|
Unless I've managed to miss it, nobody really seems to be talking about the actual relationship between free downloading of books and its effect of sales; ie, is there any evidence that downloading of ebooks is negatively affecting the purchase of the paper variety?
Since the whole point of any discussion about copyright infringement (not bloody 'piracy') is whether or not an author is losing out on income from downloads of their work, doesn't it make sense to talk about whether or not that's actually the case? The first Harry Potter book was published in mid-1997, shortly after the internet as we know it now first started to enter the general public consciousness. According to some of the arguments concerning copyright infringement, J.K. Rowling should be a pauper living on soup by candlelight since, presumably, nobody would bother buying any of her books over the last decade if they could download them free online instead. Similarly, nobody would bother going to the cinemas to see the related films because ... etc.
Yet despite this, and despite the fact every one of her books hits the 'net about as fast as you can say 'Microsoft Windows sucks', her personal wealth is in the reported region of three hundred million British pounds.
But let's not concern ourselves with the authors who are startlingly rich; let's look at the facts as regards authors who aren't so much in the public mind. Tor are giving away free books. Is this resulting in lower sales for those authors? In the majority of cases, apparently not. I haven't yet heard of anyone saying their sales suddenly dropped. Many authors, including Cory Doctorow, who is highly and vocally critical of anti-'piracy' laws, report a boost in sales as the result of putting a creative commons license on certain of their work. Apparently this is also the case for other authors who don't have nearly as high a profile as Doctorow (editor of the Boing Boing website).
Surely the focus over the legality of c.i. should be not on technical or moral questions but rather on: who wins, who loses? If the evidence supplied by those supposedly most at risk from c.i. is that they are in fact benefiting from free downloads of their work, then what exactly is the point of arguing? When an entire publishing company (Baen.com) puts a large part of their work online for free and claims to benefit from it, where is the threat many see as implicit in downloading?
If we were really concerned with getting money to people who work creatively, we would need to close down every secondhand bookshop; threaten every charity shop that sells secondhand paperbacks with legal action; exhort schools to prevent children lending each other cd's and books in the playground. I'd say close down the libraries too, except that in the UK and some other places you actually do get something back if you're an author. If pirated ebooks were a real threat, publishers and booksellers in the UK and US would be calling for a ban on electronic reader devices instead of re-gearing their websites to sell content to them.
Follow the money. Who benefits? The public, the authors, or the publishers? Or do all of them have something to gain?
PS: I've had a look at some of those pirated OCR'd texts floating about the darknet, and believe me, they're no threat to anyone. They're not proofread, they're badly formatted, and sometimes barely legible. Nobody except a very few dedicated souls are going to actually read them. Most people will wait until they can get something properly formatted, proofread and legal they can download for a reasonable fee (if the publishers charge a sane price).
My conclusion: there is no threat.
|