As e-readers such as the Amazon Kindle continue to rise, so follows the publishing industry’s worst nightmare: e-book piracy. For years e-book piracy was the exclusive province of the determined few willing to ferret out mostly nerdy textbook titles from the Internet’s dark alleys and read them on their PC. But publishers say that the problem is ballooning as e-readers grow in popularity and the appetite for mainstream e-books grows.
A review of e-books currently available for illicit download confirms that e-book piracy is no longer dominated by technical how-to e-books but includes best-selling authors Janet Evanovich, John Grisham, and James Patterson. PCWorld found that one-third of Publishers Weekly’s 2009 top 15 best-selling fiction books were available for illicit download through a growing variety of book-swapping sites, file-sharing services, and peer-to-peer networks.
More from PC World.
Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolut
Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution
by: Tim O’Reilly
The continuing controversy over online file sharing sparks me to offer a few thoughts as an author and publisher. To be sure, I write and publish neither movies nor music, but books. But I think that some of the lessons of my experience still apply.
http://openp2p.com/lpt/a/3015
Why The eBook Industry Needs More Piracy
Why The eBook Industry Needs More Piracy
Bobbie Johnson, over at the Guardian, does an excellent job of explaining why ebooks really haven’t taken off yet: there’s just not enough piracy going on. With the launch of the second generation of Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader, we’re getting another round of stories about ebooks. They’ve done marginally better recently, but the Kindle is hardly making strides that match with the iPod — a device to which it’s frequently compared.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090210/0344063716.shtml
Beautiful Children
The book “Beautiful Children” was released as a PDF free from the book’s website. I have a copy of the PDF. The book got a decent amount of press coverage and was downloaded by lots of people. Go to Google and try to find a copy of the PDF of Beautiful Children. I looked for awhile and cannot find a copy.
Point being that piracy is not a problem for all books. Here was a book that the publisher made available electronically for free and a year after the promotion you cannot find a copy of the book on the web.
Download page for book.
Used copy for a penny
You can buy a used copy on Amazon for .01. Add in shipping and the book will be on your doorstep for $4. The author gets nothing and this is perfectly legal. The messed up print publishing model creates a system of remainder books that creates a cheap (almost free) supply of books on the market. For the cost of shipping you can get one of these books without having to pay the author a cent.
I can buy the book on the Kindle for $9.99 and the author gets something. If publishers are so worried about profits they need to do something about remainder books instead of worrying about digital piracy.
Beautiful Children: A Novel
on Amazon for one cent. Buy a paper copy and give the author nothing.
the author gets nothing?
I don’t understand that. Did the author get paid something for the book, or was he beaten until he finished typing?
I think some authors (creators) expect to be paid in volume for each time the product changes hands. If I see “Joe” perform at a club, Joe gets paid either part of the cover collected or a flat rate. If he negotiates a flat rate, he still got paid regardless of how many or how few people he played to. Can Joe approach all the people who arrived above the expected number and ask them to cough up a few bucks because his flat rate doesn’t match the number who enjoyed his performance?
and how does the remainder trade work? does the author get royalties on those books? however small? really, I have no idea how that works.
and the used book market is just a bad analogy. again, does the author expect to be paid by each person who enjoyed his work? like Joe at the club? or like a street performer? we have no contract to pay the street performer who chooses to give his talent away for free in the hope of some payment. unless you mean extortion where the street performer has thug friends who force you to pay… are these authors attempting to extort money from each reader of his books?
why don’t authors demand flimsier publishing materials so the books fall apart of the ink disintegrates when exposed to light? then we couldn’t resell the books for one penny.
I think it makes perfect sense that the level of ebook piracy is not fully saturated… just like with music, we have a balance between what is stolen and what is purchased and vendors establish a price to absorb the theft, meaning the more popular songs cost more than a buck but the least popular might cost 89 cents.
eventually, when we see just how many pirated books are traded, the industry will figure out a pricing strategy which accounts for that theft. until then, we don’t know enough about ebooks and piracy.
so the answer is to start stealing now and help the publishing industry figure this out.