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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.
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.
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
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?
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
/...
Here are the questions I'd suggest you ask yourself:
The downloaders are probably unlikely to buy your book at retail anyway, but they do bring you more exposure. Given that they are not costing you much income, how much time/money do you want to invest in pursuing them?
The people offering the downloads are probably working on the assumption that you/the publisher don't care. Often, a simple contact from the author/publisher will get the result you want, as they prefer the easy route.
My usual course of action is to ignore the downloaders. I usually drop the people offering the downloads a nice note saying that they're publishing my work, and if they'd send me half the money they made and stop it, I'd go away. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't but just go away. Those who continue, regardless, I see if the site is in the USA then send a DMCA notice. I also proactively work to ensure my own/publisher's sites are the primary matches for my publications.
Most importantly, I don't lose any sleep over it, or invest much time in it. It's not a big loss to me, and the intangibles I gain from it are worth more to me as a specialist writer. I figure an hour of my time is worth $25, and if it won't earn me $25 in royalties, chasing these people is time badly spent.
IMHO
"I am so sensible, sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.
At present, the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law, and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
On which side, indeed, should the public sympathy be when the question is, whether some book as popular as 'Robinson Crusoe,' or 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller, who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?
Remember, too, that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find, that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."
So these laws finally went through, and the pirates are here. Surprise!
Consider voluntarily opting out of the over-zealous protections offered by current copyright law. For example, check out O'Reilly's Open Book project. Among their options are the Founders' Copyright, where works return to the public domain after 14 or 28 years (instead of the current lifetime + 70 years). Even better, given the technological revolution between then and now, consider even less restrictive licenses that would enable your customers to get even greater benefit out of your works.
Yes, this option requires that the public make some "nice distinctions" by recognizing that your works are (would be) more freely available than the typical work, and that they should correspondingly pirate them less. If you take this path, remember to proclaim your moral highground loudly and proudly, so that people notice. Also, encouraging your coworkers, fellow authors, publishers, etc., along the same lines and increasing the number of works so available will help the public to more often encounter and understand this issue, and again reduce the incentive to pirate your works.
Let's see the "I don't believe in imaginary property" crowd come out with their memes â" and see them getting a new one ripped out by people, who finally realize, that Intellectual Property is not just about stealing other people's MP3-recordings.
Or perhaps your ilk will be ripped a new one by people who realize that authors don't need copyright any more than musicians or any other artists.
The business model of "write/record first, ask for money later" is fundamentally flawed no matter who tries to practice it.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
The only way to be sure that nobody wants to steal your book is to write a book nobody wants to steal.
A limited market for an esoteric textbook, imagine that.
And the swappers that are passing it around aren't interested
in buying it (or probably any other technical literature for
that matter), imagine that?
This is like kids passing around copies of Photoshop or Autocad.
They are NOISE.
They give the false impression that there is a market where there isn't one.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Who's Sue? Is she hot?
A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. -- Groucho Marx
Book pirates? I'd pay the ransom dude, those guys are serious business.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
I'm waiting for the "Imaginary property is stealing" memes - didn't you know that home photocopying is killing the book industry?
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!
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
Send Google a 512(c) takedown letter. duh!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And there's nothing you or anyone else can do about that except adapt.
Actually, I kind of like the old model. I like being able to plunk down $10 and see a movie that cost $100m to make. I like being able to pay $100 for a textbook from a leading expert who's not just doing it to advertise other services. I'm a content consumer and I like the old model. It's far from perfect, but it's better than watching videos of people's cats riding Roombas on YouTube.
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.
Ask Inky, Pinky and Blinky.
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.
I love your post - it's so surreal if you drop the first sentence. You might consider selling it as a beat poem.
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
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
I noticed today that the bookstore at the University of Waterloo has a print on demand book machine. This thing will take a PDF file, print the pages for a book and have it bound in about 6 minutes. The big problem is a $50 set up fee plus between 5 to 8 cents per page if you print your own PDF. However, if course textbooks are printed the price drops. For example, a text that goes for $100 now sells to students for $70. In your case, this could be a very good way to start making money again. As always, the problem is pricing. I'm an economist, so let me explain using the jargon why I think the current situation will not prevent piracy. The answer is obvious: the final unit price is still too high.
The sales pitch I received tried to convince me that consumer surplus increased by $30 because of print on demand. What was not mentioned was that the producer surplus of the firm (O'Reilly and others) also increased dramatically. No longer does O'Reilly have to worry about shipping costs, wholesalers, retailers, inventory etc. They simply have to ensure that their PDF gets to the printer securely. We as consumers know this. We know that we should get more of a break if the producers are getting a deal. Let's face it $70 isn't cheap even if you have a job. (Also, O'Reilly isn't exactly a a brand I associate with quality anymore, either.) That $70 price tag is going to (hypothetically) encourage me to look for a pirated copy and read it on my laptop. If it was, say, $30-40 bucks then I would think again. For $20 bucks I wouldn't even hesitate...
So, in my humble opinion consumers ("pirates") are simply being rational. Everyone would prefer to have a proper book. No one likes getting gouged on price if they can't see the value added. Is the publisher really adding that much value to your book? What do they do? Proof read and edit? Most books today seem to have barely passed through either process, so it becomes hard to support the argument that much value is added. (In my humble opinion, O'Reilly is one of the worst on this count. Their newer books are often barely readable.)
But let's say we both disagree on this count. Instead, let's look at the history of publishing in the USA. For a long time, there was no copyright because the USA had a largely uneducated population and the government wanted to ensure that the population could have cheap access to materials for self-improvement. For example, Dickens would publish in the UK, and "bootleg" copies of his books would be circulating in major US cities within days after copies of his books were received from overseas. How did authors combat this? Often they would serialize their works in newspapers or magazines because they knew that they couldn't stop copies from being made.
Where does all this leave you? In a nutshell: innovate or die. If your publisher is smart, maybe you could both set your prices low enough so that:
Price = materials + labour + publisher profit + writer profit
is still low enough for consumers to want to buy. Since you are currently making nothing on this item, I would say there is tremendous room for some profit on this item right now.
Other options may be to rebundle key chapters with other "classic" works to make a useful course primer. Also, it may be that very cheap but out of date print-on-demand copies will sell well enough to encourage the publisher to pay you for a revised edition.
Up to you.
Yes, he DOES know exactly what he's doing! Go do a Google search for one of the unique phrases in his post such as "selling legit copies including digital editions for the Kindle" and you will see that he has posted exactly the SAME message on dozens of message boards over the past month. Slashdot - News for nerds, stuff that mattersOthers search strings actually locate pages that are selling legit copies including digital editions for the Kindle. I've started looking around for ...
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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
First off, the best books are written because something needed saying, not because some writer needed a perpetual income. Secondly, if a writer writes about things that people feel a need to read, the writer will develop an 'audience', which, in a way, is a perpetual income. Third, and most important, if you don't put in any effort, would you really appreciate what you take out?
In my experience, there's no free ride. You always pay, one way or another.
Words to men, as air to birds.
I always thought it was funny that they raised their prices to such astronomical levels. An ex of mine would always buy her books used, save 60-70% per book, and then sell them again at the end of the semester.
If you can make it convenient for a person to pay for the book they have to have anyway, at a price they'll gladly pay, sales would skyrocket. If a new book was $50 instead of $250, came with a PDF on CD-ROM and reprintable forms instead of some lame workbook, you could update it every year with correction, and who wouldn't pay that? The difference between $25 for a used copy and $50 for a new one would eliminate the second hand market. No one would wait around with cash at the bookstore for that difference, but they would if it was the difference between $250 and $70.
Not to mention the sales you get from kids losing their books, spilling bongwater on them, or throwing them away before they realize they've failed the class.
It's like music CDs. I see $5 DVDs all the time, even at grocery stores. Are you telling me they can't sell a regular CD for $3.99, and one with a Bonus DVD and high quality mp3s for 7.99? For $10 I can get many of my favorite bands on vinyl with an mp3 download coupon in the sleeve.
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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
If I mow your lawn, then I get paid for mowing it and that is the end of it. A lot of jobs are like that. But not all. If I am your firefighter, I get paid each day, even if there are no fires. The day a fire breaks out and you need it controlled, you don't pay me anymore then you have done each day.
Doctors and such are slightly different as well, you don't just pay them for labor and material, you pay them for the cost they went through to get that education that made them a doctor. So their salary is not just the salary right now, but the salary they missed out on during their student years.
If I pay an engineer, I don't just pay him for the job right now, but for the ensurance that his work will continue to be solid long after the work has finished.
An actor I pay not just for the performance tonight, but for all the excersises.
A bus I pay not just for the overcrowded bus he is driving right now, but for all the empty ones in the off hours.
My rent for a house is not the total cost of the house, rather it is the cost of the house being build payed over several years.
AND THAT BRING US TO AUTHORS. The years of copyright are there because an author does NOT get paid his salary when he completes the book. Rather each book sold carries with it a small portion of his fee. In the days before current copyright an author was payed upon completion by the publisher and all sales after that belonged to the publisher. This is EXTREMELY risky for the publisher and easily leads to only those books being written for which someone is willing to pay the author his fee at completion or even during writing itself. Not all authors can work that way and if you value diversity neither would you want them all to work that way.
An author writes a book, then has to recover his salary he missed out on from the sales, sales that will NOT be instant on the day of publication. Do you really want books that might sell only 100 copies on day one to have to pay the author in full from their price? And then what reason would the author have to continue sales? That is the reason for copyright, to allow a content creator a period of time to recoup the costs of producing the material.
Copyright is no different from the rights of ownership that allow you to build a house and then rent if out over several years to recoup your costs and make a profit. If you want to get rid of it, it means the end of a lot of basic ways of doing business.
I myself have no problem with copyright (within reason), what my beef is with the RIAA/MPAA and the likes is that they wish to maintain their own roles of distrubtors/copiers and charge insane amounts of money for it while the content creators get peanuts.
Say a song writer charges 2 euro for a song, I got no problem with that. But if the RIAA charges that, it means the songwriter might end up with a nickle if lucky. THAT is the problem. Same with iTunes. If all the middle man were cut out the songs could sell for less and the artist get more. Win-Win, except for the leeches in the middle.
THAT is my problem with the current system, not the original idea of copyright. That is an essential if we want to allow content creators to make money from their work other then through a direct instant fee upon completion. If you want to be able to rent, you got to support propertly laws that allow this. And if you don't want to pay 20.000 for a book on compression, then you need to support copyright that doesn't mean this author has to look to single buyer for his work.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Maybe it's a dull book? Maybe it's a quick read? Maybe it's not advertised? Maybe it's NOT a best seller?
Book Publishing 101: Nobody makes money by publishing books that aren't bibles, yearbooks or church directories.
Nearly all the books that are published are vanity press editions that you paid to publish yourself, anyway. Some vanishingly small number of titles appear in the NYT RoB because you've already published a best seller, you're famous, you're infamous, you have no qualms about being exploited provided somebody ghostwrites "your book" for you. One in a billion people PER GENERATION are J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman or J. K. Rowling. Or Agatha Christie, if that's your genre. Make up your own numbers.
Just because people pirate your book doesn't mean people read your book. Book pirates are the literary equivalent of beachcombers, beach bums and itinerant metal scanners. They don't read. They collect whatever intellectual flotsam washes up on their tiny shores, in hopes it might be good. Some of them organize that data into well-encrypted volumes, never to be reopened.
If a few people did buy your book, congratulations. You've beaten long, long odds. And presumably you meant your reader(s) to find utilitarian or derivative uses for whatever nuggets of hard-gleaned technical wisdom you passed on in your book. If noble information-sharing was not your intent, then your book should have remained a journal, a daybook, a diary, a log, a laboratory notebook — and you, member of the secret order of whatever guild you belong to, should be filing for a patent.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
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/
If your book's already being distributed illegally, that means that a) you've got good info that people want, or at least a professor use your book
and b) people didn't care to fork out money for the paper copy, or they don't want a paper copy.
You can create your book, without the publisher and distribute on line without the cost of going to the printing press, for much less. I'd easily fork over $10 for a good digital copy of a book.
If I read a legal paper and electronic copy of your book for free (the electronic one must be readable on my 6" e-ink gadget) and I like it, and then you release the book as public domain or GFDL 1.2 but not 1.3 or later versions (but if the book is very great then I may settle with Creative Commons or other similar licences as well), then I could pay you whatever you want for the book, as long as what you want does not exceed a monetary amount I have in mind right now and aren't going to tell you. In short: You don't need to have copyright, you don't need to force people to support you for writing books. If your books are good, people will come to you to support you without any laws, copyright, or other things.
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.
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?
Bad steak analogy. You didn't consume the steak.
Just for the sake of argument....
He may not have consumed the steak, but the restaurant has lost steak. They've lost something tangible because it didn't meet the standards of the customer.
If you don't sell a book because the guy read through any or all of it and it was utter crap, you've lost only a potential sale because it didn't meet the standards of the customer. You never had that money. You never had a physical good which is now unfit for consumption.
So yeah, the analogy is imperfect. The point is, though, that almost every good that is sold can be returned if the customer decides that they don't like it (even in cases where it has been used or partially used)--except for goods which are copyrighted. You can't return software, you can't return movies or CDs, and you can rarely return books.
I'm not making a judgment on whether or not the behavior is just or right; rather I'm clarifying that despite the fact that the analogy is imperfect, it's sound.
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