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."

Comments

Offer the Ebook for free.

[Shikaku]

Ask for money for a printout.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[princessproton]

(I'm not trying to be inflammatory, just honestly asking, but) How is this different from what's occurring now? The ebook is being obtained for free, while printed copies require a purchase. The author states that the free copies are not helping with his sales, so how would him being the source of those free copies change that?

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[middlemen]

Actually, maybe offer the e-book for say 2$ and see how many buys you get. 50$ for a book might make people think twice before they buy, but 2$ for the book might actually generate more volume of sales for you. Those who pirate only do so either because they are not interested in buying the book at all, or they cannot afford it. But by making an authentic e-book version affordable you can increase volume sales because it becomes really cheap to buy. Replication of an e-book copy really costs no money unlike its dead tree counterpart, so instead of asking the question about how to control piracy, why don't you ask the question about why should e-books cost so much as the dead tree versions ?

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[peterwayner]

I do this with my book Free for All . It's a great success if you measure success by the number of people who read my work. But it's contributed zero to my income since I released it in electronic form. No one asks if they can buy printed versions.

There is a slight way to measure the effect. Used versions trade on Amazon and they've stayed at roughly the same price.

BTW, I've read the electronic version on a Palm and it's very easy to read. This may have been a viable strategy during the TRS-80 years, but not during the iPhone years. I wouldn't be surprised if the iPhone has better resolution than some of the sketchy laser printers I've seen.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[Sad Loser]

I have recently written a textbook, and I have written it for a series that I know will get widely pirated, because the pages are A4 sized and photocopy really well and it will appear as a torrent quite quickly.

I will not make a lot of money from the book - probably $5k per edition, but writing it will enable me to share my vision with a lot of people, and I regard that as a privilege. The more it is pirated, the more it will help my career.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[TheRealMindChild]

Firstly, your site says your paperback edition of "Free for All" is out of stock. Doing a google search shows Barnes & Noble carry it. I think the average human is more likely to take a trip to the book store to also browse other books than to go through the trouble of contacting someone for a copy who advertises they don't have anymore.

Also, "Free for All" is a story. Apparently story readers are happy reading such things not on paper. However, me and just about every other colleague I've ever dealt with wouldn't stand for a reference book coming from anything but paper. I need to be able to scribble on the pages, highlight things, doodle in it, place sticky notes of varying colors everywhere. Very likely, the people "pirating" this compression book are not actually using it and would have never bought it.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[peterwayner]

The publisher is handling the Kindle pricing for this title. They've set the price at Amazon at $51 for the print on demand and $41 for the Kindle.

That's actually a fair representation of the costs. The printing probably costs about $5 and the shipping/handling about $5.

The real cost is in the time it takes to prepare the book. It's not fair to compare the cost of a data compression book with, say, a romance title. The size of the markets is vastly different. I would be happy to sell my data compression book at the price of a romance novel if I could sell as many copies.

Synthesizing information isn't cheap. It took me a long time to write that book. If society doesn't reward people for their time, they're going to stop doing it. I realize that the Wikipedia is very cool and much better than my books in many ways, but I don't think we're ready for it to be the only source of information.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[jrbrtsn]

Hey Peter, You don't suppose no one is buying the printed version because your website lists it as "out of stock"?

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[ta bu shi da yu]

I think he's already found his solution. Now that he's been published in the NYT and on slashdot, Google presents searchers with Amazon.com, the NYT and slashdot in the top 10 search results.

Problem is solved, time to move on.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[mdwh2]

I realize that the Wikipedia is very cool and much better than my books in many ways, but I don't think we're ready for it to be the only source of information.

No one claims Wikipedia should be the only source of information - in fact, Wikipedia explicitly disallows original research, and instead is meant to reference other sources. Even if you offered your "synthesized information" to Wikipedia for free, it most likely wouldn't be the appropriate place to put it (just as with any encyclopedia).

I'm not sure what your concern is with Wikipedia, as you seem to be repeating this point? I don't see how it's related to the issue of piracy for your book. If you mean that only free material will remain - well yes, it would be bad, not because free material is of poorer quality, but simply because of less material being available. Whether downloading copyrighted material results in less material being produced is of course a matter of much debate here on Slashdot.

But my point is, imagine a commercial software developer asking Slashdot about piracy, and then dropping a comment about "Imagine if we all had to rely on Linux!"? Yes, I think that commercial material is very important too (after all, I use Windows myself), but this comment doesn't come across well, and just reads as an insult to free information.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[cdrguru]

It might have something to do with the fact the book is $50 because the content is worth it. Printing and distribution are a very small fraction of the cost of a book and it is valid that these costs be removed from the price of an e-book. So you take the $50 book and charge $45.95 for the e-book.

Look into it some more, don't just assume that printing and distribution is extremely costly. As the author of a $50 book (http://www.amazon.com/s/&field-keywords=cd+and+dvd+forensics for example), I know the costs of shipping a box of 22 books from the publisher is like $10. The printing cost is also not significant. A book like CD and DVD Forensics might cost $5 to print in relatively small quantities.

Either the content is worth it or it isn't. The physical book is essentially cost-free as far as anyone is really concerned.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[geekoid]

SO, how much did you pay the people that contributed to the books? I do notice you dodge actually citing many them.
I mean, if you should get paid for your effort, shouldn't they?

Anyways:
Who is your target audience? I grabbed the PDF, read the first 20 pages, and the last 5, plus some in the middle. The part where you talk about Disney.

Who is interested in it? It seems to me at this time it is only interesting to people who where involved in some manner i the last 15 years, but since they were involved in IT during that time, they know the story. SO why would they buy?

Honestly, If Linux becomes a dominant force the book you linked to will be considered a gold mine to historians, but for people living through the time? I don't see it.

BTW, sine a downloaded the PDF to sample your works are you counting that as a lost sale like piracy? becasue if you are, rest assured I would never have bought it.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[peterwayner]

I have no problem with doing it for no financial reward if only the builder and the grocer would shelter and feed me with no expectation either.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[stranger_to_himself]

Best of luck to you! It's quite a good reason to write a text book, but it looks like it may soon be the only reason to do it.

Actually the best and only reason to write a textbook is so you can win arguments by saying "I wrote the book on (insert topic of disagreement)!" and then smugly pulling the book from your shelf.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[J Story]

Cory Doctorow: "[M]y biggest threat as an author isn't piracy, it's obscurity." (http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/14/why-publishing-shoul.html)

I suppose it's a different issue if the book is required for a course, in which case we delve into questions of monopoly prices and substitutes.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[peterwayner]

Sounds like an almost perfect bullshit filter to me.

Actually, I think it's exactly the opposite. People who write for money are very interested in giving their audience something useful. Those who write to share ideas are often-- but far from always-- interested in pontificating. I know there are some truly generous souls out there, but the Internet is full of people who just want to share ideas. You can sample a few websites and tell me what you think.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[ta bu shi da yu]

You're assuming that people are a. searching for his book, and b. actually downloading it in the first place.

I would love to know how he is certain that piracy is affecting his bottom line. After all, he's hardly going to be able to get download figures from the piraters. Couldn't it be that nobody is reading it in the first place?

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[jfengel]

> Synthesizing information isn't cheap. It took me a long time to write that book.

I published a book some years ago, and there were a lot of other people involved, too: copy editors, reviewers, typesetters, artists. All of whom require management, secretaries, paper clips, etc etc etc. The publisher spent a lot of time and money marketing that book.

You are probably receiving only $8-$10 of that $41 in Kindle sales. The publisher's overhead probably only accounts for another $10-$15, leaving a pretty considerable overhead. Much of that is making up for projects that didn't happen, books that failed to turn a profit, etc.

So you can't sell that book for $2 online and expect to have that mean anything. The author and the host of people assisting him or her put in a lot of hours. It could probably be less than $40 and still turn a profit for the publisher, but it's still going to be pricey ($20-$30).

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[Moryath]

My sympathy level dropped by several levels when I found out he's making college textbooks.

Why? Because I've been through that ugly racket. Not one of my college textbooks was under $250. All of them were written "by the professor", or co-authored by same, and then required for their courses so that they had a captive audience to "sell" to. "New editions" came out every other year, the only difference between which was the numbers inside the practice problems and the page count (altered by resizing the font). The full textbook + labbook + "labpack" (a set of components that could have been bought for 1/10 the cost at the local Fry's, but for which they "assessed" the fee without giving us a choice to look elsewhere) set for my courseload actually came out more expensive than in-state tuition my first semester.

For every "change" or "new edition" that actually included new research in the field, there were 100 more that were nothing but crap-ass "planned obsolescence" maneuvers designed to squeeze students for every penny by destroying the used-book market. One of these asstard professors actually forced people to hand in the back cover of their book with the final exam or take a zero grade, in order to make sure that there were no second-hand books on the market.

I would have loved to see a book available for $50. I'm impressed that it retails for that. I wish you well as a writer. But I have much less sympathy for you based on your line of work, having been abused by your peers.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[Anonymous Coward]

He could always flood the internet with incomplete electronic copies of the same file size. After downloading a few free copies of those people will get frustrated and buy the official e-book.

He could update his book?

It's 10 years old.

(Not posting a link here, as I will deny him the advertisement value)

With all due respect - isn't this exactly what is the problem with copyright? People sitting on their asses, demanding to get paid, while blaming piracy for not getting money for some work created ages ago. To hell with that.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[TenDollarMan]

Well... He ain't obscure no more.

Given this book appears to be 10 years old, I'd write another book...

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[gmack]

There are a lot of people who talk about piracy. The publishers because they need someone to blame things on and the pirates like to make noise about how what they do really benefits society. I suspect the real truth is that it doesn't really do much of either.

You need to know that in our society you have people who pay for things and people who steal things. People who pay for things generally pay for things and people who steal things generally refuse to pay for things.

Years ago a some people I know got into the warez scene. For some reason and to this day I still don't understand one guy I know had $50 000 worth of software on his PC. He had no use for most of it and didn't even bother installing the larger part of his collection and most of it was for industries he neither understood nor had any interest in. He simply grabbed it so he could have a huge value of stolen software on his computer and he been forced to actually pay for it he would have dumped 99% of it.

It's the same with people in the town I grew up in stealing shopping carts taking them to a secluded area and bashing them open to get the dollar coins out. (yes I'm Canadian) Best they could be doing? $2 to $3 an hour. They would make better money collecting tin cans or working at McDonalds' yet they continue.

Do you honestly think that most of the pirates have any interest in programming compression algorithms?

In the same way the most pirated songs are also the ones with the highest volume sales so you should keep in mind that these are not actually causing much if any lost sales. The internet just makes it much more noticeable.

The few real programmers with an interest in learning about compression algorithms will appreciate the work you put in and want to reward you because that's generally what decent people do.

My advice to you is to grow thicker skin. I'm certain it would bother me if I were in your shoes but idiots will be idiots and no amount of lawsuits, technological fixes or attempts at guilt will change that.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[TheSpoom]

This is solved by The Pirate Bay's trusted user icon system and the inherent model of BitTorrent; users will not continue to seed a bad copy, so you just sort by seeds and generally will find the best one.

Pirates: We're smarter than you think, matey.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[Moryath]

That's easy enough to get around, and I saw how they did it.

The Prof gets an advance from the publisher for each edition. Since it's every 1-2 years, that's a steady stream. Sure, they "make nothing" from the sale of the books at our particular college, but they still make plenty with a decently sizable advance, and since they can guarantee a captive market, the "advance" for the next edition is pretty much assured.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[shaitand]

How would the author know if free copies are helping his sales? All he knows is that his sales suck and he is frustrated and wants to blame piracy.

That doesn't mean the free downloads are hurting his sales or aren't responsible for them. Seriously, its a data compression textbook. Exactly how incredible do you really think his sales are going to be? If that many people really had need of his textbook or found it that useful they would buying hardbound print copies they could have open on their desk while working with the material.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[Marful]

The free copies are in fact helping his sales. He is just not aware of this fact.

Baen Books has been giving out free e-books for years now and because of the free e-books that these books sell for longer on the shelves and the hardbound versions sell more than the ones that don't offer the ebook.

Eric Flint has a commentary on baen's free library website here:

http://baen.com/library/

I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow. My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:

1. Online piracy â" while it is definitely illegal and immoral â" is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.

2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.

3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market â" especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people â" is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.

In the course of this debate, I mentioned it to my publisher Jim Baen. He more or less virtually snorted and expressed the opinion that if one of his authors â" how about you, Eric? â" were willing to put up a book for free online that the resulting publicity would more than offset any losses the author might suffer.

The minute he made the proposal, I realized he was right. After all, Dave Weber's On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a "loss leader" for Baen's for-pay experiment "Webscriptions" for months now. And â" hey, whaddaya know? â" over that time it's become Baen's most popular backlist title in paper!

And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.

Sure enough, within a day, I received at least half a dozen messages (some posted in public forums, others by private email) from people who told me that, based on hearing about the episode and checking out Mother of Demons, they either had or intended to buy the book. In one or two cases, this was a "gesture of solidarity. "But in most instances, it was because people preferred to read something they liked in a print version and weren't worried about the small cost â" once they saw, through sampling it online, that it was a novel they enjoyed. (Mother of Demons is a $5.99 paperback, available in most bookstores. Yes, that a plug. )

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[AnalPerfume]

The world is littered with creative people who believe they are good enough in their chosen art form to deserve a handsome lifestyle from their efforts and spend their days working a normal job like everyone else to pay the bills. Do they stop doing their art because the world won't co-operate and pay them for their art? Anyone who believes they will stop is deluding themselves. Art is created because people have something they want to say, in the form they want to express it, regardless of whether or not anyone else "gets it", or even sees it.

It's a nice dream to make your living from your art but only a small fraction of creative people ever achieve that. It's been like that from the start and will continue that way. It's the golden carrot offered to the contestants on shows like Pop Idol "it CAN be you but in all likelihood, it won't be you.....or it may be you for a short while so make the best of it before you're dumped back to reality."

Trying to fight against the internet is futile too, unless you want to waste your time and money following the RIAA / MPAA model of suing your customers. The internet has steamrolled many business models which were previously very lucrative, your best option would be to look for ways to adapt to it and use it.

Offer something of added value like signed copies of your dead tree versions and cheap (or even free) ebook versions. Go for the Creative Commons approach and allow your customers to adapt your characters and stories with their own fan fiction. Stories, regardless of their medium are about connecting with the audience, some of that audience are creative too, in fact most of them are probably more creative than they realize but would never act on any impulses. By allowing your customers the freedom to live with the characters they've connected with, it will win you more loyalty, with more of them likely to want to reward you by buying a signed dead tree copy even if they never open it, just to support you. Let them build a community around the world you've created, or set a website / forum up yourself and encourage participation of art work etc.

In short...engage your audience, allow them to get involved in the world they've connected with. You will reap what you sow; if that's DRM and lawsuits your rewards will be that many of your audience who would like you, will have no compunction NOT to pirate your stuff feeling that you deserve to be ripped off. Engage them, encourage them and reward them and they will reward you in return.

The choice is yours, all it needs is some thought, attention and enthusiasm. For a creative person this should be second nature.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[powerlord]

If the builder and grocer could make limitless copies of their products instantaneously and at little or no cost, they probably would.

And yet, while the copy and reproduction may cost nothing, that does not mean the item itself spontaneously sprang forth from the ether, fully formed.

Books and other creative works, even if they are in electronic form, still take time and dedication to create, as well as research, proofread, etc.

If your time is worth nothing, that is fine, but most people's time is more valuable than that.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[CodeBuster]

and then smugly pulling the book from your shelf.

Which contains only copies of your book, but which you pause to scan, for effect, before selecting at random an individual copy and exclaiming, "ah, here it is" and presenting it to your interlocutor along with an invoice.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[commodoresloat]

It's a book about data compression. It's TEN years old. If all he does is change a few words in the new edition, I hope it gets pirated by everyone who needs to read it, and I hope the ones who don't pirate it buy a used copy of the old edition. But if he truly adds value to it in an update he will solve this so-called "problem." I agree with the GP poster, this is exactly the reason copyright laws need to be reformed. What other job can you have where you can still get paid for some crap you did ten years ago? Methinks he doth protest too much.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[SputnikPanic]

Okay, the book is ten years old. Seeing how the book is in the tech field, the author shouldn't expect to see that much income from it ten years out. There are exceptions, sure, but in general, I get your point. What I'm interested in is the rest of your statement:

isn't this exactly what is the problem with copyright? People sitting on their asses, demanding to get paid, while blaming piracy for not getting money for some work created ages ago.

Does this apply to, say, works of fiction, too? If you were to write the Great Gatsby for our time -- a book that wasn't particularly well received when it first came out but whose appreciation grew over the years -- would you feel you had the right to get paid for it 10 or 20 years later when your book finally starts getting the recognition (and sales) it deserved?

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm all for Baen; but the notion that it is a useful data point in this instance seems a bit shaky.

Baen's stuff is largely trade paperbacks. Fairly cheap, per book, and read largely for pleasure. TFS's compression textbook is a textbook. Considerably more expensive, and presumably read for a course, or for reference.

Reading on the screen, in short chunks, isn't bad at all, and it is also exactly what you would do to a reference book. Reading long, focused, sessions on the screen kind of sucks, which makes paper novels more valuable. I'd strongly suspect that, with the exception of classic reference works sold to students who are thinking ahead, textbooks are substantially more vulnerable to being replaced with pirated digital copies than novels are.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[DancesWithBlowTorch]

Here's a textbook on Data Compression, Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms that's five years old.

It's freely available online, from the author. And here comes the shocking bit: It's fun to read.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[Endo13]

Methinks the problem isn't piracy so much as that he is still expecting to get money for something that is already rendered obsolete by a newer better version, the creator of which is offing at a much better price (free).

This story should indeed be tagged Troll.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[sgtrock]

You'll notice that neither the builder or the grocer expect to get paid for 10 years past the point that work was completed...

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[Endo13]

Does this apply to, say, works of fiction, too? If you were to write the Great Gatsby for our time -- a book that wasn't particularly well received when it first came out but whose appreciation grew over the years -- would you feel you had the right to get paid for it 10 or 20 years later when your book finally starts getting the recognition (and sales) it deserved?

It absolutely applies. There have been many many things that have failed initially because they were released before there time. It's one of the risks you take.

Or to put it another way, if I build and sell Widget A based on my patent, and for whatever reason it doesn't sell well at all, then when the patent finally expires another company builds Widget B which is almost identical and it sells really well, should they now pay me money for the patent?

There's a reason Patents and Copyright are supposed to be time-limited.

The problem is people think they have all kinds of ridiculous rights and entitlements. Sorry, no one anywhere has ever had a right to making a profit. Patents and Copyright are the public giving the creator the privilege of exclusive sales of the product of his creation for a limited time. If you can't make a profit from your idea in a reasonable time period, then that's your problem, and no one else's.

Given how easy it is to publish, market, and distribute works these days, copyright should be shorter than it initially was, not longer.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[jcaplan]

If people are bothering to pirate this book that means that it is still relevant. Just because he hasn't updated it lately does not give people the right to rip it off. He invested his time and energy into writing it and most works do not pay for themselves instantly, but over time. Writing a book is a risk as is publishing it. Some don't ever pay off. Some are worthwhile enough that ten years later people are still reading them. A publisher invests substantial money in giving an advance to an author and promoting a book and loses money on the majority of them, though a few sell enough over time to make up for the losses on the others.

If the work has become dated, or the cost appears to exceed the work's current value then someone else can write their own book or wiki article on the topic. If you don't like the cost of a good in our capitalist marketplace the solution is to compete, not to steal.

I also have no idea how updating his book will solve his problem of people pirating his book. People who are too cheap to spend a few dollars to compensate the author of a book that they spend many hours reading are unlikely to change their habit because of the date of the last update.

(Btw, the quote "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." implies that the "lady" is a bit too strident in making affirmative statements for someone who is truthful, "protest" having not yet acquired its negative connotation. In the debate on this man's book there is no question of truthfulness, only on how you view his concern.)

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[jonadab]

> Can you give me one single thing that has changed in the last 10 years regarding data compression?

I can, and it's a biggie.

Ten years ago, it actually made sense for an application to include its own built-in data compression subroutines written by the application developer. Today it does not.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[peterwayner]

he is still expecting to get money for something that is already rendered obsolete

Actually, I'm not. I just wish that anyone who still showed an interest in my book would be shown directly to a place where they could actually pay for it. And I wish that they wouldn't be tempted with all of the Torrent sites.

I know the book is ten years old. I'm not surprised that someone may have written a better book. I would just like the book to be treated fairly.

In the end, my needs are inconsequential. The problem is that the better authors who write the newer books are going to be affected even more by piracy. And then they're going to do something else. So you can blame my book all you want, but we're all going to be hurt when the better books disappear.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[radtea]

I'm not surprised that someone may have written a better book. I would just like the book to be treated fairly.

The book that's being cited in this thread is being given away for free. This gives you a reasonable estimate of the fair value for your book.

I do a little writing myself, and am slowly coming to terms with the idea that authorship as a viable career is very nearly dead.

There have always been good people able to write good books who haven't been able to afford to live on what an author makes. That figure has just about dropped to zero, meaning that in future most non-fiction will be written by people being paid for other things (university lecturers, think tankers, etc.) or hobbyists. Fiction will be written by the well-off or well-patronized or hobbyists.

It's the new reality authors are facing. Musicians are facing it too.

Music and fiction and non-fiction were all produced before the age of commercial publishing. They will continue to be produced in the age of electronic publishing an ubiquitous copying.

The reality is that equilibrium market price of a good whose marginal cost of production is zero... is zero. That's fact, and what's fact is by definition fair, if the term has any meaning at all.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[commodore64_love]

You are correct. He's just making random assumptions, as most human beings do. I'm one of those who typically downloads something for free first, and then buys it if I like it. I wouldn't have to do that if the media companies offered refunds for junk titles, but since they don't, I use the "try before buy" approach to protect myself from wasting precious dollars.

If I were an author, I'd visit the top 10 pirate sites and just post a brief note. Something like, "Hello I'm the author. I hope you enjoy the book, and if you do please buy an official copy from amazon or other stores. Your legal purchase supports me, the editor, and everyone else who worked on this book, and help us feed our families. Thank you. :-)"

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[Endo13]

In the middle ages when no copy right existed authors starved because every moron just could reprint it as he wished.

Ahh, those poor starving middle ages authors. The world will never know.

Besides my correction in bold, your comment is a sign of very limited insight. You basically demand that an author of a work has to make his profit/living shortly after he did his work.

No. Shortly after he publishes it.

So ... in other words he can not place it into his basement and sell it later? If he sells it as a book, but 10 years later it could become a movie, he is out? When someone finally after the movie was a success thinks about making it into a musical, he is out? HELLLLLO? Are you nuts? With what right should anybody be able to "transform" an authors work into a movie a musical a DVD a CD a TV show without paying proper royalties to said author?

If you write a book, copyright it, then store it in your basement for 10 years you obviously don't care much about making a profit from it. So sure. Or, you could just wait to copyright it till after you get it out of your basement.

Why the F**K do you want to treat intellectual work different from any other work?

Exactly!! What kind of sense does it make to treat it differently from any other work? You work, you get paid for it. Or you get paid, and do the work. Either way, that's it. Over. Done. There's no reason why anyone should continue to keep getting paid indefinitely for work they did umpteen years ago. You know as well as I do that most copyrighted works generally provide their worth in profit within the first year. A good movie generates the vast majority of its profit in its first month. PC game publishers admit that they make most of their profit in the first week. A best seller book can make the author millions of dollars of profit in the first year. So tell me. Why is it that a particularly fine book/painting/audio track/movie/etc. should continue to pay money indefinitely even after the author has already gotten obscenely wealthy from it, while other particularly fine jobs do not? If I build a bad chair, most likely no one will buy it, or if they do they won't pay much for it. And rightly so - the chair is junk. If I build a particularly good and beautiful chair, it will probably net me a nice sum. At least a few hundred bucks, anyway. But people seem to have forgotten that exactly the same thing applies to intellectual work. You don't deserve to keep getting paid for a book 40 years down the road just because you didn't make as much money from it as you wanted to in the first few years. The reason you didn't make as much money from it as you wanted to is because your book sucks, just like my bad chair. It's junk. There's a reason people aren't buying it. That still doesn't mean you should keep collecting until you're finally satisfied that it's paid itself off. If you wrote a crappy book, you probably should lose money on it.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[BrokenHalo]

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.

Re:Offer the Ebook for free.

[chthonicdaemon]

It takes lots of time to earn a degree (I've been studying for more than 10 years up to PhD level). I would hope that it would generate some income for several years. Oh, wait -- it can, but I need to continue working.

Everything you can say about "knowledge workers" can be said about Engineers and other technical personnel that solve problems every day for a salary. They plan for their future not by hoping that someone will give them money today for work they did ten years ago, but by putting away money while they are earning it for work they are doing right now.

I sense quite a lot of the OP's resentment is just because someone is using his book without paying for it. One of my colleagues had this issue with notes he distributes to his class electronically (as part of the course). An enterprising student started selling printed copies for a profit, to students that could have printed it out themselves, but felt his price was reasonable. The colleague felt hard done by that someone was profiting from his work without him getting a cut. The sense of ownership that one feel about ones work makes one feel like it should remain in your control forever. Unfortunately this is an untenable situation with stuff like words which can be reproduced easily.

"These free copies aren't boosting sales"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Already answered, sort of...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

A Very Special Public Service Announcement

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:A Very Special Public Service Announcement

[buchner.johannes]

What Can I Do About Book Pirates?

Hire book ninjas!

Do you really expect help from Slashdot???

[Farmer Pete]

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.

it's a trap

[j00r0m4nc3r]

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?

Re:Have You Noticed Any Personal Income Loss?

[LWATCDR]

Funny but when people violate the GPL then people on Slashdot are gung ho about legal action.
I suggest a take down notice and then contact your publisher and let their legal department go after them. How to fight pirates? And your asking here?

Re:Have You Noticed Any Personal Income Loss?

[dargaud]

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)?

I concur. I sell images off my website. In arbitrary units, in the last 10 years I've been selling between 3 and 10 a month. Since last summer I've sold only two. Maybe the rise of flickr is for something in the wild availability of quality images, but I'd bet on the crisis and everybody holding out for better times...

Specialized tech books don't get bought by individuals who may also be cheap asses and willing to pirate them. They get bought by _employees_ who need them in their works. And an employee doesn't care how much they cost and they are certainly not willing to get fired for a torrent download in order to save the company 50$ !

Also remember that tech books have a short shelf life. If I want a python book and I see it 3 years out of date, I'm pretty sure there's something more recent.

Re:Have You Noticed Any Personal Income Loss?

[peterwayner]

First, O'Reilly isn't really my publisher, although I did contribute a chapter to the book Beautiful Security.

Second, I don't think that people are out to screw me personally. At least most people that is. But I do believe that humans take the path of least resistance.

Third, I think that students are already under a great deal of financial stress. The temptation to save a few dollars by grabbing a free copy of the textbook is very understandable to me. I just wish people would look at text book authors as the good guys because I think we provide much more information per dollar than the universities. Alas, I don't think I'm going to change people's ideas on that very soon.

Fourth, at some point the search engines and the web sites need to take some responsibility for what they display. I do blog about my book and I do use clean URLs to help the search engines do the right thing.

I think there's just something plain broken about the search engine results.

 

Re:Have You Noticed Any Personal Income Loss?

[Nihixul]

You bring up some good points, but I didn't agree with this:

You seem to already have the negative caged-animal attitude that suing the shit out of everyone is your only option.

Considering this quote in the summary,

I'm open to suggestions.

I don't really think that's a very fair characterization.

Re:Have You Noticed Any Personal Income Loss?

[eldavojohn]

Funny but when people violate the GPL then people on Slashdot are gung ho about legal action. I suggest a take down notice and then contact your publisher and let their legal department go after them. How to fight pirates? And your asking here?

What a terrible terrible analogy. The companies that violate the GPL that get sued are making money and are solid entities with legal statuses. The book pirates are making nothing and they are part of the vaporous cloud of the internet. You would be more effective suing ghosts. They are sharing books that they derive entertainment or information from--not money! I will encourage the EFF to prosecute violators of the GPL. I will encourage O'Reilly to sue these people if they see a loss.

The GPL is a license, violating a license is not the same as violating copyright. You aren't suing over money, you are suing to have the source code released. There are so many differences between your analogy and what's going on here I don't know where to start.

Actually, he knows exactly what to do

[SlashDotDotDot]

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

As a fellow author...

[dex22]

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

Opt out of copyright extensions

[chkn0]

Thomas Babington Macaulay's speech in the House of Commons, 5 February 1841 on the obscene extension of the term of copyright protections:

"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.

Limited Market, Limited Sales

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:Have You Noticed Any Personal Income Loss?

[ericrost]

Umm are you blind, he ISN'T PUBLISHED BY O'REILLY, the book he's referring to:

http://books.google.com/books?id=mnPeNQ0ZCsUC&pg=PA187&lpg=PA187&dq=data+compression+peter+wayner&source=bl&ots=ADJFApRA6Q&sig=9vqTz19uyk4WjFh5TwT5HY6zzZU&hl=en&ei=HJIMSoTzFITAMq_SzbMG&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#PPA179,M1

is the top result to the string he gives, and is published by Morgan Kaufmann.

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Re:What about me?

[SwordsmanLuke]

I love your post - it's so surreal if you drop the first sentence. You might consider selling it as a beat poem.

Re:Fortunately, this problem is easily solved.

[omeomi]

Take the books home, and scan them with a flat bed scanner.

Who has time to scan the couple thousand pages in all of the books for all of the classes in which the typical college student is enrolled? Even with a relatively quick scanner, that would take forever...

Sorry, Peter; harsh reality time...

[tlambert]

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

More than you think!

[Parhelion]

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 ... www.yenrab.com/ - Similar pages 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 ... www.reviseict.co.uk/news.shtml - Similar pages 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 ... www.suseblog.com/rss-feeds - 29 minutes ago - Similar pages 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 ... 110th.com/home.html - Similar pages [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 ... akress.com/news/tech.php - Similar pages help4um.com How to Home and Garden, Automotive, Help with your PC ...Mar 14, 2008 ... Others search strings actually locate pages that are selling legit copies including digital editions for the Kindle. I've started looking ... help4um.com/ - Similar pages

Not all jobs are the same my friend

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.