Could the Kindle spark book piracy?

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Would you make any distinction between the "seriousness" of downloading a copy of a book without paying for it, and re-selling multiple copies of that book on eBay for cash?

I mentioned elsewhere that last year someone was selling duplicated CDs of my software on eBay. It wasn't only my software he was selling, it was all sorts of things - Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec, etc. In the previous month alone, from his past auction results I could see that he'd made over £2000 ($4000) from his auctions of illegal software.

To my mind, that is serious crime, not petty theft. Would you agree?

As a crime, no. Fifty crimes at £40 does not equal a £2000 crime. A serious criminal, yes.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Sigh... you know what he meant...

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

I say yes but not because of any feature other than increased user base. There is nothing intrinsically easier about placing a pirated e-book on the Kindle versus, say, the Sony reader. However more people using readers means a greater number of pirates, assuming pirate-distribution is flat across all types of readers. (we need a pirate smiley)

I agree. Well stated.

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Sigh... you know what he meant...

Y'know, you need a simple disclaimer note that you can just copy and paste as needed, to wit:

"Be advised that the words "Ereader," "ereader" or "e-reader" have been casually used on this forum to mean a generic e-book reading person, device or application. Those words and their use should not be confused with "eReader™," which is a particular e-book reading application that uses the PDB format. eReader™ is the property of eReader.com. All rights reserved."

Or something like that.

I just love this relationship you two have over this! For me, I'm going back to read an ebook on my Ereader....oops, I mean Reader which doesn't have eReader.

[tristan]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

If you'd ordered a book that turned out to be an ugly hardback, you wouldn't consider it okay to walk into the bookstore or library and just take a paperback copy for free. (And neither would the store or library. Ask them.) To balance out the cost, you'd return one and use the refund to buy the other. They are two distinct properties, and both have to be paid for (or returned, in the library's case).

That's a straw man argument if I ever heard one.
The book you are taking is the physical property of someone. Downloading a copy of an ebook illegally is more akin to borrowing the book from the library and photocopying it. You are not taking anyone else's physical property.

The thing about information is it now costs next to nothing to reproduce. The media it is on costs, but just copying costs next to nothing nothing. So the marginal cost of producing more is zero (or as close as makes no difference).

If I were to download a book illegally then I would not have actually taken anything away from the publisher or author. They would be no worse off than before hand.

Its a very difficult situation morally because it is nothing like stealing a physical copy of a book, yet we all intrinsically feel that authors should be compensated for the costs in writing the book...

[andyafro]

I do not think the kindle will spark piracy. Those who pirate games and music will pirate ebooks those who buy there books and music will buy there ebooks.

You can argue ethics all day but it comes down to that - Those who do will, those who don't won't.

I have no problem with downloading a book you want to read but cannot find anywhere else and is not for sale in your format, my problem is with those that then share it or try to make money by selling it on ebay or stuff.

Alot of Pirated ebooks are much like pirated music or films they are usually terrible copies which need hours of attention to get them right, much like films you get a copy of a book just to have a look until you can find a proper copy that is perfectly edited that you would be happy to pay for.

Much like the 7th harry potter book, i pre-ordered and paided for it for my girlfriend but it was nice to find the first 147 pages there on the web for her to read. it was just a sample but enough to keep her going till it came through the post. i also found some Severus Snape book that came before the 7th book that i would never have found in any shops. whats wrong with that i didnt give it to anyone else and i didnt try sell it, so who gets hurt.

Piracy will stay the same, the people that know its wrong will not do it, it leaves a horrible feeling in the gut no matter what the arguement.
and those that do it don't care or have made there case for what they do and nothing will ever change that.

[csmith75]

I think that the Kindle has done a decent job of making average consumers aware of the ebook readers, which increases the popularity of the device. Any increase in popularity of a particular type of product capable of playing or displaying media will increase piracy.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

I think the sooner we understand and accept the fact that electronic files really are definable entities with malleable but distinct characteristics, the sooner we can work out a way to deal with them legally, morally and ethically.

In the example that nekokami's mentioned, she's talking about software, rather than a book. In that case, she's purchased a license to use the software when she purchased the original copy she referred to. I haven't checked the licensing language for this particular case because my copy of "The Lost Treasures Of Infocom" is still in a moving box somewhere, but typically the license allows for reasonable backup making. Arguably she's just using a backup file of the software she purchased a license for, it's just not a direct backup copy. It is, however, identical to what she'd have gotten if she had made that direct copy.

For paper books like you've mentioned, Steve, there's a physical component to them that doesn't parse well to e-books. The reason you'd return that ugly hardback and buy a paperback is that you can do so. You're returning one physical container for another, and each container is tied to a single copy and vice-versa.

For e-books there is no physical container. That's one of the things we have to keep in mind during that working out how to deal with them you mentioned.

One huge glaring problem we have right now is that publishers really want to sell licenses to books, so that they keep control over how we use them, but they don't want to allow the same sets of reasonable options that come with software licenses and that make them bearable to the customer.

If they took the licensing thing to its logical conclusion, they would see that regardless of the format I've bought a book in, I can only read one copy of it at a time, and if I've bought (and still have) that one copy, they've been paid for my licensed use of it. If I want to lend or give that copy to someone, I should be permitted to do so under a reasonable license, just as I can let a friend come over and use Excel on my computer or give/sell them my original copy of a game as long as I don't retain access to it.

I guess my main point is that part of the reason that we're having trouble figuring out how to deal with the uniqueness of e-books is that the Publishers (et. al.) don't want to think about what e-books really are and mean to their industry in any reasonable fashion, so they're trying to do things that are mutually incompatible. And they have a lot of power with those who make law in the various nations of the world, and of course, lawmakers are not known for their great ability to recognize mutually incompatible actions, now are they?

[Liviu_5]

I think there will no large changes because Kindle in the current incarnation will have a limited impact on e-books.

It may increase sales by some fraction, though the interesting part would be to see if it brings lots of new people to e-books since based on comments everywhere most people buying it as of now are already e-book readers who may not have had the right device until now.

[bob_ninja]

I voted that it will reduce illegal copying.

As other well written essays explained (linked from forums herein), illegal copying is directly proprtional to the price. Book costing $1,000 will be stolen much more often than the one costing $1. Devices such as Kindle are not that significant. Plenty of students were copying expensive textbooks on Xerox machines decades ago. Of course, Kindle like Sony Reader and others do make it easier. However, there are other means. Given a high enough price, people will find ways even without using eReaders.

Thus the real question is where are book prices headed? I am guessing that Kindle's ease of use and access to eBooks will drive higher sales volume for eBooks which in turn will cause lower prices (higher volume, lower prices). In fact, all the readers combined will drive more volume. Just as Apple generated a lot of volume that gave it significant pricing power, so will happend with eBooks. If they do generate enough volume, Amazon could also lower prices just as Apple did for music.

In that case, sub-$10 price for a book will simply be too low for most readers to bother with illegal means of obtaining books. Once an average book costs less than a single meal then most people will simply download legal books from Amazon and others.

All that being said, there are still a couple of problems. Kindle is too expensive (today). I don't think it will sell enough volume to become as ubiqutous as iPods. Not even close. Especially if US goes into recession. So it may take some (long) time for reader devices to achieve a widespread use and drive the eBook sales volume.

As the other post noted (Kindle is the worst thing that could happend to ebooks) this fragmented market of many formats and DRM schemes will confuse consumers and hold back sales. Consider the latest video format HD vs BluRay, which is only 2 formats, much less than eBooks, yet still sales of discs are very low. Again for simple ease of use we need a single format akin to PDF that would be widely supported. Similarly odd DRM restrictions can also reduce sales.

Thus while Kindle and Amazon will help drive sales, there are still a lot of barriers to wide adoption and lower prices that will more or less kill illegal copying.

[nekokami]

Thanks, NatCh. I really was just trying to think of an example where "format shifting" would apply to software, and that was what I came up with.

With regards to books, I want to be crystal clear: I pay for the books I read. Either directly, by purchasing a copy, or indirectly, through taxes to my town for use to buy books in the public library. For books that I have paid for directly (not library books), I really don't see the harm of using file sharing sources for format-shifting purposes, and if there was more effort put into making a system which would, in fact, verify ownership of the physical copy before allowing download of the file, I'm not sure it would even be illegal (in the US).

Furthermore, I will go out on a limb here and say that I strongly suspect that the vast majority of people who download ebooks from filesharing systems in fact own the books in paper, or will very shortly buy them-- and would have bought them in legitimate digital form if that were easy and the price were reasonable. Call me crazy, but I think the book-reading population is a lot more likely to try to keep their favorite authors in business than people downloading pop songs or cracked software. Perhaps it's because books are much more strongly tied to individual authors. We know perfectly well whose bread and butter we're impacting if we don't pay authors. With the music, video, and software industries, it's a lot easier for people to forget that there are individuals involved and assume that a faceless corporation won't even notice the missing business. (And yes, HarryT, I know that's often not true for software-- I'm talking about a mistaken perception here.)

[bob_ninja]

Originally Posted by NatCh

...
One huge glaring problem we have right now is that publishers really want to sell licenses to books, so that they keep control over how we use them, but they don't want to allow the same sets of reasonable options that come with software licenses and that make them bearable to the customer.

If they took the licensing thing to its logical conclusion, they would see that regardless of the format I've bought a book in, I can only read one copy of it at a time, and if I've bought (and still have) that one copy, they've been paid for my licensed use of it. If I want to lend or give that copy to someone, I should be permitted to do so under a reasonable license, just as I can let a friend come over and use Excel on my computer or give/sell them my original copy of a game as long as I don't retain access to it.
...

Actually the new licensing schemes even for software are becoming a real problem/pain. The Personal Computer revolution in part was driven by a very simple model of software sales. You buy it and use it all you want. No licensing/service contract with IBM, no special restrictions, etc. In those days nobody cared. Thus you could keep using your dBase III+ for DOS even today.

Then Microsoft in its quest for ever more profits started crafting new licensing agreements with restrictions and pushing their clients to annual suscriptions, etc. Of course, they are shooting themselves in the foot. Despite all the so called studies showing new licenses are cheaper, everyone knows they are more expensive. Thus they actually promote illegal copying (as evidenced by ever increasing suuply from China despite all the efforts to stop/reduce it) and/or push their customers to alternatives (Linux).

It would be very stupid for publishers to repeat this mistake. Sure they can impose any number of restrictions via new license agreemnts and DRM. Once again they'll simply induce more illegal copying and/or push people to alternatives (Gutenberg). After all there is a huge amount of good content already available in public domain!!!!

This whole licensing game is quite pointless. Why do companies have to be so blind?

[sianon]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Harry, you shoudln't indulge in cruelty to animals in public.

[volwrath]

Piracy will without a doubt increase. More ebook readers sold, more piracy... But the ratio of legit to pirated books will increase

[bingle]

I voted that it will increase piracy, but I think it depends on what you mean by "increase". Just as with the iPod, there will be a new group of people who look to the internet for free content for their new device. This demand will increase the number of files floating around and books digitized, as well as increasing the downloads for each file.

However, I think more people will buy the Kindle with a view to legally acquiring content than those who buy it in order to pirate. No doubt almost everyone who owns one will engage in a little casual piracy, much as they do with digital music these days, but most people will be happy to buy books from Amazon.

So... the amount of piracy will increase, but the proportion won't. It might even decrease.