Is piracy likely to harm ebook sales?

[BlackVoid]

Originally Posted by Fat Abe

Look, we still live in a civilized nation, and without recompensing each other, we all suffer. If a pirate chooses to be honest, he should do a good deed, equal in value to his bad deed. Buy a print copy (or substitute title) from the publisher.

Going in with the army to steal other peoples oil is the civilized way.

[mike_bike_kite]

This is just my approach - I'm not saying whether it's right or wrong: I tend to only read science and technical books electronically and haven't progressed to reading novels as ebooks. Most of the material I read is "free" simply because I find it difficult to justify $10 on such small virtual possessions. I do fully understand an authors need to be compensated but I'd also like to see the full savings from zero publication costs to be reflected in the price. I tend to buy hard copies of the ebooks I like (sometimes new, sometimes 2nd hand) because I like having a real library of everything I've enjoyed reading. My real library has approx 2000 books and is obviously all paid for.

[Worldwalker]

Addressing the original topic, whether piracy will harm ebook sales, my take is this:

First, there are two broad groups of readers. I think of them as the bestseller readers and the bibliophiles. The former buy maybe a dozen books a year, the latter a dozen books a month. For the bestseller readers, books make up only a small part of their entertainment menu. They read books, yes, and sometimes a whole lot of them read the same book, but they don't read like the bibliophiles do. Reading is just a thing they do sometimes. The bibliophiles are the ones where, when you go into their houses, you have to move books before you can sit in any chair. Possibly before you can get in the door. In other words, they're us. There aren't nearly as many of us as there are bestseller readers, but on a per-person basis, we buy a hell of a lot more books, which may make our weight in the market closer to theirs than the publishers realize. We're the ones buying the backlist and midlist. We're the ones who go without other things so we can buy more books.

Out of those two groups, it's the bibliophiles who are most likely to buy and use ebook readers. Why is someone who reads a book once a month going to shell out hundreds of dollars to read that book in, frankly, a less convenient form? By and large, they're not. It's us, the people whose physical libraries put their houses' structural stability at risk, who own more bookcases than all other articles of furniture put together, who want and need devices that can carry around hundreds of books at once. Sure, we buy bestsellers too. We buy just about everything with words on it. We're the real mass market when it comes to ebooks. A device that's a gimmick to Joe Average is to us the means of saving our floor joists.

Now, out of those two groups, the bestseller buyers aren't going to be downloading illicit books -- if they have ebook readers at all (which is questionable, given the ratio of the price of the device to the amount of use they'll get out of it) they're not spending so much on ebooks that the effort to collect and use second-rate copies is even worth it. So publishers aren't losing any money from them. The bibliophiles, on the other hand, are already spending every penny we can spare on books. We're maxed out; there's no book-buying capacity left. If some bibliophiles are getting illicit copies of books, that is probably supplementing, rather than replacing, their normal book buying.

Part of the problem, and part of the scare tactics, is how the industry figures its "losses". Just like the BSA assumes that every warez d00d who has a cracked copy of Photoshop CS4 would have bought it at full retail price otherwise (because every teenager has $700 to spend on software to put lame captions on his Facebook pictures), the publishers assume, or claim to assume, that everyone who downloads a 3,000-book torrent would have bought every single book in it at list. That's a $36,000 loss! Except, of course, that I don't think any of us know anyone who spends $36,000 a year, or probably even a decade, on books. Certainly not any of the people who are downloading torrents of bad OCR's of worse scans. If someone who isn't a customer anyway is making copies of a product for free, the seller has really lost nothing. You can't lose money you don't have, and never had a chance of getting. And who knows, maybe they'll find a book they like in there, and decide to buy a legit copy.

If piracy really harmed ebook sales, Baen Books would be out of business. They not only don't weep and wail about "theft", they have a huge list of electronic copies of some of their finest books available on their website, in many handy formats, that they encourage you to download and share with everyone you know. They pack CD-ROMs in the back of some of their books (not sure if they still do) with more of the same, and again, with an exhortation to copy the CD and give it to everyone. And it pays. By and large, people want to feel virtuous, and if they can get a good product, a product that fills their needs, at a fair price, from someone they respect, and with warm fuzzy feelings attached, they'll buy it. Aside from the substantial cubic footage of dead-trees books I've bought, and continue to buy, from Baen, I shelled out about sixty bucks a couple of weeks ago for another batch of ebooks. They deal fairly with me, and they give me a good product for a good price, so why shouldn't I?

(by the way, I should point out that all of my ebooks are either legitimately free, such as the BFL and PG, or properly paid for; I'm discussing the reasons for piracy in hypothetical, not personal, terms)

Something else to consider: Remember the early days of the video rental industry, when the studios tried hard to shut the stores down because they feared rentals were cutting into the sales of their $50+ videotapes to the handful of people who had players? Yeah, about that ... now DVDs sell for $10-$20, there's a Blockbuster on every corner, I don't know anyone including my elderly mother who doesn't own a DVD player of some sort ... and movies can make more off of DVD sales than they do at the box office. Everyone buys them. They found a price point that makes them cheap enough to buy to make it worthwhile to buy the necessary hardware, and with said hardware being widespread, there's a huge market for the DVDs. So instead of where the video industry started, with a tiny handful of people paying $200 in today's dollars for each movie, they have practically everyone on the planet paying $10 each for zillions of movies.

That's what the ebook publishers need to do: sell their books cheaply enough so that buying an expensive device to read them with makes sense, and by doing so, they'll cause their market to explode, and their profits will follow. If you sell one book at $10 profit or 10 books at $1 profit, you're making the same money -- and the more the customers have, the more they want. It worked for the movie industry, it will work for the publishing industry.

Speaking of the cost of producing an ebook, it costs a hell of a lot more to produce a movie -- yet compare the prices of the end product. Even direct-to-video movies, with no theater revenue to help offset the production costs, still seem to turn a profit for their producers at those prices. Customers do notice this, and they consequently start feeling gouged when a book is selling for more than a movie.

So ... no, as long as the publishers provide a means for customers to buy a good product at a fair price, and don't treat their customers like their blood enemies (e.g., Baen), piracy isn't likely to be a serious problem. If things keep on as they are, where most publishers are making legitimate purchases harder and more inconvenient than obtaining illicit copies, charging disproportionately more, compared to printed versions, for what the customer actually gets, and applying DRM that inconveniences only the legitimate customers ... well, yeah, it's gonna be an issue.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by JaneFancher

DAW got snarky last year and went after a bunch with cease and desists on all of their writers. Don't know how effective that was. .

It tends to make people pirate them even more. It's become known as the Harlan Ellison effect. Before he sued a fan over some book that had been out of print for 20 years there wasn't much of his stuff available, now all of it is. People upload them all on a regular basis just to annoy him.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Part of the problem, and part of the scare tactics, is how the industry figures its "losses". Just like the BSA assumes that every warez d00d who has a cracked copy of Photoshop CS4 would have bought it at full retail price otherwise (because every teenager has $700 to spend on software to put lame captions on his Facebook pictures), the publishers assume, or claim to assume, that everyone who downloads a 3,000-book torrent would have bought every single book in it at list. That's a $36,000 loss! Except, of course, that I don't think any of us know anyone who spends $36,000 a year, or probably even a decade, on books.

The "war on drugs" uses similar tactics.
They calculate the street value of the smallest known amount of a drug, weigh the amount they sieze, and declare how many millions they've taken off the street.

So--if marijuana sells for $25/gram, and they sieze a warehouse with 200 plants, they put those plants on a scale (stems, roots, leaves & all), note that they've got a ton or so of plant material, and declare that they shut down a dealer with $14million in contraband. Riiiight. (No idea what marijuana plants weigh, and my concept of street value is based on extrapolation from 20-year-old conversations.)

Speaking of the cost of producing an ebook, it costs a hell of a lot more to produce a movie -- yet compare the prices of the end product. Even direct-to-video movies, with no theater revenue to help offset the production costs, still seem to turn a profit for their producers at those prices. Customers do notice this, and they consequently start feeling gouged when a book is selling for more than a movie.

Movies, even direct-to-vid movies, get a lot more viewers than books get readers. (A movie is a 2-hour time investment towards entertainment; a book is longer than that for everyone except bibliphile speed-readers.) And I think that's an area where production cost of the individual units *does* matter. For all the hype about books only costing a couple of dollars to print (and distribute and store, which is a lot of where I question the claims), discs cost *pennies* to produce. Even good-quality DVDs, bought by the case (truckload) are very cheap, and so are the packing materials. The color picture on the outside of the box is probably the most expensive part of a DVD.

Movie sales are measured in the millions. Book sales are measured in the thousands. DVDs take less storage space and less display space to advertise.

That said, YES... people will consider, should I buy this book, or a movie instead? And the book needs to have something compelling going for it; mainstream ebooks at the price of a DVD, with DRM, are a hard sell against all the other forms of entertainment available.

We're the real mass market when it comes to ebooks.

Indeed, and the mainstream publishers are seriously missing something here. We're the ones who *will* switch our purchases from $4 used paperbacks to $6 new ebooks... where they exist. But we won't switch from $4 used paperbacks to $17.99 new ebooks that require code-stripping before we can read them in our choice of venue. I could be convinced to buy 2 shiny ebooks instead of 3 beat-up paperbacks; I'll make up the reading gap on the blogs and fanfic archives. (I *will* be reading that ~80,000 words worth of content *somewhere*.) I'm not going to be convinced to buy 1 shiny ebook instead of 4 1/2 paperbacks.

But the big publishers don't know I exist, because I never bought hardbacks* and rarely bought new paperbacks. So none of their marketing attempts are aimed at me, and I continue to buy used paperbacks (and chop the bindings off, and scan them, and OCR them & correct them and throw them into my ebook reader 'cos I can't stand to read paper anymore) and low-price ebooks and make up the reading gap on fanfic archives.


*Slight hyperbole. I've bought, oh, four or five new hardbacks I can think of, in my life. I think that's close enough to "never" for publishers' purposes.

[JaneFancher]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

It tends to make people pirate them even more. It's become known as the Harlan Ellison effect. Before he sued a fan over some book that had been out of print for 20 years there wasn't much of his stuff available, now all of it is. People upload them all on a regular basis just to annoy him.

Ahhhh...poor Harlan. (joke, guys, joke) You know, in person, he's one of my favorite convention people and he's extremely smart. But he is a bit of a pit bull when it comes to his legal rights.

But there ya go. What I've got to do is go post all my stuff to pirate sites (badly scanned versions, of course) then post that the pretty and legit copies are available at CC!

Whole new ad campaign! (where's my pirate hat?) Arrr!

Yes! I knew there had to be one.

[JaneFancher]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Movies, even direct-to-vid movies, get a lot more viewers than books get readers. (A movie is a 2-hour time investment towards entertainment; a book is longer than that for everyone except bibliphile speed-readers.) And I think that's an area where production cost of the individual units *does* matter. For all the hype about books only costing a couple of dollars to print (and distribute and store, which is a lot of where I question the claims), discs cost *pennies* to produce. Even good-quality DVDs, bought by the case (truckload) are very cheap, and so are the packing materials. The color picture on the outside of the box is probably the most expensive part of a DVD.

Movie sales are measured in the millions. Book sales are measured in the thousands. DVDs take less storage space and less display space to advertise.

Very interesting exchange, and dead on. There's an additional aspect that I missed, if it was addressed, and that's the effect of a critical mass of consumers. A theatrical movie or a best seller are aimed at the entire community, at getting the "have you seen/read" factor going quickly so the sales can explode in the first couple of weeks. Since reorders on the part of book stores are all keyed to the first week sales, this is crucial in the shelf life-span of a given title.

Most books that are different from the current best seller model depend on good old word of mouth, i.e. individuals recommending books to their friends. This means that such books must remain available to allow time for this much more intimate exchange to take place. Back when backlist could be warehoused for years, this wasn't a problem. Writers with a different voice could build a readership slowly but surely. A new book would come out and the publisher could offer the entire backlist.

Thanks to the Thor-tool decision, those warehoused books became taxable items not just in the first year of production but for every subsequent year. This shifted the entire dynamic of book publishing. It became economically unfeasible for meaningful numbers of backlist to be kept available. Every time a new book in a series came out, they had to reprint the entire backlist...only to trash the unsold copies before the end of the year. The number printed was therefore kept at a bare minimum.

This was particularly disastrous for SF/F which depend heavily on series and backlist, thanks to the world building inherent to the genre, which eats up a lot of wordage. But all non-bestseller books are directly affected by a decision that turned books into cans of tomatoes.

So those costs of shipping and warehousing that you question probably reflect this necessary tax.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by JaneFancher

But there ya go. What I've got to do is go post all my stuff to pirate sites (badly scanned versions, of course) then post that the pretty and legit copies are available at CC!

Whole new ad campaign! (where's my pirate hat?) Arrr!

Yes! I knew there had to be one.

Heh. Post non-OCRd scans in PDF form, with some skewed & slightly cut-off pages, scanned flatbed so the middle between the pages has that awful dark line that covers the edges of the words near the center.

Attach a letter-sized PDF page to the beginning--"Here's Jane Fancher's book so you don't have to go to closed-circle.net and buy the fancy ePub & Mobi and other ebook versions for $5. Save five whole dollars by reading this version!"

[DawnFalcon]

Or one of the PDF's where the text is twice as wide as the page, and the only way to get the text is to copy each page invididually and paste it somewhere else. How do I know about them? Oh yea, some etextbooks I bought. Suffice to say that ended up in a chargeback.

[DJHARKAVY]

To add to that, there are people who want to read on their eReader books that they already paid for in one form or another.

I, for example, have bought multiple copies of every Harry Potter book, one for myself and one each for two teen relatives. Is it really hurting the companies if I want to have a digital copy that I can carry around?

I recently listened to a (paid for) audio version of the Time Traveller's Wife and wanted to read it. But I cannot get a digital edition and do not like to carry paper copies around. I would pay for a digital copy if it were legally available but it isn't. So if, at some point, I were to find a digital copy, how is the publisher being harmed? I have bought a copy of the book already (albeit an audio one) and have no intention of buying a print copy under any circumstances...

Certainly these are rationalizations. But I fail to see how anyone is harmed in either case.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by JaneFancher

Thanks to the Thor-tool decision, those warehoused books became taxable items not just in the first year of production but for every subsequent year.

[nitpick]Not quite. The asset itself isn't taxed, but because it must be accounted for at full cost value, it increases pre-tax profit in the accounts, and so increases the amount that must be paid in tax.

There's a very good explanation of the effects of the decision at http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/thor.htm

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

If piracy really harmed ebook sales, Baen Books would be out of business. They not only don't weep and wail about "theft", they have a huge list of electronic copies of some of their finest books available on their website, in many handy formats, that they encourage you to download and share with everyone you know. They pack CD-ROMs in the back of some of their books (not sure if they still do) with more of the same, and again, with an exhortation to copy the CD and give it to everyone. And it pays. By and large, people want to feel virtuous, and if they can get a good product, a product that fills their needs, at a fair price, from someone they respect, and with warm fuzzy feelings attached, they'll buy it. Aside from the substantial cubic footage of dead-trees books I've bought, and continue to buy, from Baen, I shelled out about sixty bucks a couple of weeks ago for another batch of ebooks. They deal fairly with me, and they give me a good product for a good price, so why shouldn't I?

(by the way, I should point out that all of my ebooks are either legitimately free, such as the BFL and PG, or properly paid for; I'm discussing the reasons for piracy in hypothetical, not personal, terms)

Hey, if authors and/or publishers want to put their material out there for free download because they think it will actually increase their sales and income good on them. My problem is with book pirates that presume the same right.

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Something else to consider: Remember the early days of the video rental industry, when the studios tried hard to shut the stores down because they feared rentals were cutting into the sales of their $50+ videotapes to the handful of people who had players? Yeah, about that ... now DVDs sell for $10-$20, there's a Blockbuster on every corner, I don't know anyone including my elderly mother who doesn't own a DVD player of some sort ... and movies can make more off of DVD sales than they do at the box office. Everyone buys them. They found a price point that makes them cheap enough to buy to make it worthwhile to buy the necessary hardware, and with said hardware being widespread, there's a huge market for the DVDs. So instead of where the video industry started, with a tiny handful of people paying $200 in today's dollars for each movie, they have practically everyone on the planet paying $10 each for zillions of movies.

Maybe you haven't walked around your neighborhood recently. Blockbusters are disappearing like the American buffalo; victims of businesses like NetFlix, cheap prices to just purchase DVDs, and pirate sharing on torrent sites. I'll not try to argue the relative impact of the three.

Originally Posted by JaneFancher

Ahhhh...poor Harlan. (joke, guys, joke) You know, in person, he's one of my favorite convention people and he's extremely smart. But he is a bit of a pit bull when it comes to his legal rights.

But there ya go. What I've got to do is go post all my stuff to pirate sites (badly scanned versions, of course) then post that the pretty and legit copies are available at CC!

Whole new ad campaign! (where's my pirate hat?) Arrr!

Yes! I knew there had to be one.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Heh. Post non-OCRd scans in PDF form, with some skewed & slightly cut-off pages, scanned flatbed so the middle between the pages has that awful dark line that covers the edges of the words near the center.

Attach a letter-sized PDF page to the beginning--"Here's Jane Fancher's book so you don't have to go to closed-circle.net and buy the fancy ePub & Mobi and other ebook versions for $5. Save five whole dollars by reading this version!"

I love it! Maybe even leave out a page here and there?

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

It tends to make people pirate them even more. It's become known as the Harlan Ellison effect. Before he sued a fan over some book that had been out of print for 20 years there wasn't much of his stuff available, now all of it is. People upload them all on a regular basis just to annoy him.

Hmm, I'd never heard that about Harlan Ellison. Loved his work, but I tend to love the books (or music, or film) without much caring about who the author is. Being aggressive about his copyright would not make feel more or less justified in pirating an author's work.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

Hmm, I'd never heard that about Harlan Ellison. Loved his work, but I tend to love the books (or music, or film) without much caring about who the author is. Being aggressive about his copyright would not make feel more or less justified in pirating an author's work.

Not so much "aggressive" as "vicious."

Harlan Ellison's one of the few authors who's successfully sued TV & movie studios for copyright infringement. In order to do that, he had to be tenacious and several types of aggressive, and really good at cutting through corporate BS and vague rationalizing doublespeak.

And then fans started distributing his books on alt.binaries.e-book. And he went after those, as he could find them; found one & sued (the case was settled for a few thousand dollars).

Legally, there is no difference between "Paramount makes a movie that grabs crucial elements of his short story" and "A fan typed that story into his computers and emailed it to 20 friends." Both are copyright infringement; both carry potential fines of $150k+. And Ellison went after both with the same approach: threatening letters from lawyers, long diatribes about the evils of copyright-theft, bigger & better lawyers when the first wave seemed to be losing ground.

Against movie studios, that approach works. It got him a hefty settlement from the Terminator's profits, and credit on the screen. (And I'm glad it did; Ellison's contributions to science fiction *should* be acknowledged, and *should* make him rich.)

Against fans? Less effective approach. Oh, it shut down the guy who first shared some of his ebooks. (With a lot more than 20 friends. The alt.binaries hierarchy was not small.) But fans weren't trying to cheat him out of millions; they were trying to *promote* his works, which weren't available as legit digital versions at the time. And shooting rats with a flamethrower may kill the rats you see, but is hardly an effective method of pest control.

And word goes out among fans: Ellison, he's that guy who thinks his books should only be appreciated by people who've got time & money to track down out-of-print used copies. And fans said, shrug, I'll read what I like and not pay attention to the wishes of control-freak litigious jerks. Cue scanners & proofreaders, and relatively soon, all of his works were bouncing around the torrents & binaries groups. (Now, I think most of his books are available as ebooks. Multiformat, even, so no complaints about DRM problems.)

I've loved the small bits of time I've spent in Ellison's company at conventions. He's brilliant and funny. And arrogant as hell, and absolutely scathing to people he thinks deserve it. (Which is incredibly entertaining to watch if you don't happen to be the target.) I applaud his going after publishers and production studios who try to screw over the authors whose works they want to use without compensation.

I have less applause for his approach to ebooks; the fact that we haven't sorted out how to allow & encourage the social side of books in digital form *and* compensate the author (and publishers, where that's relevant), doesn't mean that authors should go after individual filesharers with lawsuits.

1) It's overly-harsh; punishment is disproportionate to the offense.
2) It's trying to punish people who want you to succeed.
3) It's ineffective. Chasing the ones you can see just encourages the others to hide better.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Not so much "aggressive" as "vicious."

Harlan Ellison's one of the few authors who's successfully sued TV & movie studios for copyright infringement. In order to do that, he had to be tenacious and several types of aggressive, and really good at cutting through corporate BS and vague rationalizing doublespeak.

And then fans started distributing his books on alt.binaries.e-book. And he went after those, as he could find them; found one & sued (the case was settled for a few thousand dollars).

He famously said, not so long ago, "If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump".

[JaneFancher]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

Hey, if authors and/or publishers want to put their material out there for free download because they think it will actually increase their sales and income good on them. My problem is with book pirates that presume the same right.

True...but if the free copy is pretty where's the incentive to come buy the real thing other than a reader's own good nature? And I personally don't want to be associated with a crappy product. Hence...subterfuge...Heh heh heh....

Not very secret, tho, since I've posted my intentions! (hunting for schill.)

I love it! Maybe even leave out a page here and there?

Heck, I could just scan the published version of Ring of Lightning where they left out page 320 and repeated another page...My first website, back in the age of dinos, was devoted to that little faux pax.

Hmm, I'd never heard that about Harlan Ellison. Loved his work, but I tend to love the books (or music, or film) without much caring about who the author is. Being aggressive about his copyright would not make feel more or less justified in pirating an author's work.

If you will allow me to digress...

My first encounter with Harlan was as a fan back in the 1970s at the first Puget Sound Star Trekkers con. (my first convention. Wheee) and he was on his best behavior because he was sharing the stage with Robert Heinlein, for whom he had a huge respect. Bob was a gentleman's gentleman, if a bit of a charming chauvinist, and Harlan acted accordingly...for the most part. When he had the stage to himself, all bets were off.

I will admit my at the time still virginal ears heard more of the F-word that weekend than I'd heard in my entire lifetime. (Computers have subsequently helped me understand the usefulness of the word.) Anyway, I hadn't read him at the time, but my impression was that he was full of great insights into, well, lots of things, but what I remember most were his comments on the media's representation of violence...basically white washing it and making it exciting rather than showing it like it really is... was ethically wrong, that if they were going to show a car crash, they should show what really happens to the people inside.

My thoughts were that his attack-dog approach was keeping his message from reaching those who really needed to hear. Likely it wouldn't have changed anyway...people being adrenaline junkies...but he had some seriously good points. He always does...if a bit extreme in his presentation of them.

He's tempered (a bit) over the years, but he's still a serious tilter at windmills, and I kinda love him for that. He was one of the first to make public the crazy love/hate relationship most serious writers have with Hollywood. And the whole piracy thing...well, it brought it to the public's attention and is at the spiritual heart of discussions like this. At the time, writers hadn't really thought out the pros and cons, all they saw was their work being handed out for free. The whole Baen experiment hadn't even started, as far as I can remember. I know it sparked a lot of discussion in our household.

To me, as both a fan and a professional, he's never been anything but kind...without real reason, because he likely doesn't know me from Adam. He's a firecracker on stage, tho, no doubt.