Book Piracy — Less DRM, More Data

macslocum writes "Ambiguity surrounds the real impact of digital book piracy, notes Brian O'Leary in an interview with O'Reilly Radar, but all would be better served if more data was shared and less effort was exerted on futile DRM. 'The publishing industry should be working as hard as we can to develop new and innovative business models that meet the needs of readers. And what those look like could be community-driven. I think of Baen Books, for example, which doesn't put any DRM restrictions on its content but is one of the least pirated book publishers. As to sales, Paulo Coelho is a good example. He mines the piracy data to see if there's a burgeoning interest for his books in a particular country or market. If so, he either works to get his book out in print or translate it in that market.'"

Comments

The real problem with ebooks

[Anonymous Coward]

The other major problem with ebooks is that the selection outside of the US is shocking. Most stores refuse to sell to us, the others will have something like "This book is not available in your region" for most of their titles.

Re:The real problem with ebooks

[lahvak]

When I got a nook for christmas, I was looking forward for buying bunch of books from the country where I grew up. I would like to read some of the books that are being published there now, but shipping them across the ocean is pretty expensive. I was extremely disappointed by the small amount of ebooks that are available. In addition, when I tried to buy some, it turned out I would have to have a mobile phone number in that country. The only books that are available to me are either free out of copyright books that were digitized by libraries or volunteers, or pirated and illegally digitized books.

When the pirated content is higher quality

[thue]

If you decide to only sell DRMed books, then you are selling a lower quality product than the pirates are given away. DRM can be a huge bother.

So I hope they are taking into account people who would have bought a non-DRMed ebook, but will pirate ebooks if only DRMed ebooks are available for sale.

Baen

[sjpadbury]

In all fairness, one of the reasons there's such a low piracy rate on Baen's books is that they are free to distribute as long as you don't charge for them

Baen on their own website has many first books in series available: http://www.baen.com/library/

Also, they've released CD's of books in many of their hardcovers over the years, with a license that allows copying, including online. One site that has them available is http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/

The only versions of their books that are electronically available and not allowed to be distributed are the ones purchased at http://www.webscription.net/

Odd that books have so much DRM

[Junta]

Music has by and large ditched DRM efforts on purchased content (may still factor in subscription/streaming services, I'm not paying much attention there. I think music has found a comfortable low price point that renders the point mostly moot. Music may be DRMed on streaming, and the best protection their is that a lot of people who would deobfuscate their stuff have no motivation to since purchases aren't afflicted by DRM. It's almost reaching a point of sanity, that the per-unit cost can be brought low because the distribution overhead is minimal (even more minimal without DRM) and the production cost is sizable, but not horribly bad.

Books, on the other hand are still DRMed by the dominant vendors. They also charge outrageous amounts and want to compare the price to the hardcover editions, completely ignoring the fact that per-unit cost is next to nothing compared to even paperback. They don't even have a significant up-front cost to recover (Movies/TV have actors/sets/etc, music has engineers and sound studios that are really needed for respectable sound, books don't *need* much more than a diligent author with a computer, though editors and artists frequently help). The DRM on at least the epub stuff is laughably easy to remove (because without removing it, it's pretty damn hard to actually put it on many devices, so they get a large volume of people out to get it). I wonder if publishers are keeping prices high and the distribution overly complicated just to slow down the electronic market because they know full well they play a negligible role if distribution becomes trivial to do.

Re:Odd that books have so much DRM

[Junta]

Sorry, but $3 for something that takes a year or more to create isn't much money.

That argument would make sense if incremental cost were the dominating factor or even a major contributer. Even if a paperback costs 50 cents to create as an incremental cost, that's still probably two orders of magnitude higher than a digital version. With negligible incremental cost, you can play all sorts of games with the demand curve and so talking about an individual purchase without the context of how that price increases/decreases volume of units sold is kind of pointless. If hypothetically charging $5 gets you 10,000 copies, but $1 got you one million copies, then $1 *is* a lot of money for a man-year of work, it's even more than $5. It's hard to play those games with even mass-market paperback, because you need to guess pretty well in advance what the required run will be or else get eaten alive by the incremental costs.

And if you want to bring up paperback pricing, nearly any book on Amazon in paperback form is available for basically the same price as an ebook

I consider this to be unreasonable. If I were going to buy an eBook and get no physical copy, I should benefit from the decreased cost from not having to create the book and carry stock that may or may not sell. If you insist on gouging me for the eBook, then I should be able to buy a physical book and be entitled to an eBook copy to go with it. If you insist on new-release pricing being high, then do hardcover only and save the e-book for paperback time. An 'early adopter' for a book getting a hardback at least gets a product with extra value that persists after the paperback comes out, but the eBook edition will be *identical* before and after a hypothetical price drop, leaving the original purchaser with nothing tangible to show after that arbitrary point.

Finally, I'm tired of people only looking at costs and using that to justify piracy.

I'm not doing that, my stance is abstain from the industry. I feel the need to make it known why I'm almost abstaining from the market (have taken advantage of some appropriately priced ebooks when they are on 'special'), and how I (and presumably others like me) could be persuaded to participate. Pricing is one issue and DRM is another. DRM makes it damn near impossible for law-abiding (since DMCA screwed over fair use) people to do things like move a book from their Nook to a new Kindle they got, but it's absolutely useless at deterring unauthorized copies for people willing to break laws (just run two commands and poof, all DRM gone from your eBook library).

There's more to any business than per-unit costs. And if you think you're entitled to everything at cost, just go into MacDonalds and try paying a dime (cost) for a Coke.

Well, for one, I won't pay the $2.50 many restaurants charge for tea or soft drink and instead go for water. But in the larger scheme, incremental cost is a key factor in contrasting digital distribution from physical distribution. The cost of producing a copy, of stocking surplus, of risking spending money on copies that will never sell, of shipping that stuff all over the place, that cost is significant and yet consumers don't see any significant savings at all by participating in a model that saves the vendor and publisher from all of that.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[Korin43]

Because if the only way for me to load text onto a text reader is to buy it an inflated price from the company's book store, then I'm just not going to purchase the device..

Isn't that exactly what the publishing companies want? Ebooks are a threat to the publishers' bottom lines. They're easy to share, they don't get old or fall apart, and authors can self-publish for basically nothing. Anything they can do that make ebooks unpopular keeps them relevant a little longer.

Situation in Spain

[Superken7]

Let me briefly explain what the current situation in Spain is and why it drives me nuts.

Over here in Spain all ebooks are sold and advertised as ePUB, until you notize its not really ePub, but Adobe DRMed ePUB. I think Barnes&Noble does the same. And there are lots of other platforms that use Adobe DRM to encrypt their PDF files.

It drives me nuts that adobe has such a high penetration in the ebook DRM market because they don't have tools for most platforms. AFAIK no official readers exist for any platform beyond Windows or Mac, which is great (sarcasm) given how many portable platforms exist nowadays (Symbian, BlackBerry, Android, iOS)

What good is using ePub if you are going to encrypt it in a proprietary format? I don't know why they took the time to advertise it in PDF and ePub (the two "biggest" and most popular cross platform formats) if they are going to screw everything up by turning it into a proprietary file.

I for one will avoid DRM ebooks, and like with movies and music, will just buy it from places where there is no DRM. If no such places exist then they have already lost because I'll just look through the net for hacked .epubs, simple as that. And if that happens too often I will just stop looking for legitimate ebook shops and start downloading everything. Maybe some people don't agree morally, but I am okay with it, and reality is most people will do the same...

I should mention that over here in Spain, amazon does not offer any spanish ebooks, same goes for the iBooks store and google books, all books are sold as a DRMed download and you need to register at Adobe Digital Editions, then register AGAIN at the online store where you are buying your books at (there is no "central store" like amazon.com, they tried to replicate the physical stores fragmentation to the online world), then validate your content with your device - granted thats even possible - its not possible for any android device for example, and THEN you are able to read your book, if you are lucky

It just amazes me how an industry that has been able to learn from the music industry and then the movies industry is so slow at adopting what consumers want.

Just my 2c, :P

DRM is impossible

[harl]

It's impossible for DRM to work. The customer has to have both the lock and the key or they can't use what they paid for[1]. If the customer has both the lock and the key then it's impossible for DRM to protect anything.

What vendors need to realize is that a lot of piracy is done simply because they can. When the cost of acquiring things is literally 4 seconds of your time you go crazy and acquire all sorts of shit that you will never use.

Is the cost of the DRM more than the lost sales? Yes piracy does generate some very small number of lost sales but not a significant amount.

Stop catering to non customers!

[1]Yes there are central server methods but until we have 100% uptime wireless, usable anywhere, with central servers that have 100% uptime forever this method will never work.

Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy.

[faedle]

You might be looking at the wrong end of the dog.

Plain text eBooks (or ones using open unDRMed formats) represent a threat. However, book publishers have found a way to have their cake and eat it too with DRM.

Through DRM, they eliminate the used market and lending, make it a challenge to share, and through obsolescence of the hardware will "get old and fall apart." Also, authors can't self-publish as easily, because while there's nothing stopping anybody from making a .mobi file that will load on just about everybody's platform, it won't have any of the DRM protections and none of the distribution advantage.

With DRM, eBook readers are a publisher's wet dream. /Disclaimer: I actually own and read books on a Kindle. I'm part of the problem.

Re:I love my Kindle

[Anonymous Coward]

But just like with Apple and the itunes, Amazon is never going to convince me that the DRM they use is for my own good. It's about control and monopolies and always has been. (And yes I know itunes is DRM-free now that the ipod dominates the market).

It seems like revisionist history to imply that Apple put DRM on iTunes because they wanted to. What evidence we have indicates the contrary - Apple wanted to be DRM-free, but the record labels wouldn't allow it.

Then please stop trying to revise histroy. Apple always wanted DRM (their whole OS is DRMed on a hardware level. Want to install OSX on non-Apple hardware? Lots of cracks needed. The OSX DRM is to check to make sure its Apple only hardware.) Apple only got rid of its DRM in its music because Amazon was in the final steps of getting the labels to agree that they would be able to sell DRM music on Amazon.com (look when Jobs wrote that letter declaring 'Oh we don't like DRM, we were strong armed...' a few months before Amazon started selling DRM free music). Apple had to drop the DRM in response to the threat Amazon was about to cause. Because if Apple really didn't want DRM they would remove it from every other digital product on iTunes. They just don't though because they love DRM, helps lock you to them.

Re:Why I pirate books

[hawguy]

Because it's an absolute SIN that they charge the same or more than the dead tree version of the product. The costs are so much less compared to physical books -- no distribution costs, printing costs, materials cost, less middle men costs, etc.

But if you look at it from the publisher's point of view, he doesn't see a $1 eBook sale as a new $1 of revenue, instead he sees it as a $20 hardcover that didn't sell.

So he charges $10 for the eBook to make up for the fact that eBooks are eating into his paper book sales. Worse, he's still got to maintain that whole paper distribution model, but now instead of a title selling 100,000 paper books, it's only selling 70,000 so his cost per paper book is increasing making it more important to make up the revenue in eBooks.

The advent of eBook readers may expand his market and let him sell more total books than before, but that's not a given and I don't think that's proven to be the case (yet). I suspect that the eBook early adopters are many of the same readers that would have bought the new release at a bookstore.

Re:Kindle is a great example

[Moryath]

Book "piracy" (e.g. rampant copying) has been going on for ages now. At the same time, I can't object to much of what happens with it.

I'm a collector of roleplaying system books. A large number of them are out of print. A sizable majority, not only are they out of print, the publisher itself is long gone. My options are to scour secondhand markets and convention auctions like nobody's business, but that can't find everything. Eventually, just to archive them and keep them around in case they get requested for reference, "piracy" is the last-and-only resort.

It's not half as good as having the physical book in my hand, but it's better than being unable to find the material. And when traveling to a distant convention, sometimes it's a "necessary evil" in order to transport the material in a 6-lb laptop rather than shipping an 80-lb suitcase back and forth.

Now, I'd be willing to pay $1-2 more to get a PDF copy of the book along with the print copy, but the same can't be said for Kindle/Nook/etc formats. Why? Because I have NO guarantee that there'll be a good reader for them 10 years from now. I'm hauling around (in some cases) 20 year old material here, I know I'll still be able to read a PDF a decade from now because it's non-DRM'ed, but the same can't be said for the DRM-laden formats.

Re:I love my Kindle

[jedidiah]

> It seems like revisionist history to imply that Apple put DRM on iTunes because they wanted to.

      Except for the fact that the music on iTunes is only the tip of a very big iceberg. Or at least it should be.

      It's fascinating how the blindered Apple fanboys ignore all of the other stuff on iTunes not to mention
everyone's old files that are still locked down unless you pay an extra fee to unlock them.

      There's DRM in audio books, books, video, phone apps and desktop apps.

      Apple's music is swimming in a sea of DRM including some stuff that is entirely under Apple's control.

Apple benefits greatly from that lock-in and the fact that you are forever married to them and the fact that
you must continue buying their hardware if you ever want to play the stuff you "own" ever again.

Re:Baen Books

[Unkyjar]

I disagree entirely.

I would say that while their entire library is science fiction and fantasy, very little of the Baen library is "hard" science fiction/fantasy. It's much lighter reading than that, but then again I probably read more Sci/Fi and Fantasy than you so it's really hard to mark where your tolerance is for prose since you cite no examples of texts you tried.

I will however point out that Tor, Harper/Collins, DAW, Del Rey, are all publishing the same quality books and authors as Baen. And you'll find that ALL paperback books can be found in used bookstores for a dollar if they're older than 10 to 15 years with a decent print run. It's the nature of the used paperback market itself.

They better not lock out screen readers or the ADA

[Joe The Dragon]

They better not lock out screen readers or the ADA will hit them hard and by law they may be forced to let a screen reader be able to read your book.