Pirated digital books

One small thing I think does need attention is that it appears that digital books are still sold by zones. I tried to get a copy of Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand for my Kindle from Amazon (@GingerCoffee should remember this conversation) and the listing popped up, but showed as "unavailable", as though it were a print book that was simply out of stock. Ginger popped into the same Amazon link and lo and behold the book was available for her to purchase because she's snug within the continental United States. Puerto Rico is a limbo zone that often gets left out as regards these kinds of sales. When a little research evinced why I was unable to by the book for my Kindle, all I could think is that this is just asking for pirating. I eventually got the book from an Ozzy seller but only after learning how to spoof my IP and then crossing my fingers that my credit card's billing address (Puerto Rico) would not trip some secondary alarm system.

How many people in situations like mine are going to go through the trouble of doing that? How many people are going to think, "I've no recourse left save for subterfuge and the surreptitious, but I don't want to fuck the author over. What wrong thing can I do that leaves the author unaffected?"

It's been explained to me that books have always been sold this way, by marketing zone or areas or whateverthefuq the correct term is, but frankly it is utterly stupid to continue to employ that sales model in a digital world. It begs for piracy to happen. It implores it. And, as anyone who understands how file sharing sites function will quickly point out, it only takes one copy, one event of piracy, to replicate into an uncontrolled swarm, which try as you may, you will never, ever dig out of the deep web.

 

I agree, that's something that should be addressed. But most of my books are available all over the world, no DRM, none of the other things people use as justification for piracy... and they still get pirated - they're generally posted on the pirate sites the first day they're released. So while we should for sure remove as many barriers to legit sales as possible, I don't think that's going to be nearly enough.

 

I saved that essay years ago, and managed to lose the author's name. Your snottiness is also an interesting approach, I guess, if not productive. I guess the intelligent discussion is over.

 

The First Sale Doctrine protects them.

I think there are two consequences to e-book piracy:

1) Price depression. If you keep the price of books low enough, there is less incentive for people to pirate. Authors get less per sale, but at least they're getting something; and

2) Greater harm to mid-list/indie writers. The Stephen Kings and J.K. Rowlings are still going to be OK. A lot of traditionally published writers don't make enough to quit their day jobs, and piracy impacts them proportionately more harshly. It is similar to the argument that Taylor Swift made about Apple's plan not to pay artists during a customer's three-month trial period. Sure, she's going to be OK, but emerging artists might not be.

In any event, no matter what kind of economic picture you paint, if you're pirating you're taking the product of another person's many hours of hard work, without their permission and without providing them any compensation for it. That should bother people with a conscience. I don't know what would make anyone think they're simply entitled to something because they want it.

 

Having slept on this overnight, I have come to the conclusion libraries are too important to lump them in with piracy. I have no problem with people borrowing a book that is shared among many. Too many people have access to books they'd never have access to without libraries. Even me, I couldn't afford to buy all the audio books I get from the library.

And many of the books I check out, I do so for research, not to read the book cover to cover. I couldn't afford to buy all those. Should we now consider the information we get from online searches are denying the writers of reference books their due because we aren't buying their books?

And I don't see how second hand book sales should be wrong. One thing that is annoying about my Kindle books is despite buying them, Amazon retains some claim to ownership. They even spy on whether I finished reading the book or not. I find that more disconcerting than someone selling their books that were paid for. Copying and reselling the copies is different from what one does with the copy one paid for.

 

Libraries for physical books and e-books have a number of potential differences. For physical books, they have to acquire the book in the first place, and have it physically on their shelves to lend it out. When one patron has the book, another can't have that same physical copy at the same time.

With ebooks, a library could potentially lend out unlimited copies of an ebook based on one digital copy, which is quite a different scenario. So my understanding of what has been done is that library ebook editions are treated more like physical books in that libraries have to acquire a certain number of "copies" of an ebook (even though it may only be one actual digital copy) and they can only lend out that many copies at a time. So the lending works a bit more like you're dealing with a physical book.

 

It's not so much that it doesn't matter, but rather, it's not something you really need to think about since there is nothing you can do. It's about the same as pondering what you can personally do to stop it from raining on weekends. You can try shouting at the clouds, you can try throwing your shoes at the clouds, you can try asking the clouds nicely to please stop raining, or you can simply accept it. You have no real agency over other people's pirating habits, so you might as well concern yourself with writing/publishing the book and ignore the futile struggle against piracy.

Besides, the idea that piracy is going to topple the entertainment industry is rather over blown. People can already pirate just about anything with minimal effort, but they don't, not everyone at least. There aren't really going to be any technological advances in book piracy in the future since there are no barriers to be broken at this point, so other than sociological changes I don't see any reason to suspect the rates of book piracy are going to rise significantly.

 

Oh the irony, a non-attributed essay passed on. I don't think money changing hands is the only measure of ripping someone off.

However, there's so much stuff out there on the Net that tracing the originator is not always possible. Looking for your "essay" it's no wonder you don't have a source. I found it repeated in three online discussions (and this forum didn't show up which is a reminder not all forums are searchable). I don't fault someone for repeating an essay that likely has no traceable author.

Slashdot had the quote with the earliest date. At least you put quote marks around it, the other two did not. And I don't know if the piece originated with this poster, "Solandri".

[sidetrack] As someone who regularly cites sources of factual claims, just a note abut dueling links. The essay is an opinion piece, and while the original author deserves credit, the source is less important in a 'duel' than it would be were it a competing factual claim. The source of a factual claim is not a trivial thing. [/sidetrack]

 

It's over if you don't want to respond to the rest of the post, I guess. (For what it's worth, I felt like my snottiness was in response to yours, when you refused to supply a source for your assertions about the music industry as if you were making a moral stand against "link wars". Possibly you didn't mean to be snotty with that? I don't know - it's hard for me to imagine how we could have an intelligent conversation in which people can just make up "facts" and not feel the need to support them with evidence, but maybe you were looking for more of a rhetoric-based discussion?)

Anyway, if you want to move past that, I'd still be interested in hearing ideas about what the new distribution model would look like. The quoted article doesn't give anything concrete, and I'm having trouble imagining what the new model would look like.

 

I wasn't meaning to equate libraries to piracy, just pointing out that trade publishers are often setting ebook prices so high that few people are willing to pay them. Those of us who don't pirate books will buy used paperbacks or borrow from the library, those who do pirate will download the book, and the publishers won't reduce prices, they'll complain about EVIL PIRATE HORNSWAGGLERS. Indies mostly set prices low enough that I rarely have to think twice about buying their books.

Obviously some people will pirate regardless, as demonstrated by the number who pirate free ebooks. But they're basically irrelevant, because they'll never buy our books.

 

I don't think you can assume pirates wouldn't buy a book. We don't know how many would and how many wouldn't. I know people who are reading ongoing series and bought all the books up until a point where it became easy to buy them onine for free and then they started down loading them. Those people would almost certainly have bought the book if they couldn't pirate it.

 

I read a comment somewhere I'll paraphrase here, since attempting to search the terms has proven useless.

For more fun, look at this list of things the recording industry has freaked the fuck out about.
http://www.cracked.com/article_18513_5-insane-file-sharing-panics-from-before-internet.html

 

Alternately - it costs, what, $.99 to buy a song off iTunes, and he was going to go to the library to get the CD instead? Or it's too hard for him to get the song off iTunes?, but easy for him to go to the library? No. This wasn't a question of distribution issues or excessive pricing.

This guy was not going to pay for the song, no matter how easy it was to do so. He thinks he's entitled to free music.

It's not a rare mindset, but I don't think it's a good one, not for the health of the music industry and not, if it translates to books, for the health of the publishing industry.

 

It's like a lot of things that change and one must adapt, change is just occurring faster these days.

A lot of my business shifted over the years. I used to teach a lot of employee safety classes but now a lot of my clients use online programs and independent study. But I shifted to more exposure follow up and grew that aspect of the business. All is still well.

Writers will always find a way to monetize their work, just as musicians will, because we don't want to give up writing.

 

When I was a kid, most people had dual cassette tape recorders, which they used to copy tapes. The music industry said the sky was going to fall if they weren't stopped back then, too. Similarly, cracking computer game DRM was a major industry in the school playground, which is probably why so many of those kids went on to work in IT.

Pirates have been about to destroy content-production industries for as long as I've been alive. They've never managed it, because most people are happy to pay a reasonable amount of money for convenient access to content. When you charge too much, or punish legitimate purchasers with DRM, or unskippable 'don't pirate this disk' ads at the start of DVDs, people stop being happy to buy them and download a pirate copy which is free and doesn't treat them like a criminal.

Publishers who hate their customers are the biggest, best friend the pirates have.

 

Or writers will write for free, because we don't want to give up writing.

And maybe it's not a bad thing to have only amateur writers. Maybe being able to make a living at writing is just a luxury.

But as a reader, I want my favourite authors to write full-time. I want them to be able to devote themselves to their craft and keep improving, and I want them to produce work at a reasonable rate so I can stay involved in the story.

 

I don't think there's a real comparison between a single copy of a cassette tape and the unlimited copies of digital files that are happening today.

And if Madonna is making 95% of her income from touring and other artists are giving away albums for free, I think there HAS been a pretty dramatic shift in the music industry. Has the sky fallen? No, I wouldn't say so, but I'd definitely say it's a different colour, and maybe a bit closer to the Earth.

 

1.) This was before iTunes was cheap.
2.) He wanted to listen to the entire CD, hence library.

 

As a reader who cannot remember the last time I paid money for a book (other than textbooks packaged with codes for websites required for class and the rare textbook I could not find online):

I do not think I am philosophically "entitled" to free content. It is a luxury that I take when I can find, and I do not complain when I do not have the luxury of finding a free copy of the content I want.

However, reading pirated books is a pain. There is so much inconsistency: inconsistent requirements for downloading a file (between torrents, filesharing sites with free downloads vs premium accounts, sites that require the user to install a download manager before downloading a file, etc.), inconsistent file formats, inconsistent content formats (between epubs, plain text files, text PDFs, scanned PDFs, OCR PDFs, etc.), inconsistent quality (sometimes OCR is riddled with errors, sometimes paragraph formatting and pagination is wonky, etc.), etc, etc, etc. If I had a job, then I could probably make enough money to buy the damn books in less time than it takes to correct all these inconsistencies manually.

Listening to pirated music was similarly a pain. I almost completely stopped downloading pirated music after I got Spotify. (There is still a bit of music not on Spotify.)

The same is almost true with Netflix and pirated movies/TV shows -- I certainly watch less pirated content than before, but Netflix has a frankly disappointing selection of movies, they lack major shows like all of HBO's shows, and it takes a while for seasons of shows to be released on Netflix. So pirated movies/TV is still a normal thing for me, unlike pirated music; it is just less common than before.

Oyster looks promising. I just found it today, actually. I think I will try it out. It might actually become "Spotify for books" for me.

 

That's disappointing. Do you plan to publish your own writing, or are you exclusively a reader?

 

I hinted at this earlier in the thread, but I have no plans to make money from anything I write. My first priority is that I like what I write and my second priority is that as many people read it as possible.

 

Have you made an effort to find other authors publishing under Creative Commons or similar structures in order to limit yourself to writing that's freely shared, or do you not feel a drive to do that?

 

There're businesses that sell second-hand books that actually make a profit...? I mean, on ebay and amazon, 2nd hand books sell for a penny. Unless it's some first edition of an out of print classic or some antique, I'm rather skeptical that there could really be businesses revolving arounf selling second-hand paperbacks...

I've read pirated books before - I must say, those you find online that you download based on an interesting blurb are almost always a disappointment. I've only found good ones when it's been through publishers or a book I saw in a bookstore but that's too pricey to buy lol.

However, if I want the book enough and can't find it online, sometimes I do end up buying it. But if I do find it pirated online then I likely won't buy it, because I don't usually reread books. To that extent, I'm not sure we could say pirated books are shadow losses, as another member said.

Non-fiction is usually harder to find pirated.

Personally, I'm not sure I'd mind it if my book was pirated. Frankly that someone would deem it worthy to pirate and then to download in the first place is flattering, as I never even expected many people to find my book in the first place! What I care about is my name on the cover. If I'm still known as the author, then it's all right!

 

I feel no drive to do that. I hear about books and become interested in them and then figure out how to acquire them, rather than looking for books I can acquire a certain way and then becoming interested in them.

Interestingly, though, I do use zero-price software instead of pirated non-zero-price software whenever possible. For example, even though I prefer using Microsoft Office over OpenOffice, I still use OpenOffice because I do not have to run pirated software in order to do so. Granted, my reason for that is more to avoid malware than to do the right thing, but still, it shows that there are times when I voluntarily limit myself to non-pirated, zero-price products.

The difference between literature and software is that open source software is ubiquitous. For most general purposes, you can find open source (or at least zero-price) software to do what you need. For some things, e.g. web servers, cryptographic libraries, compilers, etc., open source is the norm and proprietary is the exception. The culture of software development is simply very conducive to experts spending a huge portion of their own time building things for the public good. (Writing open source software is, for example, one of the best things you can put on your CV.) The culture of literature, not so much, apparently.

You said you would like to see a cultural change among readers where piracy becomes abnormal behavior. I would like to see a cultural change among authors where writing quality literature for the public good stops being abnormal and extremely rare behavior. If that happens, then maybe there will be enough free literature to occupy so much of my time that I have no time left to spend reading non-free literature. (Hell, a good chunk of that time is already spent reading older literature that is now in the public domain -- not because it is an alternative to copyrighted literature, but simply because it is good enough to motivate me to spend my time reading it instead of doing something else.)

 

There are several successful second-hand book sellers around here. They don't pay much for one's used books but people still bring them in by the boatload.