Pirated digital books

And I buy from them whenever I find something I like.

 

Yeah, some around here as well, and one I go to in Arizona when I'm there that is very nice and appears to be doing quite well, based on the size and look of their store, number of employees, and number of people I see in there whenever I'm there.

 

Definitely not illegal in the U.S. It is allowed under the First Sale Doctrine of U.S. copyright law. There is a strong bias in the law against restraints on alienation of property.

 

One key reason that kind of culture works in tech is because writing something open source can often, indirectly, be translated into writing something for money. Like you said, it's a great thing to put on your CV.

If you want that kind of culture to spread to authors, they need the same kind of incentives. When they're writing all this stuff for free, they've still got mortgages and rent and kids to feed. It doesn't even really work as practice, since writing a novel is a rather different beast from writing, say, a newspaper column or some other form of writing they might get paid for.

Do you have any ideas on how we might give them those kind of incentives?

 

...buh? No. No. The fact that the book may state that it can't be resold, or loaned, or that you have to perform an interpretive dance in praise of Random House for every hundred pages read, doesn't make those demands legally valid or enforceable.

It's not just "socially" acceptable. Libraries are legal, and the sale of used books is legal. Period. First sale doctrine. This was recently upheld by the Supreme Court even in the fuzzy case of works sold cheaply abroad and resold in the US.

If the owner of a collection of books dies, would you burn those books, rather than allow them to be used by anyone else?

The very idea that copyright should be used to make it illegal for books to have a second owner strikes me as very, very frightening.

 

Why is it bad? And are you talking about libraries or used bookstores?

Libraries buy their books. I walked into a Portland public library recently and saw STACKS of the same popular books--five or ten of the same book in some cases--on the "New!" shelf. Why are those sales bad for writers?

Without libraries, people who can't afford to both buy books and pay their rent would not be able to read books. Libraries allow people to read. They create readers. Without libraries, the book-reading, and therefore the book-buying, population would be smaller.

Without libraries, tax money wouldn't be going to buying books. You absolutely cannot assume that the people who borrow those books from the library would have bought them. You absolutely cannot assume that the ability to browse bookshelves, seeing the works of hundreds of authors, dipping into one and then the other, doesn't introduce people to new authors and cause them to buy books by those authors.

And the same, though to a lesser extent, is true of used bookstores. Used bookstores give people an opportunity to discover new authors affordably. They allow people to read books that are out of print, and many of those people will then seek the in-print works of those books' authors.

A society where reading is a luxury that only some can afford IS NOT GOOD FOR WRITERS. A society where only the very latest things that are still in print can be found and read, where everything that isn't still making a profit vanishes from view, IS NOT GOOD FOR WRITERS. And it's not good for society.

My head's going to explode.

Edited to clarify: My head's going to explode at the idea that used bookstores, and libraries, libraries LIBRARIES FOR GOD'S SAKE ONE OF THE CORNERSTONES OF A FREE AND EDUCATED SOCIETY are equivalent to piracy.

SHEESH.

 

I don't use the public libraries much any more, but I used to use them a lot and discovered many writers whose books I would never have purchased. I've since gone on to buy books from those authors. A lot of them.

 

I like libraries, too, and I love that site you can go to that searches libraries and tells you which ones have your books - every time I see one of mine listed, I get a thrill. Someday I'll see one of mine on the shelf in person, and it'll be another exciting landmark as an author! (I'm hoping to get the 'saw it in a random bookstore' thrill this August!). So, maybe that's just an emotional argument, and maybe I should get the same thrill when I see my books listed on pirate sites, but... I really, really don't.

I think the practical argument that makes sense for me is that I used to work in a library, and I know that books were generally replaced or weeded out after ten-twenty loans, on average. People just aren't that careful with library books, and they don't want to sign out ones that look grungy. So when we saw book checked back in looking beat up, we'd decide whether they were popular/classic enough that we still wanted them in our collection, and if we did, we'd buy another copy. So that's a ratio of 10-20 readers:1 purchase, while the pirate sites could be thousands and thousands of readers:sometimes no purchase, if they lifted an ARC, which they often do.

So, I'm yay libraries, boo pirates, and I'm comfortable with my reasoning.

 

If your father pays taxes, then he has paid for many library books.

Are you under the impression that libraries seize their books through government power, or something? Libraries pay for the books that they offer. Pay money. To publishers. Who pay royalties to authors. Libraries are an income source for authors. Libraries represent a non-trivial percentage of book sales. Why do you want to deprive those authors of those sales?

No copyrighted works have entered the public domain in the United States for quite some time, because Congress continues to extend copyright. It's entirely possible that no copyrighted work will enter the public domain in the United States ever again.

Even if copyright weren't constantly being extended, copyright lasts for many, many decades.

You seem to be assuming that libraries are only for pleasure reading, and that public domain works--that is, works that are several decades years old--are sufficient for that. How much good is a decades-old book going to be for a person who wants to learn computer programming? History? Modern literature?

How many people will use libraries if they offer only decades-old books? Who is going to publish those books that are so old that no one is willing to pay for them? You seem to be saying that libraries are OK, as long as we ensure that they offer nothing of value.

 

Used car sales, taxis, and mass transit deprive the manufacturers of new cars of revenue.

Home cooking deprives restaurants of revenue.

Public schools deprive private for-tuition schools of revenue.

Sale of homes that are not newly built deprive contractors of revenue.

Garage sales deprive all sorts of industries of revenue.

People's selfish insistence on wearing their clothes more than once deprives clothing manufacturers of revenue.

Amateur entertainment like church choirs and school plays deprive singers, musicians, and actors of revenue.

The existence of sunglasses deprives the manufacturers of migraine pills of revenue.

Selling Band-Aids and antiseptic without a prescription deprives medical professionals of revenue.

Libraries might (though I doubt it) deprive publishers and authors of revenue.

We're not changing any of these funamental, long-established aspects of society to safeguard that revenue.

 

I would be ecstatic if my book ends up in the library. I plan to donate some print on demand copies to the local branch if my book ends up being good enough they would want it. I think the additional exposure is worth the cost of a few lost sales.

I can't imagine anyone's income as an author has been significantly impacted by library copies. The library tends to mostly carry better selling books, when it comes to fiction anyway.

I'm willing to be shown I'm wrong if there is some evidence of that fact.

 

I think a lot of publishers disagree. I know that some of mine are quite aggressive about getting access to the library sales market. I assume they wouldn't be pushing that hard if they thought they were hurting their sales by selling to libraries.

 

What I think you don't understand is that I find the idea that libraries should be banned, or the idea that books should not be loaned or passed on to a new owner, to be just as ludicrous.

Libraries are a deep and fundamental part of an educated society.

Eliminating all modes of transportation that don't require a new car purchased by only one owner, would increase the revenue of the car manufacturers, and would pay a lot of people. And it would also undermine countless other elements of society. It would make transportation a luxury available only to the already-prosperous, make many forms of transportation actually illegal, and make it all but impossible for the not-yet-prosperous to become prosperous. It would be horrible, unthinkable, ludicrous.

Eliminating libraries and eliminating the loaning and resale of books is similarly horrible, unthinkable, ludicrous. Knowledge is not a luxury, to be permitted only to the already-prosperous. When we change our society so that it is, we risk damaging it irreparably.

And making knowledge a luxury would reduce the market for knowledge. Protecting authors from the re-use of books would, in the end, be protecting authors right out of a job.

 

Hmm. Yes, I hadn't really considered, but it would be fairly easy for publishers to drastically reduce their books' availability in libraries. They could refuse direct sales to libraries, write contracts that require their distributors to refuse sales to libraries--they could make getting their books into libraries difficult enough that most of their books would indeed not be in libraries. But the libraries are still full of books, so presumably they don't do that.

 

You said--unless I misunderstood--that libraries should only provide public domain or old information.

That would make libraries essentially useless. So while the libraries could still legally exist, and be legal, and people might go in there to get out of the rain, their function would be essentially eliminated.

As well, public domain information and information too old to provide publisher profits won't be published, so the libraries won't have books, unless they print their own.

So your suggestions wouldn't ban them, they would just make them useless and impossible, which adds up to essentially the same thing. There would be no reason to provide public funding for these now-useless libraries, so they would gradually be eliminated.

If you're not saying that libraries should only provide public domain or old information, what are you saying?

 

There's a reason publishers like to get books noticed by libraries. In 2012, libraries in the U.S. spent $1.2 billion on their collections, around 63% of which was for print books. That's not insignificant money, and I doubt that individuals who use libraries would make up the difference if libraries stopped buying this stuff.

http://www.ala.org/tools/libfactsheets/alalibraryfactsheet04

 

...buh?

So the authors of nonfiction don't get this special protection? What about their income? Why are fiction writers so special? And where is all this public domain fiction going to come from?

 

Do you not realize that there are tons and tons of nonfiction books written for entertainment?

And, again, do you realize that libraries pay for their books? I haven't gotten clear acknowledgement of that yet. You know that libraries don't get their books for free, right?

Edited to add: Also, education often involves literature. Fiction.