Novelist Blames Piracy On Open Source Culture

joeflies writes "CNN published an article entitled 'Digital Piracy Hits the e-Book Industry.' It quotes the following statement by novelist Sherman Alexie: 'With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership — of artistic ownership — goes away. It terrifies me.'" The article also points out a couple of interesting statistics for a "slumping" industry beset by piracy: "Sales for digital books in the second quarter of 2009 totaled almost $37 million. That's more than three times the total for the same three months in 2008, according to the Association of American Publishers," and "consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers."

Comments

Re:What do you expect.

[Old97]

Your logic escapes me. I understand technology very well and I understand his concern. Piracy is much easier and cheaper in a digital world than in a print world. It is a threat to the business of content creators (authors) and their publishers. Ads won't pay the bills. All the clowns on this site who think people should or can work for free or a pittance need to get of their mommas' basements and try to support a family.

I'm talking about people who write books, write or make music, movies, etc. If you have a family or want a life or good health you can't spend your time on the road touring nor can you afford to spend all your free time producing content for which you earn little income. Living for art is a something only the wealthy and the obsessive can do. The rest of us want a nice home, medical care, educated and happy kids and a content spouse. If you don't want or need that then fine, but you are part of a tiny minority.

So how does one get paid a decent amount for one's work in this new model? Advertising is not going to do it. Markets are more fragmented because there are more content delivery channels available. Well that drives down ad rates for the mass market vendors. So the solution is supposed to be to improve the targeting of ads to consumers based on what we know about their interests and proclivities. The problem their is that requires a lot of data collection that many of us see as an invasion of privacy. We block the ads, block the cookies and turn off the scripts in order to avoid all that. Now how much would an advertiser pay if his message rarely gets through and only the clueless can be targeted? (Even the clueless eventually start blocking ads and third party cookies and such.)

Charging for content is necessary and in a digital world the only way that works if enough people are willing to pay. Of those who are willing to pay, you need to get them to pay and not just take it for free. Reasonable unit pricing and convenient delivery helps (a'la iTunes), but frankly, piracy is pretty easy and convenient too. So why pay? Some of us pay because we feel a responsibility to the content producers, but many people seem to assume that content producers are all millionaires. Why is that? Who do they think are paying them? The only rich content producers are the lucky few. Even in a pre-digital world many of the most talented and creative people barely eked out a living and many dropped out in order to provide for their loved ones. In a digital world it can be much tougher.

So whether or not this particular author understands technology, he does understand that his world and his livelihood is under threat and that he needs to figure out how to adjust. That's just being perceptive.