eBook piracy, how common is it?

[Xenophon]

@HarryT: I fear that your US readers may not understand about the UK's "public lending right" system. For those not in the know, here goes: In the UK and some other countries, libraries pay a per-checkout fee into a common pool of money. They also track which books are checked out. The pool is divided up periodically (prorated by number of checkouts), and money is paid to the copyright holders. Said money is capped at a maximum of XXX pounds. I don't know whether non-UK authors get anything from this pool.
@HarryT: You might to well to attach "in the UK" to your statements that "authors get paid when you check out a book from the library."

@MoeJoe (and others) on theft, bits, and potentially infinite replication: I've been on both sides of this issue during my time in the software industry. I worked for many years at a startup company that produced high-end compilers and development tools for the embedded systems industry. My paycheck depended directly on the company being paid for its products.

Should we have given away the product? (Actually, we did give it away to Universities for instructional use. Or evaluation copies to just about anyone who asked. But I digress.) Richard Stallman (and the gcc folks) think the answer is "yes." But then, gcc is still substantially inferior to what we were selling -- even 13 years later. In fact, we didn't care about 'minor piracy' (think home or hobby use of a non-licensed copy) -- those folks could never have purchased the product in the first place, and weren't worth pursuing (from a business perspective)! But if you were making any substantial use of our products, you could bloody well pay for what you're getting.

To dispose of the free software arguments: sure, gcc was free. We thought gcc was wonderful. It acted as a minimum bar to entry into our market -- if your product wasn't very significantly better then gcc, you couldn't compete and your company went out of business. And from our point of view, that bar was quite low and easy to leap; it was easy to compete with... for us. Gcc cleared away about a dozen annoying competitors with sucky products, who competed successfully only because their sleazy salespeople lied convincingly. That was great!

As for DRM, well, our 'DRM' was lawyers and law enforcement. When the product is expensive -- typical individual sales were way over $100K -- copy protection is the wrong approach! The motivation to crack your DRM is too high, so that approach is doomed. But any user who could reasonably purchase the product will surely pay up when approached by a law-firm with a legitimate claim. That's just business. In fact, later on when we switched to 'per-seat' licensing (as an optional alternative to 'per site' licensing), our customers asked us to track the number of seats in use so that they could pay for additional seats if they needed them. They were perfectly willing to pay... as long as we provided value.

The only piracy we ever had trouble with is sort of a funny story. One day we got a support call from a (British) Royal Navy installation in... Singapore? Hong Kong?? ...anyway, in the Far East. The project was one of those "If we told you what we're doing, we'd have to kill you" things, and it was years ago, so I'm not completely clear on the details. They'd purchased our products from our Far East distributor, had a problem, and wanted support.

The only problem is that we didn't have a Far East distributor!

The RN, being a fundamentally ethical group, promptly paid us for the license they thought they'd already purchased (and sicced the law on the folks they'd bought from originally).

In the case of the RN installation above, they didn't "steal" anything. After all, we still had a copy of the bits of the tools! But if we took that attitude with every potential sale, the company couldn't have existed and the products wouldn't have been available at all.

Xenophon

P.S. Where's that company now? We were acquired by a multi-billion-dollar hardware manufacturer, who promptly pitched the entire product line and re-assigned the engineers to work on other things. They effectively wasted many millions of dollars! Go figure.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

Mystery (ebook) - Dan Brown Book Collection - 29275 downloads
Mystery (movie) - The Davinci Code - 1979394 downloads

Is the "Dan Brown Book Collection" just his books, or does it include a bunch of other books about Merovingian history, gnostic theory, conspiracy theory, occultism, and other topics?

Downloads of the torrent of a collection doesn't tell you how many people also acquired an individual file within the torrent. (The movie is likely to correspond to actual movie downloads--or movie *attempts*. Not all files remain available, no matter how many people grab the torrent.)

[Greg Anos]

Harry, re your professional writer as a job.

I agree that a professional writer treats his writing as a job. I merely point out that in these days of great economic flux, no person's job is guaranteed to be there tommorrow. Consider all the technical professionals whose jobs have been off-shored to other countries, and the loss of factory worker jobs in high-pay zones. These people didn't want their livelyhoods to go away, but they disappeared nonetheless. A professional writer has to face the disintergration of his markets and the loss of his paid profession just like any other skilled worker, these days.

[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

So (drum roll) the impact of file-sharing on Dan Brown is roughly: 0.09758333333333333% lost or never would have bought sales.

To be fair, that's somewhat misleading as ebooks are still in their infancy. When digital music pirating started, the vast majority of people still listened to music on CDs or casette. Or to put it another way, *all* digital music was pirating.

We're a little further along on the ebook front, but the fact remains that ebook sales are a fraction of total book sales. So the fact that pirated ebooks are a fraction of a fraction of total book sales is only logical, at least until more traditional readers switch to ebook format (or more non-traditional readers start becoming readers *because* of the ebook format).

[elena]

I voted 2, there is almost nothing to buy in italian..


Almost all my italian e-book are custom scans, free books and things that are not available any more; very few are bought ones. Anyway, I already had p-book editions of some e-books I downloaded from the net, and, believe it or not, I also happened to buy some of the "good ones". I bought Rowling's (p-book) and the Pratchett's (e-book) only after I'd downloaded, read and liked the pirate scanned version, for example.

[Xenophon]

Given all the posting while I was writing the above blatherings, here's the short version:

For the downloaders: If it's worth your time to read it, watch it, or listen to it, it's worth paying for. On the other hand, if you sample it and hate it, just delete and be happy. Think of it as "voluntary small-scale patronage of the arts."

For the content creators and copyright owners: Provide decent value for people's money, and most folks will pay you willingly. After all, if they like the product, they'll want more of it -- and someone's gotta pay for that! But "decent value for people's money" probably means a lot less per copy than you think it does. Fortunately, the net lets you remove at least one layer from your distribution network. Split that markup with your customers and both creator/owner and customer will be better off.

Xenophon

[DuneSoldier]

I selected "I buy most of my ebooks". I actually been reading only Baen, Gutenberg and Feedbooks books so far. But I am planning on buying some books soon, because of their free library and other freebies from this site.

I'm assuming you're using P2P to mean pirate, but I just want to point out there are more uses for P2P than piracy. Gutenberg project uses it to distribute the SciFi CD and Linux projects use it for distribution too.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Is the "Dan Brown Book Collection" just his books, or does it include a bunch of other books about Merovingian history, gnostic theory, conspiracy theory, occultism, and other topics?

Downloads of the torrent of a collection doesn't tell you how many people also acquired an individual file within the torrent. (The movie is likely to correspond to actual movie downloads--or movie *attempts*. Not all files remain available, no matter how many people grab the torrent.)

The torrent contains three novels - The Da Vinci Code
Deception Point, Angels and Demons. No stats available on individual completion of files, just full-file completion, number of times I'm assuming it (as a whole) reached 100%.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

Given all the posting while I was writing the above blatherings, here's the short version:

For the downloaders: If it's worth your time to read it, watch it, or listen to it, it's worth paying for. On the other hand, if you sample it and hate it, just delete and be happy. Think of it as "voluntary small-scale patronage of the arts."

For the content creators and copyright owners: Provide decent value for people's money, and most folks will pay you willingly. After all, if they like the product, they'll want more of it -- and someone's gotta pay for that! But "decent value for people's money" probably means a lot less per copy than you think it does. Fortunately, the net lets you remove at least one layer from your distribution network. Split that markup with your customers and both creator/owner and customer will be better off.

Xenophon

I agree, but on the other hand don't you feel somewhat ripped off when only 7-15% of your money goes to the actual author? Wouldn't it be great if I, or you, or any reader could give the full amount to the writer? That's another consequence of the generation we live in, they're becoming less and less tolerant of the big companies that manufacture our culture. They want a way to be directly involved with the creator. They want the money they give to go to the author, not the go-betweens.

[Lanik42]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Please see earlier in the thread. UK libraries, under a system called the "Public Lending Right" pay authors 5.98p (roughly 10c) every time one of their books is checked out of the library, up to a maximum paymant of £6,600 per year (about $10,000) per author. ie the author does get compensated when a book is checked out of the library.

That is in the UK - and a negligible amount even there. Here in the US, there is no such system, so it really doesn't apply.

Originally Posted by sirbruce

To be fair, that's somewhat misleading as ebooks are still in their infancy. When digital music pirating started, the vast majority of people still listened to music on CDs or casette. Or to put it another way, *all* digital music was pirating.

That's not technically true either. Now I know we're talking about sharing here, but to clear up a common misconception (thanks RIAA!) it is and has been perfectly legal to make a digital copy of your purchased (or legally free) CDs and cassettes. Depending on your location, it could even be legal to distribute (with no profit) a given number of copies of those CDs. Of course, these legal rights aren't exactly promoted by the music industry....

[Lanik42]

sorry for the double post!

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

@HarryT: I fear that your US readers may not understand about the UK's "public lending right" system. For those not in the know, here goes: In the UK and some other countries, libraries pay a per-checkout fee into a common pool of money. They also track which books are checked out. The pool is divided up periodically (prorated by number of checkouts), and money is paid to the copyright holders. Said money is capped at a maximum of XXX pounds. I don't know whether non-UK authors get anything from this pool.

Xenophon - Non-UK authors do indeed get paid from the PLR. In fact the most borrowed author from UK libraries last year - and a recipient of approx $10,000 from the PLR - was the American thriller writter James Patterson.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

I agree, but on the other hand don't you feel somewhat ripped off when only 7-15% of your money goes to the actual author? Wouldn't it be great if I, or you, or any reader could give the full amount to the writer?

Well, no, actually. Many authors, perhaps even most, need the editing, promotion, and distribution services. Even allowing for how limited those have become, they provide some value; the publisher should get some of the income for having bothered with the slushpiles and deciding "this one is worth reading." (Anyone who thinks otherwise should head over to Smashwords and just read whatever's free; if you run out, you can visit fanfiction.net; there's a couple-million stories of, erm, variable quality. Almost half a million Harry Potter stories alone--who needs the next book?)

I dunno that I think those services are worth 85-93% of the list price (in fact, I'm pretty sure I think they're not), but they're worth *something.*

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I do accept, by the way, that it's morally (but not legally) OK to buy a book and then scan it for one's personal use

Obviously the legality of that depends on where you live. I'm sure that's what you meant though.

[Good Old Neon]

We can intellectualize and rationalize downloading ebooks (or any other form of electronic media) for free until the cows grow weary and make their way home, but the bottom line is, unless the author or publisher is giving it away at no charge, doing so is theft (unless, as others have already indicated, one is scanning previously purchased copies).

With that said, I would give my left foot for a copy of Balano’s 2666 – I received the hardcover (along with a Kindle) as a Christmas gift, but I’m a bit too enamored with reading on my Kindle to crack its substantial spine.