Slashdot Mirror
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."
Maybe if the consumer didn't feel ripped off, exploited, and raped by every business and company they have to deal with we'd be more receptive and less possessive of whatever goods we happen to come across. Half the damn stuff in my house I don't really own, I license or lease or rent it or whatever. Damn right I like the idea of open source and control.
It's simple: don't offer your unfounded opinion.
Clearly people pirate books they wouldn't have bought... I know one kid who has like 4000 ebooks, he's probably read two of. Also, making them "more" digitized doesn't matter. When there's one digital copy, there's 10,000,000. They are right about one thing, making them easier to buy (and part of easier means less copy protection) will mean they will sell more.
Just look how iTunes completely stopped selling anything when they started offering non-copy-protected books - oh wait, they didn't.
I just checked the kindle store; He has five books available there.
I then checked amazon.com and found pages and pages of paper books of his.
Now, why would people pirate his books?
Perhaps because they aren't legally available in ebook format?
There's really no critique of open source here. He said "open source," but he's just throwing the term around without knowing what "open source culture" is. He clearly means something along the lines of "peer-to-peer" culture.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity - of artistic monopoly -- goes away. It terrifies me." There, fixed that for you, Mr. Alexie.
he keeps on using internet for everything. he doesnt object to being linked in forums/content sites using open source scripts for their engine, he doesnt object to using google, which not only uses numerous open source elements to power its operation but also provides open source back to the community, he probably is thrilled when someone gets to buy his books by finding him the through the searches google provides, and many many more.
well, see, mr novelist, apparently you either dont know zit on what you are writing about, or just one of those who want everything self-centric.
if you want to prove otherwise, drop your usage of ANYthing that includes open source. including google, any and all links it provides to your novels/ebooks, any potential traffic/sales you get from forums/sites using phpbb and the similar open source engines. and then lets talk. else, youre just another bastard to us.
Read radical news here
You know, I'm always. . . impressed. . . by the ability of the 'news' media (and people in general) to turn things around completely ass-backwards. The anecdote that the CNN story leads off with is about the Dan Brown book "The Lost Symbol". The book sold millions of copies, but was pirated over a hundred thousand times in the first few days. To me, that says "9 out of 10 People willing to pay for stuff they *could* have downloaded for free". The *real* story, which CNN apparently wishes to ignore, is that the vast majority of people are honest, and wish to pay the authors whose books they like, *instead* of pirating. The *real* story is the pirates are the vast minority of people. Of course, that doesn't generate page views.
As for Sherman Alexie . . . why do I care if he (she?) is terrified? People get terrified about all sorts of irrational things. Many children are terrified of the dark. Why do I care if someone is irrationally terrified of something?
(CNNNN) -- When Dan Brown's blockbuster novel "The Lost Symbol" hit stores in September, it may have offered a peek at the future of bookselling.
On Amazon.com, the book sold more digital copies for the Kindle e-reader in its first few days than hardback editions. This was seen as something of a paradigm shift in the publishing industry, but it also may have come at a cost.
Less than 24 hours after its release, printed paperback copies of the novel were found in library sites such as the New Your public library. Within days, it had been read for free more than 100,000 times.
Library loans, long confined to books, are spreading to music and movies. And as electronic reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble's Nook, smartphones and Apple's much-anticipated "tablet" boost demand for books, experts say the problem may only get worse.
"It's fair to say that loaning of books is exploding," said Dilbert Drongo, an industry expert and professor of marketing at Fordham University.
Sales for library 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 (AAP).
Statistics are hard to come by, and many publishers are reluctant to discuss the subject for fear of encouraging more libraries. But library loans may pose a big headache in 2010 for the slumping publishing industry, which relies increasingly on electronic reading devices and e-books to stimulate sales.
"Libraries are a serious issue for publishers," said Carnt Hakkit Book Group in a statement. The company that publishes Stephenie Meyer's wildly popular "Twilight" teen-vampire series says it "considers copyright protection to be of paramount importance."
Authors are concerned as well.
"I'd be really worried if I were Stephen King or James Patterson or a really big bestseller that when their books become completely lendable, how easy it's going to be to loan them," said novelist and poet Sherman Dyslexie on Stephen Colbert's show last month.
"With the open-door culture of the Library, the idea of ownership -- of artistic ownership -- goes away," Dyslexie added. "It terrifies me."
And it's not just bestsellers that are targeted by librarians.
"Textbooks are frequently loaned, but so are many other categories," said Ed McCoyd, director of dubious policy at AAP. "We see shelving of professional content, such as medical books and technical guides; we see a lot of general fiction and non-fiction. So it really runs the gamut."
Lending of music, thanks to cassette, CDs and other devices, has been a threat to recording companies for more than a decade. Over the years, the record companies tried different approaches to combat library loaning, from shutting down free publicity to encrypting songs with digital-rights management software to suing individual customers.
Although legal lending of music persists, Apple's online iTunes store is now the world's biggest seller of music.
To some industry observers, this may be where the future of the book industry is heading as well. But talk to publishers and authors about what can be done to combat libraries, and you'll get a wide range of opinions.
Some publishers may try to minimize lending by delaying releases of books for several weeks after digital copies go on sale. Simon & Schuster recently did just that with Snorkel King's novel, "Under the Aquadome," although the publisher says the decision was made to prevent cheaper e-versions from cannibalizing hardcover sales.
Some authors have even gone as far as to shrug off physical book technology altogether. J.K. Pot has thus far refused to make any of her Hairy Porter books available physically because of library fears and a desire to see readers experience her books in pixels.
However, some evidence suggests that authors' and publishers' claims of damage from libraries may be overstated.
Recent statistics
What are the odds that Sherman Alexie is simply making a controversial statement to gain publicity?
Prior to this article, I'd never heard of him. Given his statement, I doubt I'll every buy any of his work but his statement has gotten his name air-time.
linquendum tondere
Not long ago I wanted to buy an ebook (just published. I went to Amazon and they wanted the hardcover price for the ebook. $25 for an ebook, just plain silly. So I went to barnes&noble, they offered the ebook for $10, similar to a paperback. So I tried to buy it.
Aaaanndd.. an error came up saying that I could not buy this book from the area I was in (not USA). I looked around some more and did not find a european distributor for the ebook. Lot's of companies had the hardcover, but no ebook. I checked if I could order it from amazon (I had no intention of completing that !!$25!! transaction) and same thing. I was not allowed to buy the bloody book.
So I went to my friends at thepiratebay and got the book. I needed to do some conversion to get the text to display properly on my device, but it worked. The legal alternatives, which I tried to follow, simply did not work. Maybe there was a way to get the legal options to work properly, but the way to get customers to do the legal thing is to make that EASIER than the illegal way.
On iTunes I am guaranteed to get good quality files, on TPB I am not. Simple.
Here in sweden the streaming service Spotify has changed the game. It's just so easy to do the legal thing that illegal downloading went down. Do the same with movies, books, programs.. basically everything else. Make the legal way the best and easiest way, and people will come.
As for Cory Doctorow, I do wish that he gave me some way of giving him money for the digital copies I've gotten from him. I don't want to buy a paper version, and I don't want to donate a paper version. I just want to pay the author (and editor and all those involved) for his/their work.
It is worse than that -- the person in question doesn't even know what is happening in his own profession. From TFA,
"I'd be really worried if I were Stephen King..."
Stephen King has already released a no-DRM ebook and made a lot of money from it, by releasing it piece by piece and requiring a certain minimum number of paid downloads before the next part of the story is released; this was discontinued because King himself could not figure out where to take the story. Perhaps if these people spent less time whining about how their fans are not paying their publishers, they could be more aware of how the Internet can change things and how they can use computers to publish their stories in new ways, connect with their fans, and provide their books to more people.
From a writer who has no idea how technology works you can expect kickass cyberpunk books! If, and only if, he has a good imagination.
If your books don't sell, don't blame piracy. Blame the books.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
TFA states:
Where do they get these numbers from? Do Rapidshare release download stats? Is there some secret BitTorrent download counter/tracker these people have access to? This has got to be a figure someone has just pulled out of their ass.
"Expert" changed its meaning. It used to mean "someone who knows something about a subject". Today it's "random loudmouth that shares your opinion on it".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Alexie is a Native American. Those people have no sense of ownership anyway. Their tribes roam from book to book. It wasn't until the white man arrived with his culture of printing out books and putting his name on them and getting all upset if the Indians took them off the shelf and didn't return them within two weeks that the trouble started.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
"Sooner or later we will have to consider, as a culture, what to do if established authors, and promising young authors, decide to abandon writing because too many freeloaders reduce author profits below subsistence."
Except that will not happen. Stephen King already demonstrated a tactic for turning a profit on eBooks: serial releases. Perhaps some day, instead of releasing entire novels, authors will release single chapters, wait until enough people have paid, and then release the next chapter, and so forth, until the entire novel is complete. The "publishing industry" may come to mean systems that automate this process, perhaps even online communities where readers not only pay authors but also communicate with the authors and with each other, commenting about the stories and characters.
Of course, that is not the picture that the current publishing industry wishes to paint, since it means the demise of their current business model and way of life. They will tell us that unless they continue to yield growing profits, authors will not write anything and we will be left without great novels to read, textbooks to study, or any number of other printed media.
"But what about the harm to books and to the confidence of new authors happening RIGHT NOW.... what do we do BEFORE we have a system of direct compensation in place?"
Educate new authors about direct compensation, discuss what Stephen King tried, and start building those direct compensation systems and online communities for authors and their fans. Such communities already exist for illegal books, missing only the payment component, so I think it is fair to assume that a community for legal books, complete with a payment system, would be successful. All that is needed is for a few great authors to try it out, to release good stories that people will pay to have revealed, and new authors will start trying it for themselves. We already have the technology necessary to start building such communities, it just has not been combined into a coherent system yet.
Palm trees and 8
Let's start with the facts:
1.Information can be copied at virtually no cost.
2.The benefit of an intellectual work is multiplied by the number of people who use it.
3.Creating intellectual works has a cost.
The current system tries to satisfy 3 by limiting 1 in order to make the work behave more like a physical object, so that people will have to pay to get the work. Limiting 1 greatly reduces 2, and has all sorts of collateral damage.
If we leave 1 intact, intellectual works have a far greater benefit to everyone. The challenge is to come up with a way to satisfy 3, without harming 1 and 2. The free-market solution to problems like this is to allow market participants to come up with innovative solutions. Those that solve the problem best stand to make the most profit, so there is incentive.
With the current sub-optimal system in place, there is no incentive to come up with a free-market solution, since the current system is effectively subsidized by taxes, and it even makes it dangerous not to play, due to the possibility of frivolous lawsuit. There is no justification for the current system, because it's been created almost entirely to benefit a small group of people, and it's been done at a cost of everyone's property rights. And no, ideas aren't property. Property is a way of dealing with conflict over scarce resources; if a resource isn't scarce, then everyone can use it without conflict. So it's not that "I have to come up with an alternate", it's that "you have to justify your continued infringement of my property rights".
When has Stephen King ever known where to take a story? Life's too short to read King.
However, his royalties may. Sooner or later we will have to consider, as a culture, what to do if established authors, and promising young authors, decide to abandon writing because too many freeloaders reduce author profits below subsistence. I'm not talking about the **AAs, I'm talking about individual authors who may have contracts with reputable publishing houses that do not insist on exploitive relationships. And what about the psychological deterrent to creativity? JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book in desperation on welfare. Might she have done so if she believed her work would be distributed freely without any compensation to her?
The writers need to adapt. Back in the 1800s, hugely successful authors like Charles Dickens used serials to captivate audiences. Each person needed to buy each issue of the magazine to continue reading the story, and later it would be published in a book if it was a success. Today, that is relatively rare in traditional publishing, though it does still happen with manga.
Perhaps established writers can do what Stephen King did when he distributed an e-book, he would release a new part after certain sales were met. Or perhaps they can sell chapters to put on various profitable blogs. Perhaps they can release things in blogs themselves.
For every story about an author not making enough money on a book, there are ten more examples to counteract it. The creator of XKCD survives only on XKCD merchandise. And XKCD is marketed exclusively to open source culture. The comic itself isn't updated daily, and theres no ads on the page. Sounds like a recipe for failure right? No, because people liked it, it survived. Surely then the tale of Homestar Runner would be one that ends in failure as they are all hard-to-do Flash animations with lots of bandwidth, yet the creators still make a living, still make new cartoons and recently released several video games based on it. All this while no ads on the page. There are many other sites that make a living for the author, User Friendly, CTRL+ALT+DEL, MegaTokyo, and Penny Arcade and more all make a living for their authors.
Do we want promising youths to avoid careers in writing because online distribution has hurt profitability? Would J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Norman Mailer have enriched our lives if they needed other jobs? And Robert Heinlein said that many of his stories were written "to buy groceries".
Promising youths are not going to avoid careers in writing because now publishing is free. Look at teenage blogs sometime and you will see more poetry than in an English class, stories, etc. If they write something and the community likes it, the community will sustain it.
Without some requirement to pay for books, would enough people do so?
There is always going to be a market for physical books. Now, 10 years from now, 100 years from now. Its not going anywhere. And those are physical things and can't be duplicated for free.
Since a large part of the US's trade brings our nation income from royalties on Hollywood movies, is it possible we need to make sure what we produce has value in the world market to improve our balance of trade and thereby reduce inflation and unemployment? Of course the answer is yes-- so maybe the question we should be asking is how to puncture the evil media conglomerates (like the **AAs) to make sure the wealth from our nation's creative minds does not unduly concentrate wealth and power.
You are just like the RIAA. You see a -possible- reduction in sales, ignore history and ignore people who don't fit your definition and make a flawed conclusion. A) Before there was any copyright people wrote B) Today, people can release content for free, without ads and still make a living C) E-Books and online publishing increase the amount of writers because it costs no money to get them published and you keep your rights.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Well, these people still need to eat. They need physical goods to be able to do their work. That means they need to get paid.
I have bought four guitars, two amps, cables, effect pedals, a saxophone and a clarinet, pooling together summer job wages, birthday gifts, savings of allowances, et cetera. I've been in a recording studio twice; I've performed on the local town square once, and at several events locally. Back when I was a kid (~14-18yo) and didn't have any real money.
Musicians want to play. Actors want to act. Writers want to write.
The publishers acted as quality assurance; they did searching and pruning, so we could have the best art. You know what also does that? A moderation system (/.). A review system (amazon). A simple counting mechanism ("most downloaded this day/week/month/year").
None of them are perfect. So aren't the studios. And some artists already choose a life of material poverty in return for wealth in terms of self-expression and self-actualization.
Exactly why is it that the people's need for art can't be satisfied well enough this way? Some amateurs are really good. Oh, so we'll go to the theatre and look at people rather than go to the cinema and look at screens, because making films is rather resource-intensive (i.e. expensive). Or we'll watch more shorts and/or more animated films. Won't we still be entertained?
'The MARKET' does not have copyright, if you want to argue about 'the MARKET', pick a field that doesn't have government protected monopolies.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
But what about the harm to books and to the confidence of new authors happening RIGHT NOW.... what do we do BEFORE we have a system of direct compensation in place?
Oh, Cry me a river. Really - if 80% of all the authors producing today simply stopped, would anyone notice? This hugely precious literary ecosystem you seem to speak of doesn't and has never existed - it's a figment of a money-grubbing, Disneyfied publishing industry.
Ever been in the fiction section of a bookshop in the last 75 years? Almost all of what's on the shelves is deriviative garbage published by a miniscule number of gatekeepers desperate to reproduce the last blockbuster than sold more than 10,000. JK Rowling?? Without too much subjectivity, JK Rowlings books are complete shit! Fiction publication is like music publication: for every vapid block-buster there are literally thousands of similar works (some arguably far better) that barely sell much over a couple of thousand copies in their entire print runs despite ridiculous marketing efforts.
Meanwhile, really worthwhile books will always get written because the energies of art and intellectual freedom will always far outweigh trivial economic consideration. For one thing, what do you think authors did before the perpetual copyright we have today? Do nobody bother to write books before 1850?
The time is ripe for change. Piracy will decimate the money-grubbing, Disneyfied publishing industry and not a moment too soon. Don't fancy making tuppence from your pipsqueak idea for a murder mystery? Get a proper job!
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
I think he clearly understands it quite well, or at least its sociological effect. The concept of "artistic ownership" is an unfortunate consequence of an economic system that commidifies everything, even ideas. Open source represents something outside of capitalist production, producing for use value instead of exchange value.
Open source culture has indeed spread the idea that ideas shouldn't be treated like property, and should be proud that it demonstrates an alternative.
Property is theft.