eBook piracy, how common is it?

[doreenjoy]

Originally Posted by pepak

1) One of the legal sources is the P2P.

P2P is not legal if the books are copyrighted.

[pepak]

Originally Posted by doreenjoy

P2P is not legal if the books are copyrighted.

It is in my country.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by doreenjoy

P2P is not legal if the books are copyrighted.

Depends on copyright law in your particular country, but it's not like it matters much. Copyright law as it stands is ridiculous, antiquated, and about as useful as a rubber duck made from lead.

Here's my own rule of thumb for all this:

DRM = no sale (I bought one with this crap on it, won't do it again, and yes I know I can circumvent the DRM, but why should I?)

DRM Free, non-ridiculous price = sale

Unavailable as ebook = download and buy pbook (author loses nothing)

Already own as pbook = download (it's format shifting as far as I'm concerned)

Offered free with a means of donation = donation given (my favourite model)

Available at local library, would never think of buying but wouldn't mind reading it = loan from library or download, delete copy after reading

"Piracy" or more accurately "sharing" is not the enemy of the author and never will be. The companies that restrict, price too high, make unavailable and don't promote the author are the real enemies. Price it right (as Sonist said) and you'd find most of the "pirates" wouldn't bother. Just look at Baen, no "pirate" would touch that stuff, it would be against their code of ethics.

[HarryT]

The vast majority of commercial eBooks are of comparable quality to printed books, as far as number of errors as concerned. Don't you think that you might simply be making excuses for not buying books?

[archpope]

My observation is that ebook piracy is still not terribly widespread. I can find tons of foreign movies and TV shows with very little effort, for example, but for ebooks, anything other than bestsellers is still relatively difficult to find. Even scribd doesn't have that much available that I might be looking for. Mostly I'm just trying to find copies of pbooks I already have in order to format-shift them.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The vast majority of commercial eBooks are of comparable quality to printed books, as far as number of errors as concerned. Don't you think that you might simply be making excuses for not buying books?

What if he can't afford the books, or lives in a country where those books are 'geographically restricted'? What if he downloads, reads, and then deletes the copies, is he doing anything less or more than if he were loaning from a library? What if he would have never bought the books in the first place, but through downloading he's been introduced to all kinds of culture that he might never have experienced before? Doesn't that far outweigh the wrongly perceived criminality of the download?

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The vast majority of commercial eBooks are of comparable quality to printed books, as far as number of errors as concerned.

That hasn't been my experience.

I'm currently reading 'Pitt the Younger' by William Hague in ebook - every word in a quotation that has a double f, has a space where one of the fs should be.

None of the commercial ebooks I've bought has been up to the standard of the pbook version. OCR errors abound.

[HarryT]

Where are you buying your books from? I buy primarily from Baen and Fictionwise, and virtually all of the many hundreds of books I've bought have been just fine.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

What if he can't afford the books, or lives in a country where those books are 'geographically restricted'?

I was responding to the poster who said "I don't buy eBooks because the quality is not good enough".

What if he downloads, reads, and then deletes the copies, is he doing anything less or more than if he were loaning from a library?

Libraries in the UK pay the author about 6p each time a book is borrowed - and, of course, they buy the book that they are lending you. How does that payment reach the author for a pirated download?

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I was responding to the poster who said "I don't buy eBooks because the quality is not good enough".



Libraries in the UK pay the author about 6p each time a book is borrowed. How does that payment reach the author for a pirated download?

And if you look at the statistics on those particular payments most authors actually receive something around 99p per year for the actual loans. It's the big boys like King or Rowling who get the profits, not the small authors. (I'll try to find the article that I read on this a couple of days ago).

My point still stands, if he wasn't going to pay, whether that be through library payment or the price of the book, then nothing is lost. A phantom sale isn't a sale, and never will be. But maybe he likes the author, and maybe the next time he's out shopping he'll be more likely to pick up the work of that author and pay for it. As far as I'm concerned, as a writer, I'd take a reader over a paying customer any day.

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Where are you buying your books from? I buy primarily from Baen and Fictionwise, and virtually all of the many hundreds of books I've bought have been just fine.

Fictionwise.

[pepak]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The vast majority of commercial eBooks are of comparable quality to printed books, as far as number of errors as concerned.

That's not my experience.

Don't you think that you might simply be making excuses for not buying books?

No, I don't think so. I might (possibly, from a certain point of view) be making excuses for buying e-books, but definitely not if we are talking about "buying books".

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

And if you look at the statistics on those particular payments most authors actually receive something around 99p per year for the actual loans. It's the big boys like King or Rowling who get the profits, not the small authors. (I'll try to find the article that I read on this a couple of days ago).

With the greatest respect, you asked "how does borrowing from a library differ" and I answered you. The payment under the "Public Lending Right" scheme is, to be specific, 5.98p every time a book is borrowed, up to a maximum of £6,600 a year. An author receives the payment if their payment is £1 or more - ie corresponding to a minimum of 17 check-outs across the entire UK library system in a year; this payment forms an extremely important element of income for many authors, because it goes directly to them, not to their publisher or agents. I repeat the question: you claim that "there is no difference" between illegally downloading a book and borrowing it from a library. How does the author get their 5.98p if you illegally download a book?

[Stringer]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

None of the commercial ebooks I've bought has been up to the standard of the pbook version. OCR errors abound.

Just out of curiosity, is your experience based on some specific format(s) or do you feel like it is a problem for all the genre? I'm relatively new to the true commercial e-books, but I used to read a lot fan-fiction before and they had such problems from time to time. Although I doubt fan-fiction problems would have originated from OCR since most of that stuff probably never even ends to print. The few (8) e-books I have bought thus far have been completely error free.

[Sparrow]

We pay for library books - whether we want to read them or not.
We're forced to stump up for books we don't want, yet publishers are strangely silent on that particular injustice.

If we have to pay for stuff we don't want, maybe downloading stuff we do is merely a balancing of the scales.

Originally Posted by Stringer

Just out of curiosity, is your experience based on some specific format(s) or do you feel like it is a problem for all the genre?

The books I buy are either MobiPocket or MS Reader.