On torrenters/Downloaders of Books...
Jan. 12th, 2011 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seawaspSaundra Mitchell has put up a post on her feelings about downloaders. I posted a fairly lengthy reply, but I felt a somewhat edited version of it belongs up here.
One of her points (if you don't go read the post yourself) is that she hasn't quite earned out on the one novel, and yet it's being downloaded by the carload (3,000 copies a week in the early stages!). So she points out that if she actually SOLD that many, she'd have hit the NYT bestsellers, and even if she only sold a TOTAL of 3,000 more copies over the entire period she'd have more than earned out. And these are painful numbers to look at, because one thinks that if only some small percentage of those people would pay, you'd be rich. Or at least making decent money.
The fact is, though, that 99% of the people doing this WOULD NOT PAY even if you could stop them from downloading. Arguing against people doing this is like shoveling back the tide. It’s like the foolishness of the MPAA and RIAA trying to stop downloads of music and movies. It can't be stopped and the people doing it are completely (deliberately) oblivious to the implications of what they do.
There is only ONE way to mitigate this activity; make the book available easily, very cheaply, online. This is why iTunes makes billions; they recognized that people WILL pay for stuff, but they won’t pay what they think are excessive prices, and they won’t pay ANYTHING if it takes them ANY effort to go looking for it, sign into some arcane website, and — eventually — they learned that they don’t like DRM, either.
All of my books are torrented, I’m sure. I don’t really care that much, because I know that the torrenters DON’T MATTER. The ones who WOULD buy my book… probably will, eventually. Those who won’t, weren’t customers, and them getting a (often very crappy!) E-copy of my book DOESN’T COST ME A THING. They weren’t going to buy anyway. They are NOT LOST SALES. This is a lesson the MPAA and RIAA *still* haven’t learned.
What the torrents MAY be is free publicity. Maybe not; I’m not contending that they’re necessarily good — but they could be, because the enemy of any author except, possibly, J.K. Rowling is OBSCURITY. The fact that 99% of the people who WOULD like your book DO NOT KNOW ABOUT YOU. This is true even of people like Stephen King, though in his case it’s probably only 50% instead of 99%.
That said, the torrenters/downloaders are *RUDE*, and I object to them on that basis; I just don’t worry about their possible effect on my sales, because it’s unlikely to actually be significant. I *know* how these people work — I was (unfortunately) involved in one of the early filesharing companies (it started out as a completely different kind of company and morphed into this while I was there; worst job experience I ever had).
So my position is hey, I'm not going to try to stop them (unless they're SELLING my book, in which case I want them hurt, or at least have their assets seized and given to me) because they're a bunch of rude bastards for the most part, but they're also irrelevant rude bastards and fighting them would gain me exactly nada.
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no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 03:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 03:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 02:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 03:17 am (UTC)iTunes Music Store (iTMS) works for two key reasons. Pricing, as you mention, is actually incidental to the first, which is the single song purchases and downloads. Disk- and flash-based players introduced a new way to listen to music to the masses. Sure, mix tapes have been around for as long as cheap tape records have been around, but tapes are inconvenient. They have to be recorded in real time. MP3 players can build up mix tapes on the fly, almost instantly. iiTMS took that idea and ran with it all the way to the bank by making it simple for the masses to build up collections of their favorite music and, together with iPod, turn that into the mix tape of the decade.
The second is the unobtrusive, liberal DRM. You can have up to 5 computers authorized with a single account, and everything purchased with that account is available on all 5 computers. Few even notice that the restrictions exists until the run up against this restriction. Add the local network library sharing and everyone in the house can listen to the entire library at will.
Reason #2 is important to general acceptance. The more restrictive a product is, the less that consumers will like it. This is the irony of Harry Potter ebooks: J.K. Rowling has bought so deeply into the piracy FUD that there are no legitimate electronic versions of her books. There are millions out there who'd pay for them, but the ebooks simply don't exist. Thus, the masses turn to illegal downloads and it becomes self-fulfilling: "look at all my books being pirated." As you say, these aren't lost sales because they can't be purchased. Out of print books fall into the same category in my opinion. It's crazy for a publisher or author to claim lost sales on media that for all practical purposes don't exist.
Reason #1 is tricky. It's what gave iTMS the critical mass it needed, but the concept of mix tapes doesn't transfer to print. We're still stuck with the novel or anthology formats for electronic books because that's all we have right now. I'm sure that there's something there and that someone will figure out out. Until then we're stuck muddling along with Kindles and Nooks. (Note: I own a Kindle DX, and I do purchase Kindle editions for books I want when they are available and I can't get them from stores like Webscriptions).
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Date: 2011-01-13 03:39 am (UTC)The second is the unobtrusive, liberal DRM.
Which was removed over a year ago.
You can have up to 5 computers authorized with a single account, and everything purchased with that account is available on all 5 computers
This restriction no longer exists on new purchases.
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Date: 2011-01-13 03:55 pm (UTC)Note: iTMS tracks are now watermarked with purchasers' Apple ID.
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Date: 2011-01-13 03:28 am (UTC)Anyway I've noticed a lot of authors that I would love to buy the books of just can not be bought. A lot are even publishing. Some have moved on to using other names etc and their books from the 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's languish only available from used book stores. Frankly that is the kind of books that tempt me the ones I would love to have again but for one reason or another aren't available for sale.
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Date: 2011-01-13 07:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 08:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 08:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 08:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 05:22 pm (UTC)This was the only job that I was HOPING to be laid off on, and felt a sense of perfect joyous freedom when it happened, despite the fact that this meant I was now unemployed (within a few weeks after 9/11) with a brand-new baby and all sorts of other responsibilities.
This was also truly tragic in that when it was Intranaut, it was one of my favorite jobs and I looked forward to working there.
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Date: 2011-01-14 05:50 am (UTC)I think Travis @ Scour still has the record for lawsuit bait though, I think he was sued for roughly $BAILOUT bucks. It was seriously about a quarter trillion bucks.
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Date: 2011-01-13 10:34 am (UTC)The fact is, though, that 99% of the people doing this WOULD NOT PAY even if you could stop them from downloading.
I suspect that 90% of the downloaders DON'T EVEN READ WHAT THEY TORRENT.
Seriously: you can listen to a downloaded album in the background in 30-60 minutes, and lots of folks have TV or movies running as a background noise/light source, but a book demands your primary attention for 3-9 hours.
I reckon most of the book downloading public are seeing collections with titles like 500 CLASSIC SF NOVELS or COMPLETE WORKS OF CHARLES STROSS and grabbing them because, hey, bandwidth is cheap and the above are a fraction the size of a single movie. But they're downloading 500 CLASSIC SF NOVELS because they're vaguely thinking of re-reading DUNE, and they're grabbing the COMPLETE WORKS OF CHARLES STROSS because they've heard the name and wonder what he's like.
And maybe they get round to opening the rar file they've gotten hold of, and it's even possible they'll look at the first page of one of the books by the author who's new to them -- but reading demands a serious investment of time. (That COMPLETE WORKS OF CHARLES STROSS? You're looking at 16-18 books currently in print, around 2 million words of text. At a reasonably fast reading speed of 350 words/min, that's 133 hours of continuous reading. And I'll bet the vast majority of downloaders can't be bothered applying 133 hours of effort to digesting something they grabbed on impulse in 30 seconds.)
The folks selling my books are another matter. If you sell my work, I expect to be paid a royalty. Making money and not giving me my share? Now that's theft.
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Date: 2011-01-13 10:55 am (UTC)It works for drugs, it works for OSs and compilers, heck, it even works for recipes. Why would it not work for books?
The simple fact is that if you play nice and let others play nice with you, most people will join in in the same spirit. And if you get most people to play nice, you can ignore the rest until they go away. (NOTE: This does not apply to the not-nice people with the means to cause serious physical harm. Different rules apply for those situations.)
As an aside, have they let Baen back into the E-book sellers association yet? I seem to recall that they were kicked out, or banned or some-such shortly after the BFL came online.
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Date: 2011-01-13 12:05 pm (UTC)If I like it, I buy a few other copies and give them as gifts for friends who I know -also- like reading [real] books.
Then, if I'm kind of mental about the book, I try to buy it in pdf format, so I can have it on my computer [since I don't have a cell phone]. Now that I have an ipad, I'll likely want to put pdfs on that. [I like fictionwise.com best for buying electronic books since they most often have pdfs.]
It's kind of like buying music on vinyl ... then cassette ... then CD. I have 3 versions of some music. [no - no mp3 player, either]
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Date: 2011-01-13 03:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 06:27 pm (UTC)Having to buy a £500 device to get an acceptable reading experience out of PDF, compared to £110 for mobipocket or epub, is another matter entirely.
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Date: 2011-01-13 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 04:27 pm (UTC)At first Baen had a couple of authors I liked to read. Then through the Free Library and webscriptions I got to try other authors. Now I'm buying at least 5-6 authors whenever a new books comes out (and the e-ARC if it is offered). [Which is how I started reading you]
Between no DRM, good pricing and easy to use, from everything I've heard it keeps piracy down.
Recently I bought some non-Baen books which was a complete disaster.
I managed to make it work but it took upgrading my ebook firmware, installing additional software and finding a store that could even sell the book to me (I live in Canada).
It would have been easier and quicker to download a torrent than to legally buy the bloody book.
Which I didn't do for two reasons. 1) If I like the book, I want to pay for it so that hopefully more will be made. 2) The quality of pirated ebooks is frequently horrible with bad formatting and OCR.
Which is why I am hoping more publisher/sellers of ebooks will remove DRM.
Since as the music industry has already learned, DRM doesn't stop piracy and if either you don't offer you product or make it too expensive it will be pirated.
And I think the only reason book piracy isn't even more epidemic is that most readers still prefer the printed form and with e-readers and smart devices I believe that will change over the next year.
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Date: 2011-01-13 08:15 pm (UTC)http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/01/book-piracy-drm-data.html
this is an agreement, filtered through my odd little head
Date: 2011-01-13 11:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-14 12:00 am (UTC)*hangs head in shame*
I don't know what I was thinking. He was graceful enough not to blast me (deservedly!) and told me he wouldn't "get a bent penny."
I feel BAD.
On the other hand, I've bought lots of his books through Amazon and read them on my iphone, so at least there's that.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-14 04:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-14 01:17 am (UTC)I can stick several *hundred* ebooks (like all my Baen stuff and a few other things) on a 1 gig card for my Nokia 770.
Given that mobipocket and the like are *horrible* on the 770, I *have* to have the books as HTML to read them.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-14 04:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-14 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-14 04:15 am (UTC)Yes
Date: 2011-01-14 09:59 am (UTC)I wish we'd stop calling it "piracy", though. It makes it sound edgy and macho. "Freetard" would be better, except it's offensive for other reasons, and not precise enough. "Freeloader"?
Re: Yes
Date: 2011-01-15 03:35 pm (UTC)My books are not DRMed because my publisher isn't that stupid, and they're available anywhere you can get a link to either my publisher's website or a number of distributor website because my publisher has world rights. I still regularly see freeloaders posting on torrent sites with requests to re-up one of my books because they like my stuff so much, and isn't it a shame that I still haven't written the next book in the series. They're apparently incapable of making the connection between "author goes back to having a day job" and "author's writing productivity drops dramatically". Of course, the fans who willingly pay for my books lose out as well. :-(
Re: Yes
Date: 2011-01-15 04:28 pm (UTC)Thing is, these guys aren't your customers, and for the most part WOULDN'T be even if you could stop the downloading. They're not the ones that will make the difference between your having to have a day job or not. I say this from a lot of experience from the inside of the filesharing revolution and observation of the people who do the same thing in other industries; they feel entitled but with no responsibility, and aren't going to develop that sense of responsibility just because you're "such a dick!" as to stop them.
Re: Yes
Date: 2011-01-15 05:17 pm (UTC)Re: Yes
Date: 2011-01-15 05:44 pm (UTC)