There's a better way to beat the ebook pirates

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by stonetools

The government can crack down by going after the hubs (findable by Google, I'm told) , closing them down, and by handing out 15 to 20 year sentences to the owners. Do that a few dozen times, and slap some stiff fines on ISPs who knowingly enable these hubs-and piracy will decline to low levels. No need for a "police state".

How do prisons work in America? In the UK they are funded through taxes and it costs £40,000 per year for each prisoner. You would need to be very sure that strategy was likely to work before you could implement it, the costs would be astronomical. 20 years in prison would be £800,000 per person, and even if each "hub" only has one sysop you're looking at nearly £2million just for 2 dozen of them.

[stonetools]

Whereas the type of piracy that I am referring to, could - in my view at least - mostly be easily avoided, if publishers took the appropriate actions. Of course, there will always be losses from piracy - that's obvious - but publishers seem to be making matters worse for themselves by upsetting the people who they should be looking after, the very people who would very likely actually pay for their product, if only it was priced more reasonably, didn't include DRM and wasn't geo-restricted.

Didn't we just hear from an author who did all that, and still got pirated? Look if reality differs from your beliefs, its time to adjust your beliefs.
I also reject the idea-commonplace on this forum- that authors and publishers need to conform to some Digerati Code of Perfect Conduct , or else they deserve to be ripped off.
Authors and publishers have what they think are good reasons to set the prices they do. I, like every consumer, think the price should be lower, but I understand that I feel this way, not because I understand the economics of publishing ebooks, but because I like cheap.
I've been around the barn a few times on DRM, and don't want to reopen the debate here. Suffice it to say that authors and publishers think it necessary to protect their IP rights, and that it is understandable why they think the digerati alternative-no protection whatever- would be costlier than DRM. You may not like that reason, but it's certainly A reason.
As for geo-restrictions, its the author's rights and they need to be negotiated- not just arbitrarily usurped by pirates.
In any case , the default should be that the IP rights of authors and publishers should be respected, not violated because some folks dislike their business decisions.

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

How do prisons work in America? In the UK they are funded through taxes and it costs £40,000 per year for each prisoner. You would need to be very sure that strategy was likely to work before you could implement it, the costs would be astronomical. 20 years in prison would be £800,000 per person, and even if each "hub" only has one sysop you're looking at nearly £2million just for 2 dozen of them.

Hey, the cheapest option is always to do nothing at all. If society is serious about protecting the IP rights of creators, they'll do as I have suggested. If society isn't serious, it will choose the cheapest option, and creators will continue to suffer

[tompe]

Originally Posted by CommonReader

The attraction of the book tends to be the written word.

Another attraction is belonging to a community that have read the book and can discus it. And being able to discus the book with the author is one things that can be used to sell a book.

[boxcorner]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Didn't we just hear from an author who did all that, and still got pirated? Look if reality differs from your beliefs, its time to adjust your beliefs.
I also reject the idea-commonplace on this forum- that authors and publishers need to conform to some Digerati Code of Perfect Conduct , or else they deserve to be ripped off.
Authors and publishers have what they think are good reasons to set the prices they do. I, like every consumer, think the price should be lower, but I understand that I feel this way, not because I understand the economics of publishing ebooks, but because I like cheap.
I've been around the barn a few times on DRM, and don't want to reopen the debate here. Suffice it to say that authors and publishers think it necessary to protect their IP rights, and that it is understandable why they think the digerati alternative-no protection whatever- would be costlier than DRM. You may not like that reason, but it's certainly A reason.
As for geo-restrictions, its the author's rights and they need to be negotiated- not just arbitrarily usurped by pirates.
In any case , the default should be that the IP rights of authors and publishers should be respected, not violated because some folks dislike their business decisions.

I don't know what reality you believe in, but I don't believe that publishers exist by serving their authors' interests alone. However, you seem to have missed my point somewhat. Of course I'm not suggesting that publishers shouldn't be entitled to make decisions about how they run their business - that would be silly - rather I feel by focussing on anti-piracy measures, instead of encouraging potential customers, by alienating them they're headed in the wrong direction.

Originally Posted by tompe

Another attraction is belonging to a community that have read the book and can discus it. And being able to discus the book with the author is one things that can be used to sell a book.

Good point.

[Fayth]

Originally Posted by stonetools

The government can crack down by going after the hubs (findable by Google, I'm told) , closing them down, and by handing out 15 to 20 year sentences to the owners. Do that a few dozen times, and slap some stiff fines on ISPs who knowingly enable these hubs-and piracy will decline to low levels. No need for a "police state".
I think technology will eventually solve the problem, if only because content providers and distributors are VERY focused on the problem of protecting IP rights for digital goods. If they don't, we'll end up with fewer content providers, as the case of Mr. Jordan suggests.

Good luck cracking down on a hub that is within a country without any anti piracy laws. The most notable torrent sites aren't run in the US you know.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by stonetools

I honestly don't think pirates give a damn WHAT publishers do to promote ebooks. They want the price of ebooks to be zero and will steal from the author if it is above zero. THE END.

That takes us back to the initial situation:

Those people are not his customers. They never will be his customers. You just said it yourself: They want the price of ebooks to be zero. If the price is non-zero, they won't pay it.

So why is he getting all worked up about people who would not give him money if hell froze over and the demons broke out their ice skates? They're not his customers. He's not going to get their money. Their money is not on the table, it's not even out of their wallets, and it won't be. If they couldn't get his ebooks for free, they'd watch TV or something. The circumstances under which he would get their money do not exist. Those people are not part of the equation.

The important people are the ones who are his customers, and the ones who might become his customers. Those are the people he should be catering to, connecting with, and working with -- not the wankers who won't give him money under any circumstances.

There are people who pirate the book because it's free. If they were unable to do this, would they give him money? NO. You said it yourself: they want the price of ebooks to be zero. If it was impossible for them to pirate the book, they still wouldn't give him any money. So he can keep stressing about those people, and decide to stop writing in order to stick it to those people, and the people in question ... won't care. They probably even won't know.

But who will know? The people who do pay for his books. The ones who give him money. Those are the people his actions are hurting -- not the ones who will never give him money. They're the people who think his writing is worth at least as much as a cup of coffee. They're the ones he needs to be selling his book to.

I'll say it again: J.K. Rowling may be losing substantial amounts of money to piracy. But Steve Jordan's problem is not piracy -- his problem is not being J.K. Rowling. If everyone who downloaded illicit copies of ebooks stopped tomorrow, he still wouldn't be making a living off his books. This is not because of piracy. This is because of being an author. For every J.K. Rowling, there are thousands, tens of thousands, of pbook writers working 9-5 jobs to pay the bills. And for every one of those, there are a thousand or more ebook writers with hopes and dreams but no sales. This is not because the evil pirates are stealing all their sales. It's because the sales are not there to begin with.

There are, as of this moment, 932,053 ebooks on Amazon. (I'm picking on the Kindle here because it's easy to get numbers for) According to another thread here, 80% of US families did not read a book last year. Quickfacts tells me there 105,480,101 households in 2009. That gives us 2,109,602 households with where someone read a book. I can't find a quick number for ebook reader penetration, so I'll guess high and say that 10% of those households read their book(s) on an ebook reader, and based on the MobileRead device forums readership at the time of writing this, 36% of those ebook readers were Kindles (or Kindle-for-whatever). That's 75,946 households in which someone bought one or more ebooks from Amazon. So for one read per book, that's about a dozen books per household -- one per month. But those books are not evenly distributed. All 932k books don't have equal chances of being read. A lot more of them are reading Water for Elephants than are reading ... well, anything any of us are ever likely to write. 2679 people have reviewed that book ... your average indie ebook author is doing well if he gets 2679 sales, and that's including everyone he knows, even the people at the health club he badgered into reading it. For every sale > 1 that a bestseller gets, some other book is not being read at all that year.

And that's the problem.

It's not that people are pirating Steve's book and reading that "free" copy -- it's that they're not reading any copy, at any price. Every last pirate could take up knitting instead of reading tomorrow and he still wouldn't be making money off his books, because the market is not there, and especially the market for him is not there. The market for ebooks is still small, and the market for ebooks from people who are not well-known is downright microscopic. And if you're trying to sell ebooks, you're not just competing with today's big names, you're competing with Sir Walter Scott and Mark Twain, and they're damned tough competition.

His problem is not that people are reading his book and not paying him to do so; his problem is that people are not reading his book. Once he addresses that problem, he can worry about whether he's losing sales to the other one.

But, again, you said it in your own post: They want the price of ebooks to be zero. If they couldn't get it at a price of zero, they wouldn't get it at all. So if you're not going to get their money no matter what you do, why bother with them at all -- focus on the people whose money you are going to get, and on getting that money. There are ways to do that. Flouncing off like Anne Rice is not any of them.

[stonetools]

Of course I'm not suggesting that publishers shouldn't be entitled to make decisions about how they run their business - that would be silly - rather I feel by focussing on anti-piracy measures, instead of encouraging potential customers, by alienating them they're headed in the wrong direction.

I think that most people here seem to object to publishers taking ANY anti-piracy measures. At least, when the publishers try to crack down on piracy, we are told that this is ALL they are doing, when this is not the case.

Good luck cracking down on a hub that is within a country without any anti piracy laws. The most notable torrent sites aren't run in the US you know.

You'd be surprised how long the arm of the US government can be, if it gets serious about piracy. And torrents can be blocked, if the ISPs are leaned on. Again, its a matter of priorities.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

That takes us back to the initial situation:

Those people are not his customers. They never will be his customers. You just said it yourself: They want the price of ebooks to be zero. If the price is non-zero, they won't pay it.

So why is he getting all worked up about people who would not give him money if hell froze over and the demons broke out their ice skates? They're not his customers. He's not going to get their money. Their money is not on the table, it's not even out of their wallets, and it won't be. If they couldn't get his ebooks for free, they'd watch TV or something. The circumstances under which he would get their money do not exist. Those people are not part of the equation.

Because your hell froze over prediction of what an entire class of people would do is no more likely than the prediction that if the cost to them COULD NOT be zero, through the burdensome cost of difficulty or punishments, then they might give up and decide that doing what's right is the better option and pay a fair price for the stuff they want.
In fact it's most likely, approaching certainty, that some people would do one and some the other and some something else. But having some people do the right thing, and some people watch TV (and at least not be breaking copyright laws or trodding on authors rights) is a better outcome than doing nothing and condoning their behavior.

That, at least, is the idea behind stronger measures and enforcement.
Not saying it's the right idea, or the best one, but it's a valid one.

[stonetools]

But, again, you said it in your own post: They want the price of ebooks to be zero. If they couldn't get it at a price of zero, they wouldn't get it at all. So if you're not going to get their money no matter what you do, why bother with them at all -- focus on the people whose money you are going to get, and on getting that money. There are ways to do that. Flouncing off like Anne Rice is not any of them.

Look, WW, I understand your argument-that piracy, no matter how pervasive, CANNOT affect sales of a pirated product because people who go to pirate sites never want to pay for stuff. I think that argument is nonsense, myself. People go to pirate sites because its easy and it doesn't cost them anything. Make it hard to get to the pirate sites (IOW, ENFORCE the law) and people will pay for things they want to enjoy.
If you make it easy to pirate or casually share, people will do that a lot. Make it difficult, and they will do it less. Its not that hard, really.
Let's also squelch the dumbest argument, trotted out repeatedly in these discussions-that if anti-piracy measures don't work perfectly to stop ALL piracy, they shouldn't be attempted at all. Let's try that argument on for size with other crimes.

Laws against murder haven't stopped all murders, so let's do away with homicide laws
Locks don't stop all burglaries, so let's dispense with locks
Anti-fraud laws haven't stopped all fraud, so let's stop enforcing anti-fraud laws.

Stupid, isn't it? Yet its trotted out as being somehow self-evidently true in the case of piracy.

[Worldwalker]

Stone, I'm getting really tired of this. We were having an interesting and productive discussion before you jumped in. I was actually enjoying your absence. We've heard your "the publishers are always right, and you pathetic little consumers should just thank us for allowing you to pay inflated prices for whatever we choose to sell you" line time and time again, and it makes no more sense this time.

Look, neither one of us is an idiot. You're a professional; I am, shall we say, a talented amateur. We're not arguing with each other -- we know that is futile, because I have readers' and authors' interests at heart, and you have publishers' interests to look out for. So we're presenting our arguments for the benefit of the lurkers, and just using each other as foils. You know this, and I know this, and everyone with two brain cells to rub together in this (and every other) thread knows this. So how about an end to the pretending?

For example, you keep using the term "digerati" to refer to those who disagree with you under the assumption that the people you're talking to will believe that there is some sort of privileged "upper class" and resent those people. I have to assume that was somewhere in some publisher's talking points ... "refer to your opponents as 'digerati' so the silent majority who resents those people will be on your side." Except it doesn't work that way, not on MobileRead. Nobody here pretends to be any kind of technical upper class -- not even me, and I'm the resident grouch. There's no "silent majority" to feel oppressed by those self-entitled aristocrats, either. We're all just people who like ebooks, and your attempts at insulting me and others, and at stirring up what I can only see as a strange sort of class warfare, are not only falling flat, they're getting really annoying. So knock it off and play nice. Tell your bosses "that doesn't work here, MR is different" and discuss matters like everyone else does ... sans insults.

Originally Posted by stonetools

Look, WW, I understand your argument-that piracy, no matter how pervasive, CANNOT affect sales of a pirated product because people who go to pirate sites never want to pay for stuff. I think that argument is nonsense, myself.

First of all, I did not say that. And as for people not wanting to pay for stuff ... look up, you said that.

People go to pirate sites because its easy and it doesn't cost them anything. Make it hard to get to the pirate sites (IOW, ENFORCE the law) and people will pay for things they want to enjoy.

That is in direct contradiction to what you said in the post I was replying to. I've caught snakes that were less squirmy. How am I supposed to respond to the points you raise if you immediately deny that you said them?

If you make it easy to pirate or casually share, people will do that a lot. Make it difficult, and they will do it less.

If you make it easy to buy an ebook, people will do that a lot. Make it difficult, and they will do it less.

So what are the publishers doing? They're making it difficult. They lock their ebooks with DRM and prevent people from using them -- at least once a week we get someone here who, unknowingly, bought a book from Amazon for their Nook, or some other combination. They implement georestrictions so that people with their money in hand, trying to buy the book, aren't allowed to buy it at any price. They raise the prices of ebooks to higher than pbook prices, all the while delivering less. They are, in other words, doing exactly the opposite of what they should be doing.

And some of those people are going to find ways to get the books they want that they can't buy for their platform, or they can't buy as cheap as a pbook, or they can't buy at all. And when they do, it's a whole lot harder to get them back.

Something a disturbing number of businesses don't seem to get: Customers are a commodity. You have to buy them, just like you buy paperclips. If you waste the customers you have, you have to buy more of them, and with each new batch, they're more costly. Yet business after business seems to act as though there is an infinite supply of customers, and new ones arrive free. After all, there's no receipt for "customers, twenty gross, boxed" that they can turn in to Accounting. But they are paying for customers. That's what advertising and promotion are: the cost of buying new customers. Driving away customers -- and that's what DRM does, that's what georestrictions do, that's what higher-than-pbook prices do -- is business suicide. Google "New Game Enhancements" for one example of what happens when a business drives away the customers it already has and hopes it'll pick up new ones ... and guesses wrong.

Let's also squelch the dumbest argument, trotted out repeatedly in these discussions-that if anti-piracy measures don't work perfectly to stop ALL piracy, they shouldn't be attempted at all. Let's try that argument on for size with other crimes.

Laws against murder haven't stopped all murders, so let's do away with homicide laws
Locks don't stop all burglaries, so let's dispense with locks
Anti-fraud laws haven't stopped all fraud, so let's stop enforcing anti-fraud laws.

Stupid, isn't it? Yet its trotted out as being somehow self-evidently true in the case of piracy.

I haven't seen that EVER suggested, recommended, or proposed. Well, except as a straw man propped up to be shot down, which you seem to do so a lot.

I'll say again, for benefit of the lurkers:

DRM hurts the good guys and doesn't hurt the bad guys. That's exactly the opposite of what a successful business needs to do.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Stone, I'm getting really tired of this. We were having an interesting and productive discussion before you jumped in. I was actually enjoying your absence. We've heard your "the publishers are always right, and you pathetic little consumers should just thank us for allowing you to pay inflated prices for whatever we choose to sell you" line time and time again, and it makes no more sense this time.
....

I agree completely and sick of it as well.

[Piper_]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Didn't we just hear from an author who did all that, and still got pirated? Look if reality differs from your beliefs, its time to adjust your beliefs.

Indeed, but the same goes for respecting the reality of what a person actually says rather than an "adjusting" it in an effort to prove something else.

He, like most others here, are saying the equivalent of, "You could lose most of that fat you bemoan if you cut out your daily burgers, fries, and milkshakes."

The truth and value of that advice is not disproved, nor is continued indulgence justified, by the existence of some people with extra pounds who don't eat those things.

Originally Posted by stonetools

I've been around the barn a few times on DRM, and don't want to reopen the debate here. Suffice it to say that authors and publishers think it necessary to protect their IP rights, and that it is understandable why they think the digerati alternative-no protection whatever- would be costlier than DRM.

As noted last weekend, every time we present a better way to protect (include the purchaser's receipt information in the ebook's metadata/jacket), all we get is crickets. ...until days or weeks later, when we see you on another thread repeating the accusations that we "digirati" don't care about authors and have no better ideas than DRM.

Why is that? Can you at least tell us why our idea meets with such silence? I've posted my suspicions a couple of times, but to be fair, I would like to hear your explanation.

[GreenMonkey]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Stone, I'm getting really tired of this. We were having an interesting and productive discussion before you jumped in. I was actually enjoying your absence. We've heard your "the publishers are always right, and you pathetic little consumers should just thank us for allowing you to pay inflated prices for whatever we choose to sell you" line time and time again, and it makes no more sense this time.

...

For example, you keep using the term "digerati" to refer to those who disagree with you under the assumption that the people you're talking to will believe that there is some sort of privileged "upper class" and resent those people. I have to assume that was somewhere in some publisher's talking points ... "refer to your opponents as 'digerati' so the silent majority who resents those people will be on your side." Except it doesn't work that way, not on MobileRead. Nobody here pretends to be any kind of technical upper class -- not even me, and I'm the resident grouch. There's no "silent majority" to feel oppressed by those self-entitled aristocrats, either. We're all just people who like ebooks, and your attempts at insulting me and others, and at stirring up what I can only see as a strange sort of class warfare, are not only falling flat, they're getting really annoying. So knock it off and play nice. Tell your bosses "that doesn't work here, MR is different" and discuss matters like everyone else does ... sans insults.

Yeah. Me too. I finally googled digerati because I'd never, ever heard the word before stonetools started using it. And I'm the kind of guy that never uses the e-reader dictionary because I've got a pretty good vocab.

And to top that off, I'm even an IT worker (albeit in an outdated computer technology you've probably not heard of) with a minor in computational mathematics. And I'd never heard the term before. Maybe that means I am a digerati, and I just don't understand that. lol.

And you know what? I don't like it. I don't like being called digerati. I find it insulting. Like calling me "Lord". How about just calling us senatores or equites (Roman terms for political and economic elites). Maybe Bourgeoise? Does that make us sound upper class and snooty enough?

grrr

As far as Mr. Jordan, I'm sorry people aren't paying for your book. Would you be so angry if those 100 people or whatever were reading your book at the library for free?

[stonetools]

Stone, I'm getting really tired of this. We were having an interesting and productive discussion before you jumped in. I was actually enjoying your absence. We've heard your "the publishers are always right, and you pathetic little consumers should just thank us for allowing you to pay inflated prices for whatever we choose to sell you" line time and time again, and it makes no more sense this time.

Well, I love you too. And I believe that YOU engaged ME. I'm responding to YOUR comment on MY post. I most certainly don't believe that publishers are always right. I just believe that the digerati are more wrong.
Don't like the term "digerati"? Well, I could try "tech utopians" or "anti DRM true believers" but you wouldn't like those either, I bet. How about "DRM opponents".
As to what you did say, I wasn't the only one who concluded that you were saying that piracy couldn't affect sales, etc. How about you restate your argument more simply? Apparently, everyone else misunderstood it the way I did.

If you make it easy to buy an ebook, people will do that a lot. Make it difficult, and they will do it less.

So what are the publishers doing? They're making it difficult. They lock their ebooks with DRM and prevent people from using them -- at least once a week we get someone here who, unknowingly, bought a book from Amazon for their Nook, or some other combination.

Let me put it bluntly. Its damn easy to buy an ebook- so easily that millions of non-digerati (whoops, average users) have bought ereaders recently and are buying ebooks at an accelerating rate. Most remain blissfully unaware that there is even such a thing as DRM and are instead focused on the ease, convenience and lower prices of ebooks. These consumers seem to be OK with device in compatibility and an inability to easily violate the copyright of the authors they read ( what you falsely call "sharing"). Maybe those consumers are more realistic than the DRM opponents. Ever considered that?