Why don’t people care enough about literature to steal it?

Author Steven D. Levitt asked “Why don’t people care enough about literature to steal it?” In a world in which illegal downloading of music is endemic, copyright violations on books are rare.

“My guess is that the answer isn’t really about people not caring enough, but rather because so few people want to read electronic versions of books (where technology makes illegal file sharing very easy), and it is generally too costly for people to print and distribute illegal versions of paper versions of books. The fact that people will pay $25 for a book means they care enough to steal it, if there were just easier ways to steal.“

February 3, 2007 by Uncategorized 5

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5 Responses

  1. GregS* says:
    February 3, 2007 at 1:27 am

    because of libraries
    If there wasn’t already a well established way of obtaining books for free there probably would be a lot more electronic theft.

    Reply
  2. Anonymous Patron says:
    February 3, 2007 at 2:44 am

    I offer a rebuttal
    There’s this thing called Usenet, from which you can download damn near anything. Usenet has newsgroups and they’re titled in accordance with what you can expect to download from that group. There’s tens of thousands of these groups; here are a few of them:

    alt.binaries.e-books
    alt.binaries.e-books.rpg
    alt.binaries.e-books.fantasy
    alt.binaries.e-books.flood
    alt.binaries.e-books.technical

    That’s just a few. There are more, just Google them.

    I get ton of books off of these newsgroups for the low price of free. They’re usually in PDF format. Some are searchable, others not. Some are OCRed, other’s aren’t. You pays your money, you takes your chances.

    Yes they’re new books. Some are just released. You can get other, older stuff too.

    So I wouldn’t say that the “market” isn’t there. It’s just that there isn’t really a Napster or Kazaa for the trade in quasi-legal reading materials. However, just search a decent torrent site, you can still find books. The real goodies are the hard to find titles, stuff that may not be published here in the states. Just as an example, anime art books and Japanese image collections are usually considered to be prime stuff.

    Reply
  3. dcplumer says:
    February 3, 2007 at 2:53 am

    It happens
    There’s actually a fairly significant problem with copyright on books worldwide, perhaps not so much so here in the U.S. China and India have often been criticized because they aren’t following international copyright conventions; you can easily get both physical and digital copies of books there (in grad school, we used to know students who would buy all their textbooks in Asia — same book, photocopied and resold). The last Harry Potter book had been out perhaps 4 hours before scanned copies of it were circulating on the Internet.

    Reply
  4. Anonymous Patron says:
    February 5, 2007 at 1:46 am

    e-books vs audio books
    I haven’t been able to get the linked article to load, so I haven’t read it. Just from reading the post and comments it seems like the discussion is focusing on e-books. I wonder if the statistics hold for audio books that have been ripped and shared in MP3 format. I would think, particularly now with the boom in digital media players (i.e. iPods) the sharing of audio literature would be very high.

    Reply
  5. leo says:
    February 8, 2007 at 12:45 am

    They Do Steal!
    It’s called plagiarism. Gosh, I thought everybody knew that.

    Reply

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