Well that's a little harsh. First off, it IS imaginary property. It's not real. It can get treated as property, in that "it" can be sold for money. That's about it. You are quite correct that the issue is not just about "MP3-recordings" and is about all creative works.
I think the issue that many people take, quite correctly, is that the word steal is used. It can never be stealing, as the property never existed. Boy, I have got into some heated arguments about that, but I am absolutely right about it. The people that want to use the word steal are biased since once we can incorrectly use the world steal, we can assign the label of thief, and then create felonies for what is otherwise a civil dispute. Felonies, and the associated loss of freedom when convicted is about the only hope "those people" have at really stopping piracy.
What "imaginary property" really is, is a set of legal rights granted by the "state". The idea being that by protecting artists, engineers, authors, etc. that we create/foster/maintain an environment in which these people can thrive, make a living, and be as beneficial to society as possible.
So it is real property about as much as certain financial instruments, and other legal contracts are real property. What is "owned" is not something physical per se, it is merely a legal abstraction that you can sell the rights from one contract to another party.
Note, I don't disagree with the idea of copyrights. I think they can be beneficial to society, just not in the form they are now. I don't support infinite term copyrights which is what the Big Media is pressing for. At some point, all of the protected works must belong to us all. I think anything past 20 years is ludicrous, under any circumstances.
Where I think you are being unfairly harsh, is characterizing those that would argue that all information is free, and that copyrights are detrimental to society as shortsighted, and merely interested in "stealing MP3's".
Ultimately all information must be free, since it will be free one way or another. I think that is human nature. I personally, won't go as far as to say there should be no protections or rights granted to the people responsible for the creative works. They should get paid for their work.
OTOH, Disney should go fuck themselves. Why they still get tyrannical control over their derivative works (not even original ones) more than 70 years later is beyond me.
It's about a balance, and right now there is no balance, intelligence, or fairness in copyrights on either side.
You should consider (gently) replying to negative reviews on Amazon with your side of the story, and with a link to the errata. The errata really does make it look like the errors are benign and won't technically mislead the reader. Oh, and make your errata page more professional, moving GIFs are so 1999.
Knowing that a book is still "supported" by the author would really put me at ease that I'm not throwing away 50 dollars.
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.
Brief summary.. 1) I hate abuse of P2P. Some of us use it for efficient downloading. 2) I'm not a pirate 3) Normally, I'd read the back of the book and buy it if I wanted it. 4) Tell me why I should buy it. Here's your chance.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
Infringing the GPL means treating someone badly who is being very nice to you. Under the GPL I can engage in endless commercial activity (therefore the GPL is a commercial license), I can share the software verbatim or modified, and I can run the program all I want for any purpose. I can't legally make that software proprietary; I can't restrict my users from doing what I was allowed to do because I must pass all those freedoms on to them when I distribute (GPL2) or convey (GPL3) the software.
Infringing proprietary software licenses doesn't work the same way. The proprietor isn't treating me nicely: they're offering to restrict what I can do with the software in many ways. Some proprietors even restrict my ability to run the covered program at all. With proprietary software when someone asks me for a copy, the proprietor puts me in a position of having to choose between alienating someone who has probably done me no wrong and breaking an agreement with the proprietor. As RMS points out, this is a tough choice because we shouldn't (in general) break agreements we have made and we have no justification for treating others unkindly when they've done nothing wrong to us. So breaking the license and sharing with one's fellows is the lesser of two wrongs here.
Ultimately the answer, therefore, is to never put oneself in that situation. One does this either by having no friends or by avoiding non-free software. Using only free software may mean doing some tasks differently or not being able to do some tasks until the software improves but it won't mean treating people unkindly and unfairly, nor will it involve breaking agreements we make via copyright licenses.
Digital Citizen
Encourage the book pirates -- seed the torrents yourself and help reduce Global Warming. Then you can take tax credits on all those carbon offsets you earned!
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
You are in a niche market and a small contributor (on global scale - you are no Radiohead giving away an album). I am in the same boat. I give away stuff both online and in my brick n mortar business; Neither give-a-way types have helped me make money on the stuff I do charge money for. The system is stacked so the creator is besieged by people A) to lazy to create their own [stuff] and B) since they don't understand creating, they don't think it has value to pay for. I have had the experience of talking to people who truly do not think stores should mark up items from wholesale, they think that any amount you mark up the item from cost you are over charging them. Piracy is perpetrated by thieves or the ignorant and selfish.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
Feel free to offer alternatives, as that's what this entire story is all about. He is soliciting your suggestions on how he can earn a living by writing textbooks.
Your job, as an author, intellectual, and general member of society is to make people want to pay for what you have to offer. Don't expect the legal system to do this for you. That's not what the legal system is for. If you want to sell ideas, you'd better spend some time thinking up a way to get people to want to give you money for them. Copyright is going away because it was not originally intended for this purpose, and doesn't suit it well. Your business model is nobody's responsibility but your own. You come up with it. You make it work. There's no magic formula. If there were, basic economics says that it would be arbitraged away.
In short, this is a question that you need to answer for yourself. If someone else answers it for you, then they'll be the one making money.
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.
People will download things they wouldn't buy for previewing, casual reading, to save money, or for sampling (perhaps copying something out of the work to include elsewhere, like a fair use copy). I'm sure there are plenty of reasons for downloading something gratis without paying and I've only scratched the surface here.
Exposure alone doesn't necessarily "put food on the table" but no financial endeavor is guaranteed to result in making enough money to consistently have food (and it doesn't matter at all how much time or work one puts into any such endeavor). Sadly we all too quickly buy into the bad reasoning that results in people believing that just because one chooses to be an artist of any kind that their work is owed compensation on which they can live. If that's the society we want, one where people don't have to worry about starvation, homelessness, and other social plight, we can have that. Erecting and defending that social safety net from privatization or dismantling is perfectly worthwhile but it won't be done with copyright policy (after all, you'd offer the same safety net to all Americans, not just writers). We can afford such a thing, but it will mean radical transformation from what America spends its trillions doing instead.
Digital Citizen
His legal right to control the fate of his work is derived from the moral right. But I can "rip you a new one" on either basis, for they aren't really distinct...
Yes, and that's wrong, because we'd rather he worked for free, and fed himself and his family with free beets grown (for free) by somebody else — in the community. Money is the root of all evil...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The more I read through this discussion the more this seems like a scam and the less respect I have for this guy. He may be sincere but it looks like he's trying to generate phony hype in order to get a few more orders for an obsolete book.
I don't really think it was 'the public' that was the driving force behind copyright. I rather think that when copyright was first introduced it is more likely that anyone paying attention who didn't have a vested interest in books saw it as a dangerous thing. Unfortunately history shows that lobbying is often more powerful than good sense.. especially since most of the original restrictions put on by those who were wary of copyright have been taken away by more lobbying.
Now, many generations later, most people see it as some sort of necessity right instead of one huge cock-up. The lobby groups have the vast population fooled into thinking everything they do is 'fighting crime' because they have the law on their side and most people seem to have been brought up to put the law before themselves (or at least condemn others for not doing so).
All in all, the public has had about as much say in the whole shenanigans as a fraud victim. The sooner people stop thinking the law is smarter than them the sooner we can climb out of this hole.
I've got a bag of rice that's ten years old I'll happily give him for free if he agrees to shut up about this nonsense. Actually I think there's a fridge in San Jose with some ten-year-old food in it as well, I don't think he'd have to pay for that either.
I used to buy computing books about once a month. eventually I realized that apart from a few most were never read.
If I download a book, it gives me a chance to read it. If I really like it I will but it. Maybe as an author you are missing the buy for the hell of it sales, but the consumer is getting a fairer deal.
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Piracy has been around forever. Where there is any distributable media whether that is software, music, movies, what have you, there will be pirates. Grrr...
But that's not the problem...
Fundamentally, the Internet coupled with digital media has eliminated the need for the overhead costs incurred by conventional brick-and-mortar distribution models.
The way media is distributed directly effects the revenue model:
If I have to create a plastic case and a small metallic like circle and ship it across the country to stores in order to share poka classics that is going to cost more than just offering it as a digital download.
Newspapers are dying for this exact same reason, distributing just news is not enough to bring in readership that attracts advertising revenue (its all online).
I will reiterate: The Internet has changed the way distribution of media occurs thereby directly effecting the revenue models of all the major industries. Get with the program.
Mr Wayne should not be fighting piracy, he should be working with his publisher to discover new ways to get his books in distribution chains that make sense in this new economy.
In classical Slashdot fashion, "I for one welcome our new Kindle overlords."
As in the case of all negative externalities
Surely there's a better way to phrase that so as not to sound pompous...
reducing ignorance is a justified use of taxation
So are you suggesting that authors be compensated with taxpayer money to produce educational materials? What about companies whose only business is producing educational materials? I work for one of them. Are we to become taxpayer-funded all of a sudden?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Despite how much we like the tactile experience of holding an actual printed book, it's a medium that is starting to loose its relevance in most modernized cultures. If people have access to the internet, they'll often seek out the most convenient source of information they can find to resolve an immediate problem. Books, which are static and never changing, lack much of this ease of use and quickly go out of date.
What's needed, is a new way of handling such content which allows the user to pay for it, without it being an inconvenient hassle. This means no DRM in a way that prevents the content from being used in a manner common to the user's particular needs. It should be seamless, and inexpensive.
One possibility... allow the user to buy the content as they need it. Instead of selling them the entire "book", sell them the info they need by the paragraph, page or chapter for a fraction of the cost. But, at least allow them to browse the content first, to verify it has the info they need.
8==8 Bones 8==8
It's a fallacy to assume that the only way for authors to earn a living is to charge for copies of works they've already written.
I'll agree with you if you can provide a single example of a way for a textbook author to earn a living on his writing without selling his textbooks.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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.
Just a month ago, I made some pretty interesting analysis on how far things have reached the level "information should be free". Frankly, after what I saw, your case looks as a quantum event over the whole Universe. Yes, I understand your feelings, more, I understand that you feel pain to see your child running wild after so much of your life spent on it. But... You cannot change a tide that is more than just "Internet". In fact, the problem is not on Internet "per se", it is in a lot of things that have been running quite wrong for, at least, the last quarter of the century (maybe a little bit longer, imho).
The big problem is that information, today, costs zero, nada, null. Not in terms of traffic, pdf, ebook or that effort you made to create your book. It costs zero to the crazy "digital" society that you, I and everyone else is in. For the 99,99999999% of the people around us, it is not a big difference you wrote a book or not. More, for 99,99999% of those, who have some say on matters of management, administration or state politics, your book means nothing at all. Yes, you may think that these ones may rise their eyebrows, for the fact that someone violated your author's rights. However, before you consider your lawyer the author's best friend, please consider this question: apart of the monetary value of your book, can he consider any other values the book may have? Sincerly, I'm pretty sure that he will not make no difference between "compression" and "cooking". And that is exactly where the problem is and that is why your book finds a way out only in a pirate network.
Someone may counterargument that lawyers have not the duty to know what "compression" is. Yes, as 99,99999999% of "everyone" does not have such obligation. Who remains? A miserable fraction of weirdos who are really interested in such matter. Now, pick up the environment where these weirdos live in... And you immediately understand why piracy is the law of the day.
What Google is showing is not millions taking your book for free. It just a few hundred under the complete indifference of six billion people. That's the Truth out there.
Now, why a few hundred is doing it? Because things have gone too far and it is too late to stop it. Frankly, don't take this as an offense, but "compression" - it's not serious. Want rockets? WMDs? Fighting instructions? Weapons of all kinds and sorts?..
Do you want how to build the?.. Which one?..
And you don't need to stop just on the horror side of the story. If you are romantic enough, you can go for robots, nanos of all sorts, genetics, AI and the 100001 ways of programming. You can go also for many other things, from paleontology up to the prototypes of nuclear fusion reactors.
"Compression" is just a drop of water in the middle of the tide. Your book is nothing inside the tsunami.
Just to give you an idea of what I am talking about, I would remark that only one of these mega-libraries carries more than a hundred thousand books. And the "knowledge base" ranges mostly from 19th century up to our times. And I would not think that this large base carries a "expired" term. An AK-47 prototype is an AK-47 today (47 is the official year of its creation). And rocket mechanics work today the very same way they worked half a century ago.
Yes, programming goes a little bit out of this. But can anyone be sure that it "goes"? Maybe it "looks" more than really "goes".
Now this is the "industry". In some way it shall be justified - lots of books have long been out of print or were nearly lost, if such libraries didn't start to thrive, On other way, we have to consider a balance - books shall be bought, but are they easily affordable? And, in the end, we shall consider that there is an innerent danger under all this - a big chunk of this knowledge carries heavy consequences.
Now what one shall do with this? That's the billion dollar question. But, the thing I'm sure no one shall do is "hunt and prosecute". These "wars" have only made things much worser than befo
The business model of "write/record first, ask for money later" is fundamentally flawed no matter who tries to practice it.
yeah, people should totally just skip the "write books" thing, and just teach/tutor instead, since then they can get paid at the time they do it. Books are useless.
Also, from now on I'm going to fly my favorite musicians over to my house and pay them for a song or two whenever I want to listen to them.
...is to charge for writing works that don't already exist.
Of course, it's a little too late for this particular textbook. But next time, instead of doing all the work of writing a book and then looking for buyers, do it the other way around. Identify a group of customers who would benefit from the book's existence (teachers, students, businesses that want to hire the graduates, etc.) and get them to pay for it.
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I'll admit, I've downloaded some ebooks in my lifetime. Half of them I don't read, and the ones I find indispensable, I buy because I prefer a hard copy rather than an ebook (also, I don't have to tote something electronic to read them). Admittedly, sometimes I download a book to see if it worth purchasing. I doubt many people will print the ebook and carry it around with them. I don't think coworkers in the software industry would applaud your thriftiness, especially since so many are authors themselves.
So to prevent theft, I would make sure your book is jam-packed with as much relevant information as possible. Make it more reference-like; full of code snippets and tables of commonly used functions, and strategically place this information: eg in the appendixes [that way we don't have to go looking for them].
I think most people that will actually a buy book, but also sometimes download pirated ebooks, will reward you for your efforts if the book was worth it. Take it from me, I have.
"You have the right to not pay him but you don't have the write to not pay him copy his book and give it to others."
But he does have the right to take it and give it to others. Of course that is only after the content ownwer's right to be the sole distributor of the work expires.
His legal right to control the fate of his work is derived from the moral right.
Perhaps you think so. I, on the other hand, believe there is no such moral right, and his legal right is derived from the Constitution.
Yes, and that's wrong, because we'd rather he worked for free, and fed himself and his family with free beets grown (for free) by somebody else -- in the community. Money is the root of all evil...
Aww, what a cute little strawman!
I'm not asking him to work for free, and I don't see anyone else in this thread asking him to work for free either. If his labor as a technical writer is valuable, then people will be willing to pay him directly for it -- the same way billions of other people get paid directly for their labor, without needing any complicated royalty schemes, government-granted monopolies, or veto powers over other people's speech.
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yeah, people should totally just skip the "write books" thing, and just teach/tutor instead, since then they can get paid at the time they do it. Books are useless.
I'm sorry you feel that way. I think books are fine, even though the business model that most authors employ is built on an illusion that's been shattered by technological advances. I'd rather see a model where authors are paid to write, and then their works are free for everyone to read.
But if you'd rather pay someone to tutor you than contribute to the writing of a new textbook, who am I to stop you?
Also, from now on I'm going to fly my favorite musicians over to my house and pay them for a song or two whenever I want to listen to them.
Fair enough. Again, if you'd rather do that than pay directly for the production of new recorded music, I won't object.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
I'll agree with you if you can provide a single example of a way for a textbook author to earn a living on his writing without selling his textbooks.
Easy enough: textbook authors can earn a living by charging directly for their labor. Don't write another book until someone (or a group of someones) agrees to pay a fair price for the time you spend writing it. If everyone does this, then anyone who wants a new book will have no choice but to pay someone to write it.
Glad to know that we agree now!
BTW, you might be wondering who exactly is going to pay. Normally I'd say "the people who benefit from the service", which in the case of writing textbooks might be students, teachers, and/or businesses who want to hire educated graduates. But since we're talking about education, taxpayer funding is another viable option: We The People have already decided that education is something worth spending our tax dollars on, so paying for writer-hours in addition to teacher-hours isn't much of a change.
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Lol, love the caps. Are you upset because your way of thinking has been shown to be a failure in the age of digital media? Or maybe you thought you could be a rich and world famous textbook writer and had your sucky book pirated by people who thought you charged too much? In either case, you sound like a loser.
You might consider taking a look at magnatune.com. When users buy music at their site, they can pay within a range. The default cost of a digital download of a CD is $8. The lowest amount in the pulldown menu is $5. The highest amount is $18. They guarantee that the artist gets %50 of whatever you pay. They must be doing something right because they've managed to stay in business.
2. Sue people People get the Streisand effect working for you
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
Yes you should sue someone who's blatantly distributing unauthorized copies of your copyrighted work, at least if you can. I mean us OSS guys definitely would like to see people who violate the GPL prosecuted so that they either comply with the license, pay us to license it differently, or stop distributing it.
But while you can and should take action against copyright violators, that won't actually solve your core problem, which is how do you sell more copies of your work. To that problem, "pirates" don't do a whole lot to affect this underlying problem, although I believe they do worsen it somewhat. But after reading your blurb here on slashdot, I'm only mildly curious about your book, but not curious enough to drop $50 on it. I might see if my library has a copy. I'm certainly not interested enough right now to download it off of bittorrent to have a quick look.
So for me you'd have to sell the book for $1, or at most $10 with an online preview. But perhaps if I knew what the book could do for me, what kind of a quality reference it was that I must have, I'd cough up $50.
I recently paid over $30 a book for several O'Reilly books, on the other hand. I'll probably buy every release of Python in a Nutshell because it has a tremendous value to me. But I'm not likely to buy a Star Trek novel, even though I think there are some fantastic stories in that genre. I'll go to my library for that.
So I guess the trick is to find the people for whom your book has value and sell to them. It's a tricky thing, balancing good writing which takes ages, with marketing which is costly. Sometimes authors hit it by pure, dumb luck (Twilight, Harry Potter), when others who have just as engaging stories to tell, go absolutely nowhere. Is Twilight horrible writing? Absolutely. Is it well-marketed? Yes it is. Harry Potter is much better writing and it's well-marketed as well. On the other hand I've read fantasy novels from some local authors that I thought were as good as Harry Potter, but no one seems to know of them (and even I can't remember the authors!).
What's the difference between someone downloading your book for free and not reading it, and someone cracking it open in a bookstore and deciding not to buy it?
You're fooling yourself if you think that everyone who downloads a copy even looks at it. In reality, many if not most of the downloads never get read. Of those, few go beyond evaluating a few pages and deciding not to keep it. Of those, most will simply keyword search for a particular idea and get their fill just as thy might sitting in a bookstore or library. So how much money are you losing when people copy something and then don't read it?
Others have already noted 1) It's a textbook so sod off 2) it's 10 years old so sod off 3) you expect to be paid for something you did 10 years ago so sod off 4) you think it's good enough to command $51 without being able to evaluate its utility so sod off.
Also, according to Amazon you made a Kindle version that's $10 cheaper. In 1999. Before the actual book was out (July 31 vs. August for the print copy). So the content is worth $41, and the paper/ink $10? Do you really think other people value your book at $41, or are most of them buying it because they have to?
Finally, there are piles of places to learn about compression directly from the source code, so I would expect anyone serious enough to pay $50 to actually go download open-source tools and study those a bit instead. Data compression is one of those topics all over the intertubes and covered at length.
O wait there's more, from the back cover (according to Amazon):
How's that working out for you?
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.
But then you'll get all the All Government Is Evil people saying they don't want state control over their textbooks, etc. etc. ;)
I am being facetious, obviously. I guess the only question is how to foster competition between authors - perhaps they submit samples and contracts are awarded, kind of like how it works with engineering contracts?
Easy enough: textbook authors can earn a living by charging directly for their labor. Don't write another book until someone (or a group of someones) agrees to pay a fair price for the time you spend writing it. If everyone does this, then anyone who wants a new book will have no choice but to pay someone to write it.
That's almost exactly what we have now. The only difference is that you're suggesting that authors get paid before they write the books instead of after. They're still charging for their books. Even so, many authors get money up front from the publisher as an advance, and then they get residuals on sales. The only thing you're suggesting is that the advance is more and they elminate residuals. What about the money for the publisher? They aren't going to publish the books for free, are they getting tax handouts also? I'm all for using public funds to better education, but assuming that the only way for educational authors to get compensated is through public funds is not a workable system, there isn't enough money allocated towards education in this country to pay all authors and publishers for their work. Not to mention the idea that the government gets to say which books get funding and which don't. I still don't agree with you, you're just rearranging the deck chairs.
As for the assumption that private individuals will pay authors to write a book.. well, that's precisely the problem that we're dealing with now, isn't it? It's apparent that private individuals are unwilling to pay authors for their work.
And your "solution" doesn't even apply to non-educational authors, entertainment, history, etc, who are also affected by book piracy. Even though Dan Brown or the lady who writes Harry Potter might sell millions of copies, no one is going to get a fund together to pay them to write a new entertainment book. No one is going to pay an author to write a biography on a historical figure. No one is going to pay a scientist to write a book explaining his new theory, say about evolution, or the laws governing heavenly bodies, or a new system of math. No one is going to pay Donald Knuth to write a book about algorithms. Where would this society be if all books were works-for-hire?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ-jv8g1YVI
There ya go!
It is just that any question related to coding/algorithms/standards/methodology/etc.. has been pretty much asked and answered online.
Yup, you're right for many topics that used to be well served by the book publishers. But I still think that there are some that need more explanation.
But I've certainly seen less demand for the kind of books I once wrote about Java programming.
Sorry.
Attempt to influence regulation/attitude or adapt. Sink or swim.
Doing a quick torrent search reveals that your book is contained only in large batch torrents, so most of the pirates will never end up reading more than the title. In a collection of 1000 miscellaneous scientific textbooks, yours covers a very specific subject that most of the people downloading the torrent probably do not study.
Keeping this in mind, out of every 10,000 pirated copies of your book, how many do you suppose have actually been read? Assuming ~200 books in a torrent and a completely random distribution, that's only 2%, and that's a particularly optimistic estimate considering the specificity of the subject matter and other factors.
If you make 10% of each $50 hardcover sale, that's about $1000 that you're missing out on. That sucks, but it's hardly anything that you should sweat over, nor does it break the bank.
The best thing you can probably do is release a new edition of the book. Your primary loss of revenue is from competition with other authors who have been releasing books for the last 10 years.
But if people truly thought your book was a quality product, they would buy it or donate to you to compensate after obtaining it for free online. There ARE honest people out there.
Is this a mild version of telling a rape victim that don't worry, there are a few decent people out there?
I'm late arriving to this flogging, but just in case you're still reading and nobody else has mentioned it: perform your work. If you are the expert, there are people who will pay to hear you in person. It won't make you rich, but it's not unlikely that you can get a 250-750 dollars a head for a day seminar. Multiply that by 30-50 for a small room / mid-market and you can take your expertise directly to your market. Since you've already published the book, you can include it with the seminar (inflating the cost to cover a tidy profit per book), or offer it for sale. A friend does this for his niche and nets about $2-4k for a day (well, a night and a day - probably 16 hours). This is a small market, where he likely gets only 15-20 tops and the hourly billing rates for professionals hover in the $80-120/hr mark.
Yes, it's frustrating. No, there's not much you can do about it. It sounds like you have a publisher, so asking for an unencumbered release in PDF format for a significant discount (my breakpoint is about $15-20, but I'm a cheapskate) with an ad for your seminar registration website probably isn't an option. While I can empathize with your frustration, when this has happened to me in the past my response has been to modify my distribution to reduce the damage. It's not perfect, but I get paid my fair share.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If the book isn't good enough to sell, it probably isn't good enough to "steal". But there does seem to be a fair amount of pirating of this book going on. So while piracy may not be the culprit, I don't think quality accounts for the drop in sales.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
That's almost exactly what we have now. The only difference is that you're suggesting that authors get paid before they write the books instead of after. They're still charging for their books.
No, they're charging for the act of writing. Instead of taking a cut of each book's cover price, they take a fixed amount up front, because writing a book only involves a fixed amount of work no matter how many copies you make.
Even so, many authors get money up front from the publisher as an advance, and then they get residuals on sales. The only thing you're suggesting is that the advance is more and they elminate residuals.
Not quite: you're assuming that the money comes from a publisher. I'm not.
The act of writing can be funded by anyone who benefits from the existence of the new book. That could include publishers, who benefit from having one more product to sell... but it could also include the teachers who benefit from having a book to teach from, the students who benefit from having a book to learn from, the businesses who benefit from having a book to educate their future workers, the taxpayers who benefit from having a more educated population, etc.
What about the money for the publisher? They aren't going to publish the books for free, are they getting tax handouts also?
Publishers will get money from selling copies, the same way they do today. But the price of those copies won't need to include a royalty for the author, because the author will have already been paid.
On the other hand, if readers decide that they like e-books better than hard copies, the publishers might go out of business. Not much of a loss if there's no demand for publishing, though. The authors will still earn a living, because e-books still need someone to write them.
As for the assumption that private individuals will pay authors to write a book.. well, that's precisely the problem that we're dealing with now, isn't it? It's apparent that private individuals are unwilling to pay authors for their work.
No, you're overlooking the difference between a book that exists and a book that does not exist.
Private individuals are apparently unwilling to pay authors for works that have already been written. There's little incentive to pay $50 for a copy when I can get a copy for $0 instead, right? The author/publisher can't stop other people from offering me copies, so that business model is on shaky ground.
But if the book I want hasn't been written yet, I don't have the option of getting a free copy illegally. I'll need to get someone to write it for me, which only an author can do. He's going to ask for something in return, and if I don't pay him, I'm not going to get that book.
(Of course in reality, it wouldn't be just me paying the author, but rather a group of people pooling their money.)
And your "solution" doesn't even apply to non-educational authors, entertainment, history, etc, who are also affected by book piracy. Even though Dan Brown or the lady who writes Harry Potter might sell millions of copies, no one is going to get a fund together to pay them to write a new entertainment book. No one is going to pay an author to write a biography on a historical figure. No one is going to pay a scientist to write a book explaining his new theory, say about evolution, or the laws governing heavenly bodies, or a new system of math. No one is going to pay Donald Knuth to write a book about algorithms.
I disagree. People obviously value the literary efforts of Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling, biographers, scientists, Don Knuth, and other authors. Why wouldn't those same people be willing to contribute to their future works?
I know if my favorite author (or musician, or filmmaker, etc.) came to me and said "I need a few bucks or my next work is never going to be made", I wouldn't hesitate. And I'm hardly the most loyal fan in the world, so I have no doubt that they'd be able to raise enough money to fund production.
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you knew the internet existed, and that the easiest thing to transmit over it is text, and you expect to get paid for each hard copy of a book?
I understand that it would have been nice to be able to write something and then get paid for doing nothing while it sells, but those times are over. information is everywhere. Either come up with a new business model (probably something that involves getting paid for doing work, and then when you're not working, you don't get paid) or get another job.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
I'd like to quote from another textbook author, Ross Anderson who wrote Security Engineering, now in its second edition.
So we see that an enticement model can work. You can use your past works to garner credibility, encouraging purchases of your new works. Making previous copies of your work freely available also floods the market. Remember that pirate distributors are lazy people too. They won't bother with scanning in the second edition, if the first one is so easy to obtain. Though I tried to pirate the second edition of Security Engineering, I was only able to find the first edition, and was forced to wait for the second edition on interlibrary loan. My perusal of the freely available first edition gave me good reason to believe that the additional work in the second edition was going to be of similar utility.
His legal right to control the fate of his work is derived from the moral right. But I can "rip you a new one" on either basis, for they aren't really distinct...
No, it is not. The concept of copyright and patents were intended to increase the number of quality public domain works by giving people an incentive to create and publish. So the public gives up their moral rights rights to copy and distribute however they wish for a limited time in the expectation that the increased profit artists and inventors get within that time will result in more for us later on.
There's no such thing as a "moral right" to control the copying and distribution of texts or songs you write. After all, I "copy" and "distribute" songs every day when I'm whistling. I "copy" texts anytime I discuss the plot of a book with someone. By reading or listening, those things become part of me, they are no longer yours.
There is only physical property. The entire concept of "intellectual property" is flawed, and protection of this so-called right was not the intention of copyright (at least not in the US).
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Perception is reality, those reading the comments - accurate or not - are going to take them into account. Does your book link to your errata page somehow? You could probably have happier "users" if the cost of the book wasn't so high. That is honestly the most likely reason so many are pirating it. If it's indeed out of print as you stated elsewhere that could also be an issue...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I decided to google "wayner data compression textbook" on google and I found some interesting results.
First, what you're talking about is no more. I could not find any links to pirated books in the top 5.
Second and most interesting is what I did find:
#1 Some (unreadable due to javascript/flash colliding with noscript) "Hot news" about your book, but no link to it.
#2 and #3 Blogs or similar about what we're talking about (not currently displayed or displaying some video I didn't care about)
#4 An amazon entry for "Introduction to Data Compression" by Khalid Sayood
#5 Kevin Wayne's Princeton homepage
#6 This slashdot article
Nowhere to be found is an entry of your book, your homepage or anything related with you (except for #2 or #3, that was not useful at all).
How come no amazon entry for your book showed up? Or even a homepage? You've beaten to first place by lots of people talking about this, when it could have been your chance to take first place. Yet the book is not in the top 5 of the list. Then comes mininova, followed by TPB.
Even more interesting is that I accidentally searched for "wayner data compression book" and found lots of amazon entries....for a book by Mark Nelson. To be fair, there was a link to "Data compression algorithms for real programmers", authored by you (or so it seems).
I checked the entry on TPB. It is for a torrent that has hundreds of science books. Your "data compression for real programers" is just one of many, and the only one by you. It seems like somebody got it into a collection of books.
Basically "data compression textbook" (if that's the title of your book) is nowhere to be found. If the book you're talking about is "Data compression algorithms for real programmers", then if you search for that, you'll find the amazon entry at the top. But if that's the case, then it's not known as the data compression book. To get a nickname like that, the book will probably have to be really famous (as in "Dragon Book" famous). If it's not DCAFRP you're talking about, then it's not known at all, so don't expect it to appear on any searches. It is not being torrented, either. You get hits on TPB because google finds DCAFRP and another books that have the word "textbook" in the title.
Anyway, most of the people downloading the torrent are probably looking for some other book than yours, but they get the torrent for the whole collection. One download = one lost sale definitely DOES NOT apply here. On a more personal note, I tend to view these collections like public libraries. I think people seed these torrents because the contents are too valuable to lose. Most just get a reference or two from a few books at most. Please don't have them taken down.
And about the poor students, you might want them to buy the books, but if it's between buying a textbook and food and rent money, the choice is obvious. Maybe if your book is good enough, in five years a future engineer or programmer is going to buy it. Don't count on that if the book is crap, though.
GPG 0x1B479C78
If you know enough about computer science to write a book on compression algorithms, then you already know that piracy can't really be stopped. If you want to sell a book online, there is going to be a small segment of people who are going to pirate it and no amount of DRM will really stop that. There is really no question here, the cost of doing business selling digital media is that some pirated copies are going to inevitably get passed around. You are not losing money, as the people who pirate your book weren't very likely to buy it in the first place.
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
But are you sure the free copies are hurting sales?
That seems to be the more important issue.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I know you said O'Reilly isn't your publisher, but they are mine. (They're great to work with, BTW. Hi Mike... :)
I have a Google Alert for my name, the books name and ISBN. When I get an alert I check it out, if it looks shady I send email to O'Reilly's infringement folks and they go after it.
Done. If Google doesn't know about it or I don't get an alert I just can't be bothered. That's my balance between due diligence in protecting the work that we put in to our book and protecting my own time and sanity.
-JP
co-author, _bash Cookbook_
Magic spell. You'll never be able to sue every last pirate and recover any tangible revenue, likely not enough to pay your lawyers, and you won't have made a dent in piracy. It's never been shown to work.
The good news is pirates never intended to pay for anything anyway, and usually just pirate crap because they can, it's there and it's easy, it'll likely sit in a downloads folder, never be read, and eventually be deleted. So you haven't really lost real world sales, at least 90% of the time.
If you feel you need to send out takedown notices, do so, but you have to accept it's going to do very little.
If I may suggest, give away your content for free on the web.
Watch revenue roll in and piracy dry up.
Ok I skipped a step in the middle there: Put the content of your book online as a interactive reference site (where it can be expanded and include interactive content and down loadable things) and slap some advertising and sponsored links on it to pay the bills. Oh and a link to the book version on Amazon.
People will always buy books, there are always scenarios where it's indispensable to have a physical book, and these people will always be paying customers.
The free online content will appease those who won't pay. Basically this business model is pretty much the only way you'll ever get any revenue from freeloaders outside the courtroom. Oh and you'll sell a load of books too.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I'll stop seeding!
Actually, I don't know almost anybody who views a book author as the "bad guy". I think students, more and more, have a negative attitude about textbook prices - but usually, the school bookstore is the "bad guy" there. (Alternately, students dislike professors who seem to publish new editions of their OWN texts on a regular basis, just so they can turn around and rip you off buying the "seventh edition" or whatever, with very minor changes, for the new semester's course. I'd use "book author" VERY loosely with most of those people.)
That said? Practically ANY type of IP that can be converted to a digital format is subject to mass duplication. Books used to escape a lot of the fate of other forms of media, simply because it was time consuming trying to scan in all the pages of a book so they were clear/readable, and stored in a digital format useful to the average potential recipient. With the advent of PDF as a document standard, better scanner technology, and broadband Internet - digitizing entire texts becomes much more viable.
I've always maintained that in the "digital age", anyone creating "intellectual property" needs to be comfortable with the idea that their material WILL be redistributed to people who didn't pay them for it first. I don't think it's really reasonable for anyone creating intangible works to expect they can make 1 or 2 works, and sit back forever, profiting handsomely from them. The key is to KEEP creating FRESH content, repeatedly. If your material has "value" to people, a certain percentage will always pay for it.
The FIRST person who wants it is going to HAVE to buy it, obviously ... and so is anyone else who WANTS to "pirate" it but can't locate a pirated copy yet. That's before you factor in all the people who pay willingly, because they want to reward you for your hard work. The rest of them? Well, you're best served by ignoring the lot of them. Some may eventually work in your favor, as "advertising/marketing". Even if you can't see direct evidence of them boosting your sales - maybe they're boosting your credibility as an author in your field? Maybe people who pirated your earlier books are now far more likely to purchase something new that comes out with your name on it?
As for search engine results? I don't know... I think that's always been "hit or miss". There's so much money to be made by trying to "game" them, people are always going to excessive lengths to force their page to the top of the search results - even when the content of their page hardly justifies it. Plus, it's just such a massive undertaking and is mostly just automated -- I don't *expect* search providers to be that "responsible" for the quality of the results. If they're consistently poor, people use a competing search engine and they're forced to improve or die out. That's about all there is to it.....
I hold the creator's right to control his creation to be self-evident. Pure and simple. To deny this right you need pages of arguments, which are very easy to prove wrong.
Your disdain for his lowly "wanting to get paid", as opposite to the noble "moral right" was obvious. Hence the (strong) suspicion, you hold money-making in disfavor.
That his work is valuable is already established — people are paying both him and the pirates for his work. But the pirates steal from him — every copy bought from the pirates is not bought from him. I fail to see, how anyone can justify this. And you've spent three postings already without trying.
The billions are still working on things, which are hard to replicate. Those few, who work on things, where the hardest part is design rather than replication, deserve no lesser protections from the society/government against people, who would take the fruits of their labor without compensation?
Oh, please, spare the "Freedom of Speech" strawman... I wrote the book, I own it. I can sell copies myself, or I can sell the rights to someone else, or I can rent them. It is not at all unlike tangible property, hence the wide-spread use of the "theft" metaphor, which your ilk hate because it is so apt.
And, as pointed out already elsewhere, the entire concept of property is "imaginary" and upheld by government. If I have a "government-granted monopoly" on the use of my backyard, my car, toothbrush, and computer, why can't I also enjoy the "monopoly" on the program I wrote?
Of course, I ought to be able to — and I can in all of the civilized world. To claim otherwise without also rejecting the entire concept of private property is to be inconsistent — even if you manage to hide behind the smoke screen of the "I rob the evil MafiAA, not the artists" smokescreen. And inconsistency is why you are wrong.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I admit it; I've pirated stuff before. However, I also pay for things too.
For me, piracy is about three things. Either:-
a) What I'm pirating is sufficiently rare and/or old now that I can't find it in stores. This is also a hint that if you were selling it, I'd be willing to pay for it, because old stuff isn't always easy to find, even online. The Terminator novels would be a good example of this.
b) Evaluation. Sometimes I'll come across a particular musical artist who I haven't heard before. If I'm sufficiently curious, I'll download an mp3 or two, and see what they're like.
c) I'm grazing/browsing in a transitory sense and I don't really care about the stuff I'm downloading. In that instance, a downloaded mp3 can be considered the equivalent of a radio track; it's transitory. If you're worried about losing money from me doing that, then put current mp3s on a site with ads, and I will quite happily watch a few second ad in order to download a file. I don't like greed, but bills need paying and I understand that.
Unlike apparently a lot of FOSS users, I'm not a Communist, although payment for me represents an acknowledgement of genuine merit. I don't have a lot of money, so if you get some from me, it means two things:-
a) I'm happy with your pricing model. Because, as I said, I don't have much money, this is important. I'm not going to pay for something I can't afford, no matter how good it is. Make it affordable, and you'll get a sale from me and others like me, and make more money in the end on volume.
b) Your product has genuinely impressed and/or otherwise made a positive impact with me. I downloaded a cam of The Dark Knight when it initially came out, but then went and saw the movie twice in a cinema, and now also own a copy of the DVD. The cam has also now been deleted. So did Warner Bros lose money from me downloading that cam? I think not.
It is sufficiently rare now that Hollywood brings out truly good movies, that when they do, I make very sure to go and see them in the cinema, (also partly simply because I still genuinely enjoy that experience more than sitting at home) and if they're really good (although this is very rare for me) I will then buy a DVD as well.
Other examples of products I've bought that I could have pirated include The Sims 2, and every game in the Unreal series up to and including UT2k4, as well as multiple copies of the original UT, due to some of them having been lost. Epic are very intelligent and creative people, who have brought me nearly a decade of pleasure from their games now, and they deserve to get paid for that.
Music I haven't bought, but would, includes anything by Guns'n'Roses, probably anything by Nine Inch Nails after I'd heard it, and anything by Shpongle, 1200 Micrograms, or Infected Mushroom as well.
Make good stuff, and you will be paid.
What can you do about pirates?
My understanding is that the best way is that you lock yourself and your crew in the cabin, disable the ship, and give SOS signal. Hopefully the Navy is on its way.
In another words - we cannot really stop the sea pirates - forget about stopping the Internet ones.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
I don't mean to troll, but don't we have actual pirates now?
There's no need to call copyright infringers pirates, and it confuses the two crimes which are worlds apart.
Question everything
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.
E-book piracy may not be helping your sales, but is it actually hurting your sales? Aside from the obvious argument that it is your work and you should be compensated for it. What I mean is, would the people who are pirating the e-book actually purchase a hard copy if there was no e-book to pirate?
Same goes for other authors. If the book was not available electronically would the pirates actually bother buying a hard copy?
Who modded this Troll? It was written by the person who submitted the article and pertains specifically to the topic. The author is a long time member of Slashdot with a paid membership. One can argue that the article itself is a troll but this comment certainly belongs in the discussion.
Dear Peter,
I suggest you publish your future books using a complicated, hacker-proof DRM system. One example would be using Microsoft's robust, cross-platform Silverlight content delivery system, possibly combined with military-grade RSA-56 encryption technology to thwart even the most determined hackers. This will ensure easy access to your textbooks, little or no complaints, effectively kill the secondhand market, and eliminate all pirated copies all in one blow. With this system, you should be able to easily charge hundreds of dollars per copy, and without pirates killing your sales I'm sure your future books will easily break 1M copies.
It can be a little intimidating to set up an effective DRM delivery system, as well as the key authentication servers properly, so if you're looking to do it yourself on the cheap I'd suggest you actually post another "Ask Slashdot" to look for experts in the field to help you for free. I'm sure you can tell by the helpful responses in this thread that many IT Experts, software developers, and fellow authors sympathize with your situation and would like to help you eliminate those brutish pirates. Best of luck!
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
"People who read technical books greatly add the technical abilities of our society. That's something a society should encourage. As copying becomes easier and easier to do my suggestion would be that the world government compensate authors according to some valuation based on readership and technical evaluation of merit. Information should, by and large, be free."
why can't people just pay for the fucking book if they want to read it?
and who do you think would pay to compensate these authors? I will make it easy for you: your taxes.
"Personally I get angry when someone complains that their intangible item is taken. I've been a vendor. I've paid for equipment and have been stiffed, have items physically stolen, that in some cases had to end up paying tax on. I WISH I had a product where having stuff stolen from me does not directly risk my ability to do business. I'm sure my situation does not compare, but I think this question falls under the reality check topic."
At least if a physical object is stolen, you can just buy another physical item. When software is pirated, it could potentially ruin the entire business. This is because the spread of the "Free version" influences people to download it for free instead of buying it. This can clearly be seen by just putting this guys book into google. Potential buyers will see the free version first.
Looking at the ipod/iphone application gold rush, I think the future is cheap and easy.
Easy to get in a moment (a click in the app store).
So inexpensive that people won't even think of wasting their precious time checking Pirate Bay.
Money will be made by small motivated teams/individuals pulling 70% of the sales revenues, volume and no reproduction costs...
If you need to create something low volume with high work inputs, good luck. You will have to count on the user base being to small and dispersed that they are forced to pay your high price and not file share.I would look to switching to something higher in volume.
Get a faculty position somewhere. Then, it doesn't matter whether anyone buys your books. Your income will be (partially) based on how many citations and how useful your book is. It's not perfect (because there are many other factors, and many stupid people). But... if you really do want to write a useful trade book (as opposed to fiction, or junk), have it used, and make a living, it's a good field. And, if you're just a jerk and not just worried about putting food on the table, you can force your students to buy your books!
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.
When I discover a good book that is useful to me I always seek a way to reward the author, usually but buying the paper version. Kinda "magic spell" that is.
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_
I hold the creator's right to control his creation to be self-evident. Pure and simple. To deny this right you need pages of arguments, which are very easy to prove wrong.
I hold that supposed right to be bunk. Phony. A fantasy made up by weak, arrogant people in order to claim power over others.
And while I'm at it, I'll assert that you "need pages of arguments, which are very easy to prove wrong" in order to support this supposed right. (Come on, what does that even mean? Do you really think you can prove a point just by pretending you can win an argument that hasn't happened?)
Your disdain for his lowly "wanting to get paid", as opposite to the noble "moral right" was obvious. Hence the (strong) suspicion, you hold money-making in disfavor.
Oh, I see. You imagined a subtext in my comment that wasn't there.
Well, now you know better, right? When I wrote "he's just trying to get paid" I was responding to your claim that the concern here was morality rather than business -- a claim that isn't backed up by the original submission.
In fact, I think making money is great. I'm very interested in new models that authors and artists can use to make money without restricting anyone else's speech.
But the pirates steal from him â" every copy bought from the pirates is not bought from him.
There are a dozen movies at the theater right now that I haven't seen and don't plan to see. Am I "stealing" from the theater by declining to give them my money? Certainly not. What if I wait for them to come out on DVD or TV? Still no.
No one is obligated to buy a product from you just because you're offering it for sale. They're free to get it from someone else, or not get it at all. It's not "stealing" unless you actually become poorer as a result.
I fail to see, how anyone can justify this. And you've spent three postings already without trying.
I hold the justification to be self-evident. Pure and simple. To deny this justification you need pages of arguments, which are very easy to prove wrong... ;)
Seriously, though, it is simple: it's justified because it's a voluntary transaction between the pirate and the consumer. Consumer sees that pirate is offering to send a file; consumer requests file; pirate sends file; transaction is complete. No one is harmed, so it's justified by default.
(One might argue that the author is harmed by being excluded, but one would be wrong. The author is in the same position after this transaction as he would be if the consumer decided not to get the book at all: he loses nothing, even though the consumer gains something. I hope we can agree that I'm not "harming" the author of every book I choose not to read!)
The billions are still working on things, which are hard to replicate.
No, not all of them. There's more to the world than manufacturing.
Many of them perform services: barber, doctor, accountant, mechanic, house painter, bus driver, CEO, and so on. They don't make something, they do something. And they manage to get paid for their labor without any special monopoly powers: they simply don't do any work unless someone has agreed to pay them for it.
I contend that what authors and artists do is closer to service than manufacturing. Writing isn't "making", it's "doing". Writers can get paid for writing rather than selling books, just like an accountant gets paid for filling out tax forms rather than copying them.
Oh, please, spare the "Freedom of Speech" strawman...
You seem to misunderstand the meaning of "strawman". Freedom of speech is valuable, and copyright is quite simply a restriction on speech: it limits the facts that I'm allowed to share, the sequences of words I'm allowed to say. Whether those words originally came out of someone else's mouth is irrelevant
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Take a look around web cartoon community, for example. Some of these guys (notably sluggy.com) have what looks like efficient models where people can pay some small money per month/year/whatever for access to privileged areas of their sites. People will get to know you through downloaded works (like me - I've never saw your book except in PDF form) and in "defender" (sluggy term) area they can get access to things like your work in progress, articles you write on random or not so random themes, discuss things with you in your forums.... And whatever you have people can find worthy and you choose to be semi-public.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
I disagree. People obviously value the literary efforts of Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling, biographers, scientists, Don Knuth, and other authors. Why wouldn't those same people be willing to contribute to their future works?
Why would they? There's not a single piece of evidence to suggest they would. Throughout history, only the rich have commissioned artists and writers to create works. No scientific or non-biographical historic book has ever been written because any group of people got together to pay the author to write it. Authors, publishers, editors, printers, etc all create books because of the expectation of sales, it's the only reason a book gets created unless the author just really has something they want to say.
You hear that, Peter Wayner? Mr2001 has come up with the solution to your problem. You should stop working with publishers and instead lobby teachers and the government for work-for-hire jobs. There you have it, good luck.
But if the book I want hasn't been written yet, I don't have the option of getting a free copy illegally. I'll find something else to use instead
People don't pay to have cultural works created. They just don't. They never have. If that's what becomes required, I don't think it looks good for the future of culture.
I know if my favorite author (or musician, or filmmaker, etc.) came to me and said "I need a few bucks or my next work is never going to be made", I wouldn't hesitate.
Right... sort of like.. I don't know, maybe giving them a few bucks for their *current* work, to allow them to create the next one. Sort of makes the whole distributed payment thing easier. But people don't seem to be very willing to do this.. surely they'll be fine with pre-paying for it though, because that's entirely different.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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.
Knowledge should be derived from input such as measurements or observations,
never synthesized, or it's called fiction.
I would go for option 3. That would be mightily cool.
Good luck!
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
1) Movie Actors
2) Singers
3) Song Writers
4) Landlords
5) Many types of Investors
6) Lottery Winners
Take your book. Introduce couple dozen subtle but significant, erm, corrections. Upload the PDF to pirate sites. For bonus points, create several different versions, one with its own set of errors.
I have no idea how well it will work, but hey, what are you going to lose?
Don't worry, you're welcome to copy my car.
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.
join them!!
Eclipse PDE and Me
Personally I'd take a few approaches in paralell
1: send C&D letters/takedown notices to any pirate sites that come up higher than the sites selling the book in the search results.
2: If at all possible (e.g. publisher contracts permit) make sure you offer an official ebook that is at least as good as and prefferablly better than what the pirates are offering (that means drm free and a good selection of formats).
3: search for reviews of your book and try and encourage them to link to a place it can actaully be purchased and/or post such a link in thier comments.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Why would they? There's not a single piece of evidence to suggest they would. Throughout history, only the rich have commissioned artists and writers to create works. [...] People don't pay to have cultural works created. They just don't. They never have.
Government endowments for the arts. Public radio and television. Netroots-funded political campaign ads. Sellaband.
Right... sort of like.. I don't know, maybe giving them a few bucks for their *current* work, to allow them to create the next one.
What makes you so sure there's going to be a next one? If their current work ends up being their last work, do I get a refund? How do I know I'm not just wasting money on a copy that I could've gotten elsewhere for free?
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
If you're feeling generous, put your PDF files up on a bittorrent site.
In fact our university's library (Switzerland here) pays a tax to cover the right to copy for its users.
As long as the torrent is restricted to the other student of the university, this is perfectly legal (and is very often done).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
> The original author should be able to claim copyright over his/her material for as long as he/she wishes!
For as long as he/she wishes??? No!
The point of copyright is not to provide a steady salary for the life of the author!
The intent is to protect the initial investment of artists so their creation is not stolen before they have a chance to make some money from it.
From Article I, Section 8 of the constitution:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
If I were going to buy a ten year old technical book, I'd buy it used. You wouldn't make any royalties off of me because of or in spite of ebook piracy.
"What Can I Do About Book Pirates?"
Cheer for Peter Pan.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
And I love how people on slashdot think that they are above national and international law and how they think that they can tell people what they can and can do with their work.
I have not written any text book. I have written software and I have placed it in the Public Domain with source code because the GPL wasn't written yet and I have contributed patches to the Linux Kernel under the GPL.
It is my right to choose to do that. It is the text book authors right to choose how his work is used as well. Looser you and the rest of the freaking leaches just make me nuts. You think that because you can do something that it makes it Moral. Heck I could take sections of GPL code and put it into a closed source product and sell it. I would probably never get caught but it would still be immoral. And just as you leeches like to put it I wouldn't be taking anything from the author at all since it is all digital. Nothing but his rights to control how his work is used that is.
The FOSS isn't about piracy and really isn't ok with it it. Everybody that pirates hurts the FOSS movement because they are still using closed source software.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
>> ...if the media companies offered refunds for junk titles...
"Junk" is a matter of opinion. You don't get your money back just because you don't like something.
Claiming that you steal something and only pay for it if you like it is equivalent to eating dinner in a restaurant and only paying if you like the food.
This guy owns his book and no one else has any right to copy, publish or distribute it unless he sells or gives them that right. You have to dance in a land of mystical mumbo-jumbo to imagine you somehow have a right to something made by someone else when he hasn't said so. No one other than its author has any rights to a created work until and unless he transfers those rights. All the rest is fairy dust and comforting rationalization.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Have you just tried asking Google to delist them?
"Removing information from Google: Reporting copyright infringement" http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=58
Your exact concern appears to be directly addressed in this way.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
Well, this is the root of the disagreement. You attempt to support your making a distinction between tangible and "imaginary" property by saying:
But that's not a justification at all for you can't drive my car, even if I'm not using it at the moment — unless I allow you to. You grant me, the owner, the control and decision-making over my back yard, but reject it over the book I wrote. Because:
You can. But if I am allowed to deny strangers the use of my car, even if I am not currently using it, I ought to be able to exercise the same control over easily replicable things I own.
Also, your attempt at making a distinction presumes, that the only use of a book is reading it. But that's not true — the author needs not read it, in fact. He often wants to sell it. And his attempts at selling it are hampered by the pirates attempts at same. And yes, they can both be selling it — just like we can share a ride in my car. But it is still my car, and I get to decide, whether I want to share it and what I want to charge you (if anything).
Face it. Unless you are willing to dispense with the notion of property altogether, your attempts to do so selectively will remain ridiculous. Bring this point up on the next party meeting. See, what senior comrades tell you about your blowing your cover too early... Just kidding...
I was not talking about people not buying his work. I was talking about people buying his work from pirates. Each such purchase is a theft from him. We don't even need to argue here, whether a free download is equivalent to a thing not bought (or a part thereof) — people are paying for his stuff. They just aren't paying him.
The exact same line of reasoning can justify resale of (tangible) stolen goods — an obviously immoral and illegal activity. Therefor, the line of reasoning is wrong and without merit.
All of those things are not (yet) easy to replicate — fixing a car or driving a bus is hard and one is paid for every time they do it. Replicating books is trivial — writing them is hard... But we are sliding back into people getting paid, which I don't need to prove my point about the creator's right to control his creation...
There are many things you can't "say" and reprinting somebody else's book is far from being the most sc
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"You have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you, for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you."
- Cornelius Vanderbilt
My publisher, Morgan-Kaufmann, has people who issue take-down notices to the illegal sites with my books. I keep a "Google Alert" on my name (an advantage of a rare name) so I can notify the company lawyers.
But I find that it is faster to ask the site why they are committing a crime in person or by email. Most will co-operate.
I then find the poster and contact his school. Note to criminal masterminds -- don't post on Facebook, et al or use a school account. So far, I have gotten two crooks kicked out of universities in New Zealand. I also caught an instructor using some of my SQL PUZZLES for class assignments when one of his students sent me a "do my homework for me!" email.
I contact his employer (http://siia.net/piracy) and ask that they fire him. Here in Austin, the Software & Information Industry Association runs radio ads. Once they have probable cause for a warrant, a full software audit is easy to get.
Finally, I keep the name on a list in case I run into him in the database world. Vanderbilt was right. If he wants to cheat me out of my only retirement (want to see my 0.401 account?), I am quite happy to return the favor.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What I would do if I would publish an ebook. 1. Is the make sure it is a lot cheaper than the paper version, let's face it you don't have to use paper or ink, no storage, no shipping, a lot less manpower. So the price of your ebook should reflect this. I know a lot of publishers don't do this or even make an ebook more expensive than the paper version. 2. Don't put limitations on your clients. No DRM, no exotic formats, ... The person who bought your book should be able to enjoy reading it ony any device he or she wants.
3. Make it personal. Every book or magazine (PDF-format) I buy from php|architect has my name, email address and client number on every page. I don't feel like sharing those, but I can read it on every device (windows or linux pc, iPod Touch, Mac) I want to. No DRM, no passwords, ...
Just my 2 euro cents.
According to FSM, as the world temperatures rise, the number of pirates go down.
So drive a Hummer.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
I bought your book for $0.50 on half.com, The shipping cost 100x more than your book, I think it is pirated though... we will see in about 2 weeks when I get it... By posting this article you got a buyer, just the profits don't go to you.
I think the real reason for lack of sales is someone can go into the bookstore and read your books there.
Oh and those pesky things called Libraries.
The problem with books is
(a) there are no digital copies you can buy
(b) they cost the same as a printed one
(c) they are all DRM'ed
If you provide a good ebook DRM free in html and pdf for say $1. A lot of people wouldn't bother to download a scanned digital one, but buy it from you. And if its a good book, you would earn a lot of money.
Ebooks should be a lot cheaper because you don't have to print, distribute, etc. But at the moment they cost the same.
If I could have digital copies in the form I like, it would buy a lot of them. But at the moment there are no alternatives.
"Nonsense. It takes lots of time to write a book, often years. If I made such an investment of my time, I would hope that it would generate some income for several years, rather than just get swiped off PirateBay by spotty-faced freeloaders."
A friend of mine has a master's degree in social anthropology or underwater basket weaving or something. She made an investment of several years of her time, and hopes that it will pay off by 'generating income for several years', too.
But she probably shouldn't hold her breath on it.
Seriously, what are we here, half-assed marxists? We're not seriously saying that an investment of X time should lead to Y income, are we?
Look, we can all agree that piracy leads to "some number" of lost sales. That number might be 100% of unauthorized copies off of BT. It might also be zero.
Somebody asking the question 'what can I do about book pirates' is starting from an unproven assumption that piracy is _actually a problem_ in the first place.
Maybe start by thinking "OK, if P2P filesharing didn't exist, how many of the people who downloaded the book would've bought the book?" Anybody who _wouldn't_ have bought the book, they're not your customers anyway, so who cares what they do?
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Speaking as someone who has four books published and a fifth hitting shelves in the next month or two (http://www.zammetti.com/) I certainly have an opinion on the matter. Before I give that opinion I'll state the one qualification to my comments, which is that writing books is not my primary source of income. I have a regular, full-time job, I write books on the side. It's nice supplemental income to be sure, but I couldn't live off of it, and if I lost the income it wouldn't hurt my family terribly (maybe a few less trips to Applebees is all!)
Anyway, I for one don't get all up in arms over piracy. My books are out there and easy for anyone to get, I've looked. I don't think there's much of anything I could do to stop it. I have to admit I even felt a certain amount of pride when I first saw them pirated because at least someone thought they were worth the time and effort to pirate in the first place :) I had the same feeling the first time I found out my Windows Mobile software was pirated too. Of course, that feeling goes away pretty quickly :)
I believe most people still like a good, physical book in their hands. I'm about as tech-savvy as anyone, and I read a lot of books in digital form, but I still greatly prefer a stack of bound paper in my hand, and I don't think I'm alone in that. So, I don't suspect piracy is really hurting anyone in a really significant way (I also suspect my publisher would beg to differ quite strenuously!).
What can you do about it? Probably not a whole lot, just as with software, music and movies. Probably the best you can do is produce the best product you can and make people WANT to buy it. At the end of the day, I believe most people are good and honest and are willing to pay reasonable amounts for good products.
So, make great movies that are best experienced on a huge screen with great sound and with a crowd. Make music that is actually good and not the boilerplate crap most groups churn out these days and cell the CDs for a lot less than they go for now. Write software that is truly useful and solid and then don't charge ridiculous amounts for it. Write books that are useful, entertaining and that look really good. That's how you curb piracy: make people want the real, original item and make them not feeling like you're asking for a kidney in return for the privilege!
A big theme here is price. Many entities simply charge too much for a given product. You know, I actually like Windows, and I would have been more than willing to buy Vista, whatever warts it may have, but when I saw a $200 price tag attached I said "nah, XP will continue to be just fine, thank you very much". Had Vista been, say, $59 or so , I'd have bought it in a heartbeat. When I see a book for $49.99, I hesitate a bit and make sure I really feel like I'm getting my money's worth. Often times I don't reach that conclusion and I'll look for a cheaper book. And let's not even get started on CDs, which are probably on average $10 more than they should ever be!
Granted, as an author there's only so much I can do... my publisher sets the price and they, by and large, are responsible for how the book ultimately looks. Fortunately, my publisher does a really good job on the later (and the former is I think debatable, although I find their prices to generally be reasonable). I do what I can to make the material as engaging and useful as I can, but that's about as far as I can take it. I think however that's the best solution available to us anyway.
And at the end of the day, don't go nuts about piracy. Like I said, I'm not trying to make a living as an author, and maybe my opinion would differ a bit if I was, but intellectually I hope not because the facts would really change, just my stake in them... I think the sales you lose are likely sales you weren't going to have in the first place and the majority of people will buy legitimately. That's my hunch anyway. In the end, people have been trying to beat piracy for
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
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
I love when people start tossing around terms like "deserve". Who or what exactly will be the arbitrator of who deserves what?
If we're gonna say that Gatsby "deserves" to make the author a pile of cash because it's such a great book, then will we be confiscating the author's royalties earned by "The DaVinci Code"?
The "least bad" option seems to be more of a free-market solution. Except, as somebody pointed out, the equilibrium price of something who's marginal cost of production is zero, is basically zero.
That may be tough to accept, but the plain fact is, nobody is entitled to X amount of money for Y amount of time and effort. Sometimes what you decided to invest your time and effort in makes money, sometimes it doesn't.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
I know this is a little behind the curve, but I am going to call Doctorow on this whole thread.
1) Giving away electronic versions of your book for free makes you more money than "doing something about piracy"
2) If people care enough about your book to pirate it, pat yourself on the back--you are becoming famous.
You should re-release the book under a Creative Commons Attribution, No Derivatives, Non-Commercial license and let the internet do its thing.
Students who were going to buy print copies of your book will continue to do so, and the ones who were just going to get it from the library will get it online. Additionally, many people who were never going to buy and read your book will stumble upon it, learn your name, look for your other works, quote you, further your research...
What more could you, as an academic, hope for?
From an author's POV, it's a form letter, google is your friend, right? Find one, customize, read the procedures on submission, send.
Any big provider providing website services (as opposed to the people who run virtual hosts on them) is going to pay attention to a DMCA takedown letter, though you'll have to poke around to find the DMCA agent.
If they ignore you, go to the Feds to complain... here's a quick primer on DMCA.
It's a mainly bad law, but it can be very useful for the few legitimate complaints the law was allegedly intended to cover.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Use this link instead. I hit post instead of preview by mistake.
Tech Public Policy stuff
But that's not a justification at all for you can't drive my car, even if I'm not using it at the moment â" unless I allow you to.
No, this follows directly from the fact that the car can only be in one place at a time.
If I borrow your car while you're not using it, then what happens an hour later when you want to drive somewhere but I haven't brought it back? You have no car to drive, that's what. I can't predict the future, so I can't borrow your car without possibly denying you its use later, even if you're not using it at the moment I borrow it.
Also, your attempt at making a distinction presumes, that the only use of a book is reading it. But that's not true â" the author needs not read it, in fact. He often wants to sell it. And his attempts at selling it are hampered by the pirates attempts at same.
You don't have a right to sell anything, only a right to offer it for sale. If people don't want to buy your product for whatever reason -- the price is too high, the product sucks, someone else is offering it for less -- then sorry, but that's the way it goes. You're entitled to try, but that doesn't mean you'll succeed.
So, no, piracy doesn't interfere with your ability to use your book. You can offer it for sale even if someone else is giving it away for free. You just won't find much success unless you provide a better value than the pirate.
Face it. Unless you are willing to dispense with the notion of property altogether, your attempts to do so selectively will remain ridiculous. Bring this point up on the next party meeting. See, what senior comrades tell you about your blowing your cover too early.
I was not talking about people not buying his work. I was talking about people buying his work from pirates. Each such purchase is a theft from him.
No, like I said, it's only stealing if you become poorer as a result. The author has exactly as much money (and exactly as many books) after the pirate's transaction as he did before the transaction, which makes sense because he wasn't part of that transaction at all. Nothing was stolen from him.
I know you'd like to ignore the fact that the author "loses" potential revenue in exactly the same way when people don't buy his work for other reasons, but that doesn't make it go away. You will have to justify your distinction between an author who fails to make a sale because people don't want his book, and an author who fails to make a sale because someone else is giving the book away -- both authors end up in exactly the same situation. The only difference is on the reader's end, not the author's.
The exact same line of reasoning can justify resale of (tangible) stolen goods â" an obviously immoral and illegal activity. Therefor, the line of reasoning is wrong and without merit.
Ah, but reselling stolen goods does harm the rightful owner, by making it more difficult for him to track down his property. (That obviously doesn't apply to information, since the author hasn't been deprived of anything and has no need to track it down.)
All of those things are not (yet) easy to replicate â" fixing a car or driving a bus is hard and one is paid for every time they do it. Replicating books is trivial â" writing them is hard...
Yes, that's exactly my point! Writing a book is hard just like fixing a car is hard. And copying a book is easy, just like driving a car that's been fixed is easy.
Therefore, authors can get paid for writing books, just like mechanics get paid for fixing cars. He can get paid for every book he writes, just like a mechanic gets paid for every car he fixes.
An author basing his business model on charging for copies is as foolish as a mechanic basing his business model on charging people to drive the car after he fixes it. It's unenforceable and it cause
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Why not turn the free reproduction of ebooks to your advantage?
Even the lowliest pirate will feel guilty about pirating an ebook they could have easily bought for $1. And since a download costs you nothing, unlike print books, you'll profit even at that ridiculously low price.
Sure, most of your customers will be curious people who buy things on the web for the hell of it, rather than the very small number actually interested in your field, but you might actually make more that way.
there is no god but truth, and reality is its prophet
Yea, the law is on your side, but that does not make the law just. A 10 year old book on data compression is almost as useful as a 2 year old phone book.
Maybe it is time you changed it to a Creative Commons License and gave back to the public that made your copyright worthwhile in the first place.
Without a "Public" to sell to your copyright would be pointless, no one to buy means no $ incentive to write it down in the first place.
Since you have milked it for 10 years, why not give it to the public so that others can easily build on what you have.
It probably is inconsequential to society at this point being 10 years old, but some less fortunate person might be able to pull a nugget out of it and make a leap forward for the rest of us to enjoy.
These aren't bad ideas. I've done that with _Free for All_ and I still give away thousands of copies from my web site alone.
Still, that doesn't answer the question of how someone else is going to fund the chance to do something more. Let's imagine that someone else takes my work and puts two months into updating it. Can they sell it and you'll support their efforts? Or will they be treated to the same harsh reality? Will they be able to swim against the tide of piracy?