On torrenters/Downloaders of Books...

[seawasp]

Saundra 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.
 

Comments

[green-ogre.livejournal.com]

I am hoping the Baen model for ebooks gets emulated by other publishers.

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.

[laurahcory1.livejournal.com]

You've probably seen this:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/01/book-piracy-drm-data.html