There's a better way to beat the ebook pirates

[Anke Wehner]

Originally Posted by ApK

Because it really is their right. You do not get to say "you sold me one thing, so now you have to sell me everything else."
That's what it being THEIR right means.

But that's stupid.
If authors, publishers and vendors together are being dickheads who dangle ebooks in front of people's noses just to jerk them back and go "ah, ah ah! Americans only!" they are going to piss off people.

The song comparison also doesn't hold up in my mind - a political campaign using a song implies that the musician supports the party or whoever it is that uses it. Where's the moral problem in selling to Australians or Europeans?

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

People don't have a right to read everything that gets published. Rights holders are free to restrict who they allow to read their titles.

No, they're not. They're free to restrict who they allow to *copy* their titles, and who they allow to publicly perform their titles, or translate them, or make other derivatives of them.

They're not free to restrict who reads them. That ebook reading is often tied to copying doesn't change that... I'm still free to loan my Sony to anyone I trust, and let them read books on it without compensating the author. The idea that "every reader should pay for each book" is not part of copyright law.

Originally Posted by stonetools

The plain fact is that pirate sites don't pay for anything and don't help the authors and publishers. They are to the publishing industry as leeches and tapeworms are to a healthy human being.

Or they are to the digital publishing industry as used bookstores and rummage sales are to the physical one... not directly financially beneficial, and sometimes detrimental because someone who buys a $1 book at a yard sale probably won't be buying the new version, but they promote an interest in books, and they introduce many readers to new authors they might not have been willing to take a full-price risk on.

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by ApK

That's certainly not why I and many others want remove DRM.

Right. DRM removal is a tool people can use so they can read an eBook they BOUGHT from the store of their choice on the device of their choice. It doesn't have to have anything to do with pirating or sharing.

I can promise that I will never pirate or even illegitimately share an eBook. There are many "cheap reads" from .99-2.99, Baen (as has been noted) rocks, my public library has a good eBook selection (yes, I return and delete properly), and Gutenberg.org is great for legitimate free eBooks. Also, I was raised to not steal and I want authors to get paid. I even feel a little guilty when I buy a used pBook. Pirating is not necessary.

[stonetools]

Do authors and publishers really care about that type of sharing? Real books have been shared like that for hundreds of years without anyone having a fit about it.

I was going to quit, but then I saw this again. ONCE AGAIN, passing a physical book along to your daddy or office buddy is completely different from sending DRM free copies of an ebook to your Face book friends or your AIM buddy list or your favorite mailing list.
To paraphrase "Pulp Fiction', it ain't the same game, it ain't the same ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same f******g sport.
The first could be beneficial: the second bestselling authors and publishers regard as a potentially mortal threat to their intellectual property, for reason that seem obvious to me .
Elfmark recognises the threat: but she claims that people will be "reasonable" and not forward it to to many people, citing the example of Baen. Baen and their authors are an example of a specialty shop. Few people will want to forward the works of Johnny Ringo; lots of people will want to forward the latest Oprah's Book Club Selection or Steven King bestseller.
Again , it is DELUSIONAL to consider passing a p book to a friend the same as emailing DRM free copies of a book to various people. Strong word, but there it is.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

I was going to quit, but then I saw this again. ONCE AGAIN, passing a physical book along to your daddy or office buddy is completely different from sending DRM free copies of an ebook to your Face book friends or your AIM buddy list or your favorite mailing list.

You're the only one talking about sending a book to one's entire FB friendslist or a mailing list; people were talking about sending a single copy to a friend, or to a sister with whom, for whatever crazy reasons, they don't want to share full access to their ebook account. Social DRM would prevent widescale sharing because few people would know how to remove it; it wouldn't prevent sharing among intimates--which is what publishers seem most interested in stopping. (Otherwise, why restrict which titles can be shared once for two weeks?)

And as far as Baen being a specialty shop--Baen's clientele are generally tech-savvy, internet-friendly, and often voracious readers. They'd be exactly the demographic to be most damaging for a publisher to allow DRM-free ebooks to; they have the resources to set up a tight network of ebook exchanges so that only 1 Baen fan out of 20 ever has to buy an ebook. They could even have public "BaenFans" mailing lists and set up ebook swaps, wherein one person buys the webscription each month and loads those books into Yahoo's archives for everyone to download, and then they're rotated out with the next books the next month.

And yet, with this as a possibility for more than 10 years, Baen has not collapsed. Do you assume that, with FB and other large social network sites, Baen will begin to collapse as its ebooks are shared too widely to for them to get enough new sales to survive?

[Anke Wehner]

Originally Posted by ApK

So is "Woe is me!" But it still reads like wallowing when posted on a public discussion forum. Just saying.

Mhm, this reminds me of a blog post on marketing for independent artists (inlcuding self-published writers): http://mcahogarth.blogspot.com/2010/...marketing.html
The relevant part: If all you talk about is money, particularly how much money you are not making, you are doing it wrong. It puts people off.

Everything I rememver hearing from Steven Lyle Jordan is connected to complaints about piracy and thus supposed lost money, and the whole "we need permanent suirveillance!!!" conclusion in particular put me off very thoroughly. If I'd come across him taking part in less charged threads, and there had been a link to them in his signature, I might have checked out his books, but not as it is.

Originally Posted by ApK

That's certainly not why I and many others want to remove DRM.
In addition to trying, and failing, to protect from copyright violations, it hinders my rightful use.

My hesitation about removing DRM disappeared with my first purchase. It was a series of four books, which as ebooks all only had the series name as a title, rather than series name and subtitle, or something else useful. Easy to fix without DRM.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Piper_

Yes.

And for all the complaints about how the Internet has made it hard to control who gets a copy of an ebook, how many authors owe their ebook sales to the existence of the Internet?

I would go further than that. If it wasn't for the ebook piracy pioneers in the mid-90s nobody would have seen any profit in making a dedicated device for reading ebooks on.

And without that first device there would have been no Kindle store, no Sony store, none of the traditional booksellers jumping into the ebook market. Not to mention there would be no opportunity for scum like me to find an audience through Smashwords or Feedbooks, etc.

And yet despite apparent widespread ebook piracy, legitimate ebook sales are still rising at a phenomenal rate. So where's the problem?

[stonetools]

Right. DRM removal is a tool people can use so they can read an eBook they BOUGHT from the store of their choice on the device of their choice. It doesn't have to have anything to do with pirating or sharing.

Er, except that they didn't legally BUY the BOOK: they bought a license to access the efile, which remains on the bookstore's servers.
I really blame the publishers for this: they should pop up a EULA every time they do a transaction, so that people could at least LOOK at what they're agreeing to. But in the interest of 1-click purchasing, Amazon and others dispensed with that, so now we have lots of entitled people talking about their "right of first sale" as if title to the actual file changed hands.
In any case, whatever the nature of the transaction, the author's copyright should remain inviolate. Breaking DRM is generally preparatory to violating the author's copyright , as in "sharing" an ebook with family and friends.
I think the era of the person who buys a dedicated reader but wants to buy a book from some other store is passing, anyway, so that reason for breaking DRM will soon go away.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Social DRM would prevent widescale sharing because few people would know how to remove it

I think I'm finally understanding what you're saying.

You're saying:

1. Embedding personal information, either in meta-data, the cover image or what have you, and making it's presence known to to the licensee (ie. "Warning this ebook contains all sorts personal info about you and maybe even ways for us to hunt you down if you pirate it") would be as effective in preventing the casual user from letting it go in to the wild as current DRM is now. -- A wash

2. The info would be trivially easy to strip by the more savvy users...just as DRM is now. -- A wash

3. It would be cheaper to implement -- +1 for the new system.

4. It would not hinder our legitimate uses (backup, space shifting, etc) -- +1 for the new system.

Do I have it right?

ApK

[Anke Wehner]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Er, except that they didn't legally BUY the BOOK: they bought a license to access the efile, which remains on the bookstore's servers.

No, the TOS of Kobo explicitly speaks of downloads of literary works. And the Smashwords license note speaks of purchasing a copy.

Only being allowed to access files over the 'net rather than saving them locally would be useless to me; my ereader doesn't have WiFi or mobile connection.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by ApK

From a purely pragmatic point of view, it's still quite doable, as many authors here demonstrate day after day.

Twice, I tried to form a response here. The first was crass. The second was... well, it would be considered more "wallowing," I'm sure.

So I'll just say that the present state of the industry just isn't "doable" for me right now. I put up with the insanity as long as I could, but now I'm mentally worn out.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

I would go further than that. If it wasn't for the ebook piracy pioneers in the mid-90s nobody would have seen any profit in making a dedicated device for reading ebooks on.

Using your wormhole again? You seem to have no problem knowing what might have been when it suits you.

Maybe it was this way: People wanted ebooks. Pirate saw the demand and filled it before the industry could. (with out costs or legal concerns it's easy to act quickly.)
Now by the time legitimate industry got into it, the presence of the pirates convinced them they needed these DRM measures, because it was already demonstrated people couldn't be trusted to respect copyright if it was free and easy to cheat.

And on a mere point of logic: If the pirate community is 'mostly folks who would not pay for the books no matter what' than how can the existence of a pirate community correctly indicate a potential for profit?

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by ApK

I think I'm finally understanding what you're saying.
You're saying:

1. Embedding personal information, either in meta-data, the cover image or what have you, and making it's presence known to to the licensee (ie. "Warning this ebook contains all sorts personal info about you and maybe even ways for us to hunt you down if you pirate it") would be as effective in preventing the casual user from letting it go in to the wild as current DRM is now. -- A wash

2. The info would be trivially easy to strip by the more savvy users...just as DRM is now. -- A wash

3. It would be cheaper to implement -- +1 for the new system.

4. It would not hinder our legitimate uses (backup, space shifting, etc) -- +1 for the new system.

Do I have it right?

Pretty much. Some benefits to new system; no detriments compared to current system--except, of course, that it would allow casual sharing among friends & family members, which publishers seem invested in preventing.

Other bonus: anyone not-tech-savvy who distributed such a book widely could easily be found. (Or at least, the original buyer could be found.) Publishers would have the option to prosecute those people--or collect demographic info and figure out who's leaking the books to the internet at large, and try to figure out how to stop/discourage those people instead of blanket-punishing all customers.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Er, except that they didn't legally BUY the BOOK: they bought a license to access the efile, which remains on the bookstore's servers. .

I didn't buy a license, I bought the ebook.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

Twice, I tried to form a response here. The first was crass. The second was... well, it would be considered more "wallowing," I'm sure.

So I'll just say that the present state of the industry just isn't "doable" for me right now. I put up with the insanity as long as I could, but now I'm mentally worn out.

You were tempted to be crass toward me?
Why? My intention was to be supportive.