N.Y. Times Article on Book Piracy

[orwell2k]

I was going to write a big blurb inprired by Paolo Coelho's attitude to eBooks, PirteBay and DRM, but then just thought it might be better to let Paolo put his views forward.

Check out his site and free eBook offers:

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/internet-books/

http://www.paulocoelho.com.br/engl/

Also some other links on:
http://piratecoelho.wordpress.com/

That last is a blog that supports internet sharing of his books and has little gems like the following:

This week we are going to have the final veredict on the Pirate Bay, the website that allows sharing contents in internet. Yesterday I was browsing internet on pirates, and this is what I found out:

“Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O’ Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century.” They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy.”

The Pirate Coelho supports Pirate Bay!!!

Paolo has become a big proponent of "piracy" in the form of file-sharing via bittorrent as a means of marketing his eBooks. He seems to be a practical kind of guy, and he can see that regardless of the meagre efforts of crappy systems like DRM, eBooks will be stripped of this and shared whether he and his publishers want it or not. In addition, he claims to have actually improved sales because of file-sharing his books via bittorrent. Check out this article (quoted below):

http://torrentfreak.com/paulo-coelho...te-bay-090415/

Paulo Coelho Supports The Pirate Bay

If anti-piracy lobbyists are to be believed, all content creators hate The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites. The truth is obviously more balanced. In fact, some of the most creative minds are BitTorrent users themselves, including best selling author Paulo Coelho, who offered to travel to Sweden to testify in favor of The Pirate Bay.

Novelist Paulo Coelho has sold millions of books, including the all time bestseller “The Alchemist” that sold more than 65 million copies worldwide. It is less known that he is also an avid BitTorrent user and that he admitted to pirating his own books.

Coelho believes that file-sharing is a good thing that can be used as a means of promotion for writers like himself. To put his money where his mouth is, he volunteered to support The Pirate Bay when they were up for trial. So, where the prosecution had to beg for support from artists, The Pirate Bay is backed by one of the greatest novelists.

“I am openly supporting their site. I even volunteered to travel to Sweden to discuss the case of open contents, but I never got a reply from them,” Coelho told TorrentFreak. It is a shame that his email went unnoticed, because it could’ve been of great help. Coelho believes that sharing is in people’s nature, and that it’s not something that has to be stopped by law.

“Since the dawn of time, human beings have felt the need to share - from food to art. Sharing is part of the human condition. A person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone,” Coelho told TorrentFreak in an earlier interview, explaining why he decided to share his books on sites such as The Pirate Bay.

Publishing his books on The Pirate Bay worked out really well for Coelho. He actually sold tens of thousands of extra books because he shared them on BitTorrent. “I do think that when a reader has the possibility to read some chapters, he or she can always decide to buy the book later,” Coelho said, and he is not alone in that assessment.

And this one for more info:

http://torrentfreak.com/alchemist-au...-books-080124/

Alchemist Author Pirates His Own Books

Paulo Coelho, the best-selling author of “The Alchemist”, is using BitTorrent and other filesharing networks as a way to promote his books. His publishers weren’t too keen on giving away free copies of his books, so he’s taken matters into his own hands.

Coelho’s view is that letting people swap digital copies of his books for free increases sales. In a keynote speech (embedded below) at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he talked about how uploading the Russian translation of “The Alchemist” made his sales in Russia go from around 1,000 per year to 100,000, then a million and more. He said:

"In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. [...]

I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. [...]

So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho."

He’s convinced - and rightly so - that letting people download free copies of his books helps sales. For him the problem is getting around copyright laws that require him to get the permission of his translators if he wants to share copies of his books in other languages.

So is Coelho just seeding torrents of his books? That’s just the beginning. He took it one step further and, as quoted above, set up a Wordpress blog, Pirate Coelho, where he posts links to free copies of his books on filesharing networks, FTP sites, and so on. He says it had a direct impact on sales:

"Believe it or not, the sales of the book increased a lot thanks to the Pirate Coelho site…"

In his speech he talks about how the Internet is changing language and books, and how online “piracy” and BitTorrent have helped him not only be more widely read, but also sell more books! It’s a must watch.

If more writers like Paolo took control of their eBook destinies we might all be better off. What's that they say, when the revolution comes the lawyers will be the first ones lined up and shot? I hope it's the music, movie and publishing industry lawyers.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

Way to selectively quote. That 21% decline was just for the audio segment. To reiterate, sales were down last year, primarily in hardback, mass market paperback, and book club/mail order. Trade paperbacks showed a modest increase (probably from people buying them instead of hardbacks). That somewhat contradicts your earlier summation that primarily only hardback sales were down, and that paperback sales made up for it.

I actually don't think ebook piracy has much to do with the book industry's problems over the past decade. Embracing ebooks would help stop the bleeding, though, and find new sources of revenue. Long-term, literary reading must be re-emphasized in our education system.

Prices have a lot to do with the decline. Hardcovers are very expensive and trade paperbacks are just a way for the industry to raise the prices over mass market books. Trades are an awful format. The size is off and the feel is all wrong. When people are trying t save money, hardcover and trades are not a good idea for the book industry. Just stick to mass market.

[Format C:]

I wonder how many sold printed books are actually read.
And how this percentage compare with ebooks.

In my case, I used to buy almost twice the p-books I have time to read (and I ended up with a library full of unread books). It means I have a 50% ratio of read over purchased books.
Since my first iLiad, I buy only the e-book I read, and I buy them few minutes before I start reading.
It means that I have now a 100% ratio, but I buy half the books I used to.
So, I can say e-publish has actually diminished the revenues.



An optimistic syllogism for Publishing Companies:

- We can't have Internet without piracy
- In five years piracy will come to an end
==> ...............

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Gee. And I thought that the only sales that were down last year were hardback sales, with pback etc. picking up most of the volume. Must be the millions of people who have started reading books on their iPhones since then, as eInk sales aren't that good yet.

Either that or it's the economy and people are more worried about paying their mortgage and putting food on the table than they are spending money on leisure activities. But that would just be silly. Let's blame the "pirates" instead, that will give us an excuse to ram more draconian laws through congress.

[voidIndigo]

About paying copyrights of books: (Sorry, Steve, I'm a huge fan, but you had to see it coming! though.) I may be mistaken, but a lot of authors out there, specially the ones who hadn't an easy start in life (meaning, poor), but by no means just them, ALWAYS talk about their sweet, fond memories of countless hours/days/books that they read in the cozy local LIBRARY!! Not many dollars went to the authors, I bet. If now you can pay for them (and I'm not considering the ones that are sent for "evaluation" or "comments"), it doesn't mean Funions guy (it is some kind of food, I suppose) can. Funions (what it tastes like?) and power and Internet connection cost something.

Declining reading?? Declining sales, you mean. SALES. Read the article again. The music industry may be dying, but it doesn't feel like living in a quieter world.

With Internet, I never saw so many people reading and writing. Slow reading, perhaps, and some pretty awful writing, sure (and not only from orkut or forum teens/addicts, some paid, alright!), but reading and writing nonetheless. I think the problem is people don't have any more TIME to read. I sure don't.

That they aren't reading books, well... where are they? Right there in the store (IF!), with a 10% (IF!!) discount from the physical one, full of DRM, so I'm not sure how many times I'll be able to read or where? Thanks, I'll pass. And please notice that I don't live in USA. I checked my favorite online bookstores in Brazil and guess how many e-books I found to buy?

I don't particularly like Paulo Coelho, but he went way up in my concept! (Not sure if this makes sense in english) Well, I started to like the old wizard.

[]´s

void Indigo

[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

Either that or it's the economy and people are more worried about paying their mortgage and putting food on the table than they are spending money on leisure activities. But that would just be silly. Let's blame the "pirates" instead, that will give us an excuse to ram more draconian laws through congress.

Just to be clear, I wasn't posting facts to argue that ebook piracy is hurting publishing. I believe it's a very small portion NOW, but only because ebooks are a very small portion of the industry in total. My point was simply that indeed, the publishing industry has been in decline for a while and needs to embrace ebooks in order to survive. I also believe those ebooks need to be cheaply priced and easily available, with or without DRM, or ebook piracy will become a major problem. (Though the industry is probably better off with lots of ebooks and lots of ebook piracy than little of both.)

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

Just to be clear, I wasn't posting facts to argue that ebook piracy is hurting publishing. I believe it's a very small portion NOW, but only because ebooks are a very small portion of the industry in total. My point was simply that indeed, the publishing industry has been in decline for a while and needs to embrace ebooks in order to survive. I also believe those ebooks need to be cheaply priced and easily available, with or without DRM, or ebook piracy will become a major problem. (Though the industry is probably better off with lots of ebooks and lots of ebook piracy than little of both.)

Sure, but looking at the current Amazon etc. prices, this isn't going to happen. It might for scifi, and shorts, and whatnot, but the rest seem to be believing the exact same thing the music industry is: "Prices are Reasonable" (and we really couldn't go any lower).
So now all we can do is wait a few years, and note that the situation has indeed escalated. It's not my fault existing industries refuse to adapt (or refuse to reassess actual costs, and adjust prices accordingly).
That is, I don't think this article will make a difference. The biggest-growing player for a while will likely be Amazon, and especially with the consumer lockin Topaz offers, they will not be forced to drop their prices. Baen etc. mostly offer niche products (LotR being the exception).

[sirbruce]

Based on my personal analysis, I really think ebooks need to be closer to $5 rather than $10 in order for the majority of current pbook readers to feel "prices are reasonable". I believe the industry can still turn a profit at this number if they run their own ebook retail website or if ebook retailers like Amazon are willing to take that a smaller margin. But you're right; none of us will know for a few years.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

Just to be clear, I wasn't posting facts to argue that ebook piracy is hurting publishing... My point was simply ...

Just to be clear, I wasn't responding to any of your points. I was quoting and responding to someone else, it had nothing to do with your post.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by TadW

Just musing... shouldn't Amazon as the biggest book seller in the world be most concerned about (e-)book piracy if what they all say is true? If so, why would Amazon continue pushing the Kindle?

Originally Posted by sirbruce

Of course they're concerned; that's why they support DRM.

Originally Posted by TadW

... which they must know as well as we do that it doesn't do anything to prevent privacy.

Amazon's DRM support has nothing to do with readers. It's there to placate publishers... mainly, publishers who have largely avoided e-books before Amazon, and want to be hand-held through the process of going digital. Amazon may actually be worried about loss, but as long as they have such large volume, they can afford to ignore what waste there is (as evidenced by many of their other business and shipping practices). As always, Amazon does what makes them successful, with little thought to the practicality, ethics or popularity of their decisions.

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

Based on my personal analysis, I really think ebooks need to be closer to $5 rather than $10 in order for the majority of current pbook readers to feel "prices are reasonable".

Strongly agree. The point of reference is a price of mass-paperback. Where a paperback edition exists, ebook must be cheaper.

The savings in printing, shipping, handling have to be passed to the customers, as a compensation for the price of the hardware. Anything else is rightly perceived as a ripoff.

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Amazon's DRM support has nothing to do with readers. It's there to placate publishers... mainly, publishers who have largely avoided e-books before Amazon, and want to be hand-held through the process of going digital. Amazon may actually be worried about loss, but as long as they have such large volume, they can afford to ignore what waste there is (as evidenced by many of their other business and shipping practices). As always, Amazon does what makes them successful, with little thought to the practicality, ethics or popularity of their decisions.

Of course it doesn't have anything to do with readers. That's why they're offering files in a format that can be read on multiple readers, like ePub, instead of a locked-in format like the kindle has. Oh, wait...

[TheJohnNewton]

Publishers should focus all effort on getting all of their books in eformats that work on all devices and offer them for a reasonable cost. Chasing pirates is futile waste of their resources that could be used instead to serve actual customers with actual money to spend. Chasing pirates will produce nothing but costs. Of course everyone on here already knows this.

[ClintBrauer]

I see some things happening in this business that will separate it from music.

1.) The amount of titles available via legitimate means is substantial and growing extremely quickly.

2.) DRM, while onerous, is not quite as ridiculous as some of the early music schemes.

3.) My belief (although I have no proof) is that the average consumer sees more value in a book than a music album.

4.) Already new models of consumption exist. (e.g. Chapter by Chapter) And I suspect we'll see many more new models over the coming year.

5.) The book industry is moving much more quickly than the music business. They see ebooks more of an opportunity than as a threat. The music business was at it's peak when Napster hit....the book business has been slowly growing for years. So the music business was going to contract no matter what...the book business had already peaked in terms of growth.

I've worked at an executive level for Sony Music, Universal Music, Sony Connect (when we launched the ereader) and now run CyberRead.com

So I'm in a unique position to see the difference.

I'm not saying piracy won't be a problem...but I don't see it getting out of hand similar to what happened to music.

In fact, I expect the book business will expand...although the definition of a "book" will undoubtedly change over the coming decade.

Clint Brauer
General Manager
CyberRead.com

[phenomshel]

Clint, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm just not seeing the "growing extremely quickly" that you refer to in your post.
I'm a book hoarder. I'll freely admit it. And what I get frustrated about is when I want a book (in e-format, of course) and it is not available to legitimately purchase ANYWHERE. I've run into this problem I don't know how many times. There's also the problem that publishers of out-of-print works aren't hurrying to get those in ebook format, even though I can think of at least two series (not single books, series of +10) that I'd buy in a heartbeat. I can't be the only one, either.
Why are publishers shooting themselves in the feet?

One of the previous posters is correct: If I can get a book through legitimate means and it is priced decently, I'd MUCH rather buy it than go to the trouble of tracking it down illegally. But, until the publishers get their heads out of their you-know-where's and catch up to the technology and get those books out there available, they are leaving people little choice. I'm not buying the "We can't afford to hire more people to get this done" argument that I've heard from three publishers I've contacted so far. The initial costs of hiring the people to help them get these books out are going to be exponentially returned when the books are available for sale.

PWJone said:

1. All titles need to be on eBook
2. They must be readily available and downloadable.

That is precisely the whole thing in a nutshell.