Book theft myth No 2: It's about price
2 Jan
If you read the comments from people who admit to ‘illegal downloading’ in my first article you’ll see a common thread in their attempts to justify what they do. As Allison Brennan has already pointed out book thieves always try to come up with some justification, whatever the circumstances. But price seems to be one of the most common ones.
We steal books because they’re too expensive on our $300 ereader or $600 laptop. Simple as that.
Really?
I’m published in something like twenty languages and my English language editions sell on export in many, many different territories. Book prices vary around the world because of local market conditions. In some countries books are a luxury item. If they have to be shipped halfway across the globe as exports, then whacked with a hefty import tax, they will be pricey too. But the ripoff of ebooks and audio books mainly affects English language editions at the moment, because most ebooks and audio titles are in English. The pirate sites may flit between Korea and Uzbekistan or wherever. But the people downloading those stolen books — the thieves — are mostly, it seems to me in English language countries.
You only have to look at where ereaders sell in big numbers to understand where most of the piracy is happening. That’s in the US, with, I suspect, the UK coming up hard behind.
Looking at the prices of printed mass market books on Amazon US and in the chains it doesn’t seem to me that books are extortionate. I won Best Mystery of the Year from the American Library Association for The Garden of Evil. You can currently buy that in paperback on Amazon for $6.99 and on Kindle for $5.99. Less than a similar paperback would have cost five or ten years ago.
The same thing has been happening in the UK where book prices have been steadily falling too. My latest paperback here, The Cemetery of Secrets, is listed at £6.99 but discounted to £4.86 for the paperback. This is a reissue of Lucifer’s Shadow and Amazon still lists that original paperback from 2001 at its original price – £9.99, then discounted down to £9.46.
Books are considerably cheaper than they were ten years ago. So how exactly is the reader getting ripped off in the US and the UK? Are we really supposed to believe that people who currently steal books online will one day see the price fall to a level where they say, ‘Oh now I’ll buy it.’ Oh, come on. People steal because they want to and they can get away with it. Pricing books at 99p won’t stop them. Yes, some theft could be attacked by making the purchasing process much easier — as it is with iTunes or the Kindle Store, but without the ties to specific hardware and standards. But price? No.
It’s worth pointing out too that falling retail book prices are nightmare for everyone in the publishing industry. They squeeze publishers’ margins at a time when business is bad anyway. For authors there’s a significant change too. Once upon a time royalties were based on the retail price of a book. If a publisher chose to discount the title they had to make up the difference. Now, as far as I can see, authors’ royalties are based on actual selling price. So my royalty on The Cemetery of Secrets is half what it was for Lucifer’s Shadow. Or to put it another way, I have to sell twice as many books to make the same money.
No point in complaining. That’s how things are. But it gives you an inkling, I hope, why authors view the ‘it’s all about pricing’ argument with some scepticism. Yes there are new business models that will come with digital publishing. Yes publishers need to be more creative when it comes to pricing, promotion and distribution.
But can anyone in the US or the UK with enough money to own an ereader and/or a computer honestly say they steal books because they can’t afford to buy them? Authors can spend years writing a book, putting in vast amounts of work that they never really recoup. You can buy all that for less than the price of a fancy glass of beer. Is that really too much to ask?
Well if it is: try a public library.
Tags: Book theft, Writing
Yes, yes and yes! I'm so tired of all these “books and especially ebooks are too expensive arguments”. In eReader forums they are very common. A few weeks ago there was an article on the online site of a quite famous German weekly newspaper, stating that if we are “so morally bad” to be unable to share material goods we should at least share immaterial goods. Everybody should have a right to everybody's immaterial goods like thoughts, ideas, stories, you name it. So authors should be the saints of societies where material goods have to paid for – without any need for food or shelter of course!It's obvious that people love other people's stories, but very often they do not appreciate the fact that there is someone who puts time, energy, effort, knowledge, talent and so much more into these stories. While dead authors (free of copyright) are seen as geniuses, living authors are often smiled upon( except when they make lots of money). Do these people really work? Don't they sleep all day or do something they love doing anyway? Isn't it more like a hobby? Why should they get paid anyway? I think this is part of the discussion.
I absolutely agree that is a common and perhaps growing attitude out there.Nothing could be further from the truth. I love writing but I regard it as ajob, a craft, just like any other. I also wonder: what exactly is theimmaterial thing I'm supposed to be getting back in return for somestealing, say, eighteen hours of my audio book which took me a year to writeand a talented actor a month to record?2010/1/2 Disqus <>
If ebooks are too expensive, don't buy an ebook reader – as David says, borrow a hard copy from the library
>>>We steal books because they’re too expensive on our $300 ereader or $600 laptop. Simple as that.That made me laugh out loud. Because I said the same thing on a site devoted to torrents that interviewed someone who seems to me make it his life to “distribute” everything he can get his hands on. He said he was doing it “for the poor.” And I said I didn't know of any poor people who could afford the damned computers and broadband connections required to grab his torrents!
I would have edited out the error in that post, but you're using that crap Disqus, which does not work for me, ever.
What can you edit it out with? Disqus seemed the best of a bad bunch of options to me.
Price comes into play in two ways:1) In many cases, the ebook version of the book actually costs *more* than the paperback, considering that the paperback can generally be resold to a local used book store while ebooks cannot.2) In the case of wanting an ebook version of a title you already have in paperback, *any* price is too high, because you already paid for the book once, why pay twice?Neither of these are a real excuse for piracy, but do explain why those of us who are technically astute buy very few ebooks. The only ones I buy are from Baen Books, who sell theirs DRM-unencumbered and for a very reasonable price. DRM in particular is why many technically-astute people would rather pirate than purchase. I would no more buy DRM-encumbered ebooks than I would buy DRM-encumbered music — hasn't anybody learned a lesson from the shutdown of the MSN Music store, where Microsoft turned off the DRM servers and instantly rendered all that purchased data just random gibberish? If Amazon got taken over by Microsoft and the DRM servers turned off, all those Kindle ebooks would become gibberish too! I now buy over $100/month in music from the iTunes store. Until they stopped putting DRM on their downloads, I bought $0/month in music from the iTunes store, I instead bought CD's and ripped them to mp3. Same deal with ebooks. I spend over $100/month on books. For publishers who DRM-encumber their ebooks, I spend $0/month on their ebooks, I buy the paperback instead and would feel no (zero) moral qualms about pirating the digital ebook version of the paperback that I just bought, in my opinion the author got his money, so there's no moral (only legal) reasons to pay twice for the same book (not saying that I actually pirate ebooks — I don't — just that I would feel no moral qualms about doing so for anything that I owned in paperback). An open, non-proprietary standard — ink on paper — even if clumsier to store and carry, is far preferable to a proprietary Kindle for me. Thus why my apartment has more bookcases than chairs, sigh!
There was certainly some silly pricing in the early days of ebooks. But I think that's pretty much gone away. As I said in the article my latest pb is $1 cheaper on Kindle than it is as a physical book, $5.99 compared to $6.99. Cheaper than a beer in most places.
I can resell the $6.99 paperback for $1.75 at my local used book store, so the Kindle version of your latest paperback actually costs 75 cents *more* for me. Not that I would buy the Kindle version anyhow, since I don't buy things that use closed proprietary protocols. I'm not an idiot. I'm not buying something where Microsoft could buy up the company tomorrow and render all my books an inert lump. If it's not an open format that's independent of any single company, I don't buy it. I've been around the computer industry *way* too long to do otherwise.
If you won't buy a book when it's less than the price of a beer I'm reallynot sure what we can do short of a scheme where we pay YOU to read thedamned things. I covered technology for 15 years for the Sunday Times hereby the way, and interviewed people like Gates, Ellison, McNealy along theway. Yes there should be an open standard not tied to any hardware. But assoon as that comes along people will still come up with excuses for notbuying – and go and rip us off instead.2010/1/3 Disqus <>
Aren't you being a little inconsistent? On the one hand, you say you sell on a hard copy book (so no longer have access to it); on the other hand, you would not buy an ebook because of the possibility of you no longer having access to it.Anyway, this is beside the point: choosing a hard copy or an ebook depends on various factors, but should not depend on the ability to avoid paying
I don't resell *every* book. Some books I keep, thus why my apartment is cluttered with bookshelves from floor to ceiling on most available walls. Many books I buy are “mind candy”, mindless thrillers and sci-fi to read in waiting rooms or on jet airliners that I have no intention of keeping. My point is that proprietary formats and DRM basically mean I get no choice — if the vendor goes out of business, I no longer have access to the book whether I wanted it or not.
I think you mis-read my comment. I did not say that I would not buy eBooks for $6. I have in fact done so. Rather, I was simply stating that for books that I have no intention of keeping, $6 is more than the price I'd pay for a $6.99 paperback copy of the book. That does not mean I won't spend the $6, it was simply addressing your notion that $6 for the ebook was less than the $6.99 copy of the paperback under all circumstances. It isn't. For titles that I intend to read once then discard, $6 for the e-book is actually *more* than for the paperback, and I will simply buy the paperback instead unless I have some reason to purchase the e-book.Note that I do *not* pirate e-books and was not advocating price as a reason to pirate e-books. I was simply pointing out that your argument that $6 for an e-book was less than $6.99 for a paperback was incorrect for a large category of purchased paperback books — those which are then turned around and resold to used book stores.
I have to say I have never met anyone before who factors into the modestprice of a book how much they can get for it second hand after they've readit.2010/1/3 Disqus <>
It amuses me how you use price to debunk the “it's not about the price” myth
I'd say it's more about *value*, which I guess is what you meant. When I like a writer a lot I'll pay the $15 for the paperback (unfortunately, that's what it still costs here, some books even go up to $25 for paperback). If I don't know the writer, I won't, because I don't feel I'll get the same value for that money, or don't feel sure enough that I will.If I see a book I think I might like for $20 but don't like enough right away to spend that $20 I'll wait for a sale, or borrow it from a friend, or try the library. Occasionally, I'll read a chapter (or two) in the bookstore and buy it anyway (or not). And sometimes I'll wait long enough for it to show up at my favourite secondhand bookstore.Wether or not to spend those $5.99 from your example (for which, btw, I can get more than one beer here 
) is up to the person. Nobody can value other people's money…This does, however, not justify stealing a book. Clearly people who do that don't value the book for any amount and will usually not want to spend any money on it at all, nor 'spend' time waiting for it to get cheaper / on sale / in a secondhand bookstore. They want it, they want it now, and they don't want to pay for it.
No. That's not what I meant. There really is no need to complicate somethingthat's very simple. Book thieves argue that they steal books because they'reoverpriced. The purpose here is to show that argument doesn't stand up. It'snot about 'value', which is a hazy and personal assessment. It's about whatsomething costs to buy, which is a simple, fixed matter that applies toeveryone. Most of the people who steal ebooks now would still steal them ifthey were 99 cents. Value has nothing to do with it.2010/1/10 Disqus <>
Ok, in that case I can't phrase correctly why I disagree with (some of) the arguments used, even though I completely agree with the main one, that it's not about the price.Probably need to brush up on my English a bit more.
I very much agree with the idea that it isn’t about price. There are alot of misguided people out there who rip/steal/share content because they see themselves as modern-day Robin Hoods. What they don’t really consider are the intellectual owners of the content. For every book, music track, film they rip and share that is one less that the original creators are able to sell.
In the romantic/Hollywood idea when RHood stole from the rich to give to the poor he was actually giving back to the poor what they had already had ‘stolen’ from them.
Not sure where I’m going with that. David, do you want thousands of e-copies of your books ‘returned’ to you?
I wonder if, however, a partial solution would be to provide an ‘e’ version of the book along with the print version. How this would be managed I don’t know.
I am a Roleplayer (as well as a book reader) and many games companies (publishers) now offer the option to either buy print, pdf or print and pdf versions of the game and supplements. This way you can legitimately state that even if you are done with the print version the ‘e’ version is still yours.
Finally I used to think that when I needed to shed a few books from my shelves that selling to second hand stores/ebay would be a good idea.
Then I found out there were these very deserving shops that needed them more than second hand stores and charity shop book prices having to compete with supermarkets is a whole different arguement.
I’m sure there will be deals where you get the ebook and a paper book for the same price one day. But I suspect it’s going to take a few years. We take an awful lot about ebooks right now but, particularly in the UK, they are only a tiny percentage of the market. All these things will take time.
IMO the real reason people feel free to steal books is that there is very little respect for writers and writing so our product is devalued and viewed as more or less worthless. How many times have you heard someone say s/he could write a book if only s/he had the time? And how many think because they can write a memo or business letter, they can write a book, too? “Anyone can do it” is a fairly common attitude.
Screenwriters are the bottom of the LA totem pole even tho movies wouldn’t exist without them/us. Remember the old joke about the blonde actress who was so dumb she slept with the writer? Or the early Hollywood mogul who called the writers “Schmucks with Underwoods” (Underwood was a brand of typewriter in the days way before computers.)
Of the experience of a friend of mine, a bestselling novelist. She was sitting in her editor’s office when the publisher came in, complained about some difficulty with a writer and said — and I quote — “This would be a great business without the writers.”
All this, even tho the craving for a story seems hard wired in the human species starting in earliest childhood…”Tell me a story —” a need seemingly almost as necessary as food and water.