Quote:
Originally Posted by vaughnmr
You ommitted several reasons that pirates exist:
1) ebooks are simply not available, the publishers won't release them. You can buy the book, but you can't read it on your ereader.
2) ebooks can't be released due to copyright (including orphan) issues. The ebook is in a legal la-la land, no one can do anything with it, usually for a long, long time. Long after you die, for sure.
3) you can't buy the ebook because of where you live.
4) ebook quality is so bad that properly formatted pirate copies are easier to read. Really doesn't make sense, but that is probably the case a lot of the time.
|
I've just come to this thread from another thread which concerns the problems newspapers are having, & their use of paywalls to try & make some money off of digital editions. And as I was reading some of the posts in this thread, it occurred to me that book publishers and newspaper publishers actually have different ends of the same problem (how to get people to pay) and that
both are trying to sell the wrong thing.
That is, both book publishers and newspaper publishers are trying to sell is content. Thus, DRM, which protects (or tries to protect) content. Thus, paywalls, which is trying to protect content as well.
But what they really should be selling is convenience and accessibility
to content. In other words, they are doing exactly the wrong thing, because they don't understand that in the digital world, content simply cannot be protected successfully over time.
In the newspaper world, publishers should be developing applications which serve content to the reader in a fashion that makes it usable in the digital world - bookmarking, archiving, linking, blogging, &c., all pushed to the reader, with updates, alerts, weather warnings, breaking events, video links and who knows what else. This stuff needs to be bundled and sold to readers in a fashion that allows the content itself to be sent anywhere and to anyone. People should come to the News App not for content, but for what the News App
does with content.
Likewise, in the book world, publishers should be making ebooks work not by selling the content, but by selling what is done with the content. I'm not a book clubber myself, but if I were a publisher of ebooks, I'd make it possible to participate in a bookclub from within the book - when you buy the book, you already have a username & password, so why couldn't that be used to keep the privilege of admission to the bookclub to the initial purchaser? I'd make it possible to buy the next book in a series right from the earlier book. I'd set up an ebook of the month club, like the old pbook science fiction book club.
I recently interested in reading a Book that was written in the 1980s. I wanted to browse it before I bought, but I could not find a copy in my local Borders. I checked, and could not find anyone selling the Book in any ebook format, much less one that my edevice could read. So I was forced into a position where I would have had to buy it from Amazon & hope I liked it.
As it happened, I found a used copy, which I bought, and found that I liked. But it is FAT. So I checked the darknet, & found a copy, which I am now reading on my Sony.
Now, see what the publisher could have done for me. The Book could have been on Amazon as a Kindle book, which I could sample. It is a whole lot easier to find a book on Amazon than on the darknet. If I liked it, I could have bought the full copy directly from the sample. Darknet can't do that, even for free. The Book, which is a history book, could have been augmented by links within the Book, or by links to "further reading" which would in turn have sent me samples of those books - which I might have bought back at Amazon. The Book could have had a comment web site associated with it.
It seems to me that most of what is damned as pirating has to do with availability of, and convenient access to and use of, content - not with pricing. As long as publishers attempt to deal with that problem by making their own product less available, harder to use, and less convenient, they are just making pirating more likely to happen.