Digital Piracy Hits eBook Industry

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

If you can proof-read a large book in 2 to 3 days, I'm impressed. It takes me 2 to 3 months to properly proof-read one of my Dickens uploads, working at it a couple of hours a day.

But for big releases like Harry Potter books you have a lot of people proof reading it. It is distributed.

[wallcraft]

I agree completely that scanned copies will be available no matter what, but an ebook version does simplify piracy. It is easier to circumvent DRM than to scan and proof read a physical book. The other thing an ebook version does is provide an alternative to piracy (buy the ebook). If a publisher decides to delay publishing in ebook form to reduce piracy they a) don't reduce piracy and b) reduce sales from those of us who only buy in ebook form.

The real test of what publishers are concerned about is what they do, not what they say. Some publishers did take action about geographical ebook rights (they want their slice of the pie, even when they don't have ebook versions yet), but no major publisher has refused to publish ebooks in a particular format because its DRM has been circumvented. Sony even switched from the secure LRX to the circumvented Adobe ePub, and no one seems to have complained.

[omk3]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

It is just a form of hoarding or completism in the digital realm. .

So there's a name for it! Diagnosis is the first step to the cure, isn't it? There's hope yet...

My pirated/free library is several gigabytes big. Are all these lost sales? Ha! I have not read even 1% of it, and I still buy completely legal ebooks (which I do read). But if it's out there, even if I wouldn't ever buy it, why not download it? Sigh...

Am I going to live doctor? And more importantly, will I be able to play the piano?

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by omk3

...

Am I going to live doctor? And more importantly, will I be able to play the piano?

Maybe midi on a digital piano, but likely not the analog piano.

[K-Thom]

Woooah, proofread is not as easy as it seems, trust me. Especially if you don't actually read the book while doing it. On the other hand most people don't even notice mistakes in ebooks and would read a terrible scan as long as it's full and free.

If you can proof-read a large book in 2 to 3 days, I'm impressed. It takes me 2 to 3 months to properly proof-read one of my Dickens uploads, working at it a couple of hours a day.

Let me clarify my "solidly proof-read". As tompe said, these novels have actually been proofread before, so this is about looking and eliminating OCR errors. After (legally) scanning about 100 novels in the past six years, I tend to know my "usual suspects" errorwise. This speeds up progress quite a lot.

And "solidly" means "sufficient for an illegal version". Nobody in the eBookz scene expects a copy without errors, though even there the self-imposed standard is relatively high, at least among the active German scene.

I just finished my own translation of Robert E. Howard's "Almuric", which will be given two complete runs of proof-reading before being released here. And if v.1 still has some work to do, v.2 will show some improvements. It's not as if it's printed on paper or carved in stone.

[Krystian Galaj]

Originally Posted by omk3

My pirated/free library is several gigabytes big. Are all these lost sales? Ha! I have not read even 1% of it, and I still buy completely legal ebooks (which I do read). But if it's out there, even if I wouldn't ever buy it, why not download it? Sigh...

Maybe in a 100 years, when copyright on some of those books expires, and it'll turn out there's no paper copy of them left in the entire world, your library will be the only means of recovering them

[omk3]

Originally Posted by Krystian Galaj

Maybe in a 100 years, when copyright on some of those books expires, and it'll turn out there's no paper copy of them left in the entire world, your library will be the only means of recovering them

Not only mine, I suspect!
But it's a nice thought. As long as I don't read them until copyright expires, I'm not really doing anything illegal am I?

[barnacle]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

My biggest completist fantasy? I would SO much love to have digital copies of the entire print runs of all pulp/"digest" type Science Fiction magazines published in the 20th century (extant examples being Asimov's and Analog) even though I would never, ever get around to reading more than a small fraction of them.

As it happens, I'm doing exactly that for Analog - I'm about fifteen years into it, so far. It's not a trivial task (and also, since it's all copyright, I won't be publishing it).

Originally Posted by K-Thom

Let me clarify my "solidly proof-read". As tompe said, these novels have actually been proofread before, so this is about looking and eliminating OCR errors. After (legally) scanning about 100 novels in the past six years, I tend to know my "usual suspects" errorwise. This speeds up progress quite a lot.

As a follow-on activity from the above... I'm working on a Master's thesis at the moment on the subject of post-processing OCR'd texts to improve their fidelity based on local context. At the moment, I'm cataloguing errors and their corrections and noodling possibilities for correction - there are certainly patterns, but they're not common between different OCR systems and often between different scanned fonts... I can see a number of improvements over normal editing/spell correction etc which I shall attempt to implement.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

I agree completely that scanned copies will be available no matter what, but an ebook version does simplify piracy. It is easier to circumvent DRM than to scan and proof read a physical book. The other thing an ebook version does is provide an alternative to piracy (buy the ebook). If a publisher decides to delay publishing in ebook form to reduce piracy they a) don't reduce piracy and b) reduce sales from those of us who only buy in ebook form.

The real test of what publishers are concerned about is what they do, not what they say. Some publishers did take action about geographical ebook rights (they want their slice of the pie, even when they don't have ebook versions yet), but no major publisher has refused to publish ebooks in a particular format because its DRM has been circumvented. Sony even switched from the secure LRX to the circumvented Adobe ePub, and no one seems to have complained.

There's a VERY SIMPLE solution for all this. Make photocopiers, word processing apps (someone could, after all, sit there and type it in), screen capturers, OCR apps and digital cameras illegal to own or operate. Then create the Mother Of All DRM and make it illegal to sell an ebook without MOAD installed.



Derek

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

There's a VERY SIMPLE solution for all this. Make photocopiers, word processing apps (someone could, after all, sit there and type it in), screen capturers, OCR apps and digital cameras illegal to own or operate. Then create the Mother Of All DRM and make it illegal to sell an ebook without MOAD installed.



Derek

You left off keyboards....

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

It is just a form of hoarding or completism in the digital realm. If you had plenty of shelf space, and people were giving away free (good quality) deadtree books, wouldn't you take lots of them, even if you knew you'd never get around to reading all of them?

I don't know how many pirated books I've accumulated over the years-- but they fill several DVDs.

My biggest completist fantasy? I would SO much love to have digital copies of the entire print runs of all pulp/"digest" type Science Fiction magazines published in the 20th century (extant examples being Asimov's and Analog) even though I would never, ever get around to reading more than a small fraction of them.

Gutenberg is doing Astounding (Analog) from the start of the Clayton years. So far they have got 1930 and part of 1931...

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Gutenberg is doing Astounding (Analog) from the start of the Clayton years. So far they have got 1930 and part of 1931...

Wow, really.

Thanks.

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by cassidym

And the article further bstates "Recent statistics have shown that consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers." and goes on to say that piracy may be a 'necessary evil'

I wonder how much that translates into more actual book sales. Of course a Kindle owner is likely to buy a lot more books at Amazon than they did before they bought the Kindle. That doesn't mean that a lot more money is going to the publishers. It may just be coming in from a different source. Most people who own Kindles probably buy most if not all their books from Amazon now. Before they bought the Kindle, they likely had more diverse sources. I would say that there's probably some increase in the total number of sales. Reader owners may buy more than borrow now. Most libraries don't have large ebook selections if they have them at all. I suppose people may also go through books a bit faster with a reader, too, since they can get a new one immediately when they finish the last one.

However, I can see the publishers' concern moving to the future. The ebook market is still fairly small. As ebook sellers get more of the total book market, they may pressure the publishers to drop prices on the ebooks. Print still has fairly high fixed costs and they won't be able to abandon it for quite some time, so they might see a real revenue drop even if ebook sales remain strong and grow. Then there's the fact that the level of piracy may grow proportionally much higher as ebooks get more popular. As it is now, most pirate copies are scanned paper books. A lot of that has to do with the culture of the current pirate community. It values the effort. That may go away as ebooks get more popular. There may not be a community any more, just a bunch of folks uploading and downloading. If I were of a mind to do it, I could have a book stripped, converted and up on a site in less than a minute. It would be a higher quality copy than most of the scanned and OCRed stuff you can currently find. For now, the publishers can compete on quality but that may not be so for long. The only way they're going to avoid losing substantial revenue to piracy is to do what they're already digging in their heals against: lower prices and dump the inconvenient DRM. If you want to compete with free, it's got to be cheap and easy to buy books. Lots of people stopped downloading music and started buying it when iTunes gave them 99 cent songs in an easy-to-use store. It doesn't stop piracy altogether (nothing will) but some money is better than no money.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Wow, really.

Thanks.

Glad to be of service. The HTML has the original Illustrations....

[barnacle]

Seconded - thanks!