Sunday 3rd January 2010
I got a bit sidetracked this weekend by the piracy issue. That first article I posted on Saturday provoked the biggest number of comments I’ve ever got here in one day — from people outraged by book theft and from those trying to justify it (most of whom won’t use the word ‘theft’ naturally).
I think it’s pretty clear where I stand on this subject. Stealing is wrong. It’s also about to get an awful lot easier. We will see a flood of new ereaders in 2010. Not just the much-hyped Apple tablet, but a host of new devices using either Google’s phone-based he Android operating system or its netbook OS Chrome. I have Android on my own phone. It’s a great product and already has a fantastic ebook reader for use on Android phones — Aldiko – which hooks into some existing legal book libraries.
My money on the mass market for ebook devices during 2010 is on products based on Google software and don’t tie customers to a single supplier. They will probably work out a lot cheaper than the equivalents from the big, monopolistic players. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the stores stuffed with ereaders starting at the $200 mark or less by next Christmas. All, of course, capable of displaying ripped off ebooks as readily as they will legitimate ones. Those of us who work in the publishing business — writers, publishers, agents et al — have a unique opportunity here. We can see the tsunami before it hits and try to work out some way of minimising the damage, based on the experiences of the music and video industry. Here are a few suggestions to kick about….
- Ebooks represent a new and potentially valuable book market that should ease at least some of the pain authors and the publishing industry is feeling at the moment.
- Book theft can never be stopped in its entirety. There are always people who will steal, and the nature of the digital world is going to make it even easier for them to do that in the future. Governments will doubtless try to intervene with some anti-piracy measures. It’s pointless for companies and individuals to try to track down and punish the army of repeat thieves out there who will never, ever pay for anything.
- Most people are honest and decent and don’t want to deprive creative workers of their income. They will buy ebooks provided they’re sensibly priced and easy to purchase. Pricing isn’t an issue in most large markets today. Delivery certainly is. Publishers need to deliver a variety of online sales outlets that let people buy books that aren’t tied to specific hardware, without unnecessary technical restrictions and hassle, as easily as we buy on iTunes today.
- There is no easy technical solution that will stop piracy, and heavy-handed use of copy protection may well deter legitimate buyers and make them download ripped-off copies instead.
If the above is true then it seems to me clear where we should all be focusing our efforts. Not on chasing the recidivist book thieves out there, who just aren’t worth the trouble, but in persuading decent book readers that it’s in their interest as much as ours that they buy legitimate copies of our work. Whether you write full or part time you should be able to expect to receive recompense for your work. To those who claim writing is too important to be muddied by ‘commercialism’ all I can say is I will happily write for nothing the moment supermarkets hand out free food, bars buckshee beer, petrol stations giveaway gas, and the taxman writes me a letter that starts, ‘Annual return? Forget it. We don’t need the money’. Until then I’d just like you to pay the modest price on the cover.
The average human being gets this argument straight away. We just need to remind them of it when the ebook reader explosion begins, and to make it simpler for them to buy a legitimate copy than a ripped off one. This is something of concern to all of us in the business. Author organisations like ITW, RWA and MWA could, if they wanted, band together and get behind it. I’m sure the Society of Authors in the UK would come in too.
I’m no expert in these matters so I defer to wiser counsel. But I’d happily stick a button up here that said, maybe, ‘Please Don’t Steal My Book’. That could link to a simple web site run by a group of authors’ organisations, perhaps with quotes from well-known writers, which sets out the facts about what writers really earn, how much we actually get from book sales, and why using ripped-off copies will, in the end, damage the interest of both writers and readers.
Any sane author wants people to read their work as ebooks. Opposing book theft doesn’t make you a Luddite. We should encourage and welcome the birth of the digital book medium. But at the same time we need to make sure the public understands what’s going on and appreciates the damage they do if they rip off stolen commercial material. If you want to read for free there are public libraries out there, a wealth of giveaway books (you can find two of mine on Scribd) and thousands of out-of-copyright classics on places like Feedbooks. There really is no excuse for anyone to steal.
The alternative is to sit back and moan as the livelihoods of writers begin to disappear from beneath them through nothing more than widespread digital pilfering orchestrated by people who hate books and delight in the damage they plan to wreak on the ecosystem of the great and varied world of books. Don’t let these bastards win.
Tags: Book theft, Writing
Ebook prices in the UK have not yet stabilised because the market hasn't
really developed here yet, nor is there competition between distributors and
ebook readers. In a year prices will reflect those of the US which are
equivalent to or less than paperbacks and they are that for many if not most
titles on Waterstones now (i.e. my ebooks are £5.70 or less compared with
£6.99 for paperback).
Your assertion that high prices only apply to 'bestsellers' is just plain wrong. Prices vary according to publisher and publishing rights. If you take a look at my friend Peter James, who was no 5 in the charts last time I checked, you'll see his ebooks are the same price or less than mine (we are with the same publisher).
http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/simpl...
There are plenty of posts on the web by publishers where they've shown how
the physical cost of book production is not a particularly large part of the
cost of the book, any more than making CDs was a huge part of the music
industry. Try Google.
2010/1/11 Disqus <>
Hi David
Sorry – I missed that blog post. I take your point about the £200 reader and the price of ebooks, but what of our perception – that of the buyer? Can you please explain how it is that a book, presumably in electronic form, is converted into printed format (paper, printing machines, transport etc) ends up cheaper than the ebook version? I take your point about the examples of your books, but this is rarely the case, especially with the bestseller lists, where ebooks are regularly around the £8.99 mark and upwards.
Just quickly looking at Waterstone's now, for example – “I, Alex Cross”: Hardback £9.49, ebook £11.65; “The Scarpetta Factor”: Hardback £9.49, ebook £13.30; “FlashForward”: Paperback £4.89, ebook £5.60. Where's the justification for those daft prices?
This is the most salient response I've seen on here.
As I've already written… the argument that it's somehow down to 'price'
doesn’t stand a moment's scrutiny.
http://davidhewson.com/blog/2010/01/02/book-the...
2010/1/10 Disqus <>
Hi David
I like some of your arguments.
For me, it's all down to the publishers. How can they justify the exhorbitant prices they're charging for 'popular' ebooks? And why, as a consumer, should I need to pay more for an ebook than I can to by the dead tree version?
I'm afraid book publishers have the same, protectionist, head-in-the-sand attitude as music publishers had a few yeas ago. What “Bad Tux” says is so right – they need to get their downloading act into gear soon, before everyone starts swapping pirated ebooks.
Great!
I completely agree with you, David. People stealing books don't love books, don't love literature, don't love writers… they only love their being able to “cheat the System” – I hope they will stopped, before the damage they are doing will be too much to be fixed …
“Don't let these bastards win.”
Yes! I'm more than glad to sign up to that. And, I would never debase the word “debate' in using it to rationalize theft. Clearly, we have a world of people who have never produced anything of value and know nothing of the experience.
Good points and an interesting debate. I've often wanted to leave a book on a train to encourage people to read the kind of writers I admire but somehow can never part with my copy.
I hate to admit it but I'd be much more likely to steal a Dan Brown book out of curiosity knowing I'd never actually buy it and he'd never miss the royalty payment. If I downloaded books, which I don't. I'm not offering that as any form of justification of course. I agree that theft is theft. If I want to read a book then why should I get it for free?
I think that Cory Doctorow's advice is great advice on how to be like Cory
Doctorow, as is so often the case with gurus. His model and his market is
very much his own and not of great relevance to the vast majority of writers
who, like it or lump it, must work through traditional distribution channels
probably for a decade to come. Doctorow is clearly very popular in the
circles that he addresses but I have to say I don't think he's much known in
the markets where most mainstream writers are these days.
For example out of interest I looked up my own books and Cory Doctorow's on
the Kent Library system – https://kent.spydus.co.uk.I have numerous copies
of 50 different titles all over Kent. He's got one copy of one book for the
whole county and nine of a second. Mine run to pages in book, large print
and audio. I don't say that as a boast but as a fact: libraries are an
important part of my market, for sales and for PLR too. The whole 'give it
away with one hand and sell it with the other' doesn't seem to be working
there. I'm sure the markets where he's popular probably don't go for me. But
that's my point – we are not all in Cory Doctorow's market.
I'd also be worried if one prerequisite to being an author was that you had
to be web-savvy somehow. That would disenfranchise an awful lot of people
who either don't want to know much about the web, or think, rightly, that
authors are better off writing than trying to set themselves up as
publishers.
2010/1/4 Disqus <>
I've not read all the comments on this debate but have you read any of Cory Doctorow's opinions on the subject? And if so, what do you think?
And there was me thinking that one of their primary reasons for cracking
Kindle DRM was so that they could read books they haven't paid for. How
naive I must be. Unless…
I have to say the philosophical gymnastics these people seem want to subject
us to in order to convince everyone they're not thieves really astonishing.
You mustn't expect normal, paying customers to fall for them. Taking
something that doesn't belong to you, something that has a commercial value
and on which others rely for their livelihoods, is stealing. I don't intend
to stop calling it that around here. If it upsets those involved in stealing
authors' work then they've a simple remedy: cut it out.
2010/1/3 Disqus <>
Baen has had subscriptions for their ebooks for years. $15 per month gets a random selection of their backlist dropped into your inbox. It's an interesting way to get revenue from backlist that otherwise would generate no revenue. They also do a number of other interesting things with their pricing (for example, a backlist title might be $4, but if a new book in the series comes out it might get bumped up to $6 to get additional revenue from those seeking backlist on prior titles in the series), and are of course DRM-free. The real issue is that they're only one publisher that specializes in a single genre, and their genre (military sci-fi) is one that I have a limited appetite for…
Kindle DRM is both tied to the account *and* a proprietary format. In fact, one of the primary motivations for cracking the Kindle DRM, according to the people who did it, was to allow accessing the proprietary format that it hid in order to build conversion programs to allow reading Kindle books on other eBook readers. And I will no more buy a Kindle book today than I would have bought DRM-protected music from iTunes prior to them making iTunes DRM-free… I bought physical CD's instead and ripped them to my iTunes collection. Today, of course, iTunes makes buying music so darned easy that I just buy away to the point that I have to set a budget or else I'm bust…
I like what you say here in general. Some points I'd like to make:
1. It must be easier to legally buy an eBook than to download one from the Torrents site. *MUCH* easier. The majority of digital music in circulation was pirated or ripped from CD's until the iTunes store made things so easy and inexpensive that only the utterly impoverished or habitual pirates will download from torrent sites.
2. DRM doesn't work to stop piracy. Every single DRM scheme in existence has been cracked. DRM doesn't stop piracy. Thus the only DRM scheme that is worthwhile is one which acts to keep honest people honest. For example, according to the technology sites apparently B&N is encrypting their ebooks for the Nook using your name and credit card number. Theoretically any new reader could be authorized to read ebooks B&N sells you by you simply typing in the name and credit card number that you used to purchase the ebook, i.e., it's not only inobtrusive but eliminates the potential to no longer be able to read the content you purchased. It's a screen door, easily bypassed, but it keeps honest people honest — what honest person wants their name and credit card number spewed all over the Internet? That's the *only* kind of DRM that has any kind of value, DRM that keeps honest people honest but doesn't interfere with their ability to enjoy the content of the book.
3. We've faced this issue in the computer games market since the beginning. Similar market, sales to individuals, but to much more technically astute individuals as compared to eBook purchasers. Some limited screen door DRM has proven quite useful because most of our sales are in the first month after release of a new game. Similar applies to books, most sales are in the first month after release, then you might see some bumps in your backlist sales as further releases are made by that author. The advantage you have with books is that most book purchasers are not computer geeks, and they're not young people (like most music purchasers) who grew up with the technology but don't have a significant income. The notion of my mother searching torrent sites to download the latest Dean Koontz best-seller makes me giggle. Not happening. She can barely manage email, for cryin' out loud.
4) I've had contact with the piracy underground over the years, and most of them don't hate games, or music, or books, or whatever they're pirating. They like collecting them, but they don't hate what they're collecting. The big issue is how to get them to pay money for what they like. In many cases that simply isn't happening — the majority of what they have, they would have never purchased for any price, they collect it just to collect it, if it was impossible to collect that for free, they'd collect butterflies or rocks or something else. But we have to give the honest motivation to be honest. Which brings up,
5) Use of the words “intellectual property” and “theft” to refer to making a copy of a work. This runs into a fundamental hardware issue — our monkey hindbrains are wired to view property as something *physical*, that can be touched and felt. Our monkey hindbrains are wired to view theft as the removal of a physical object from our presence such that we can't use it anymore. Using these terms in reference to bits and bytes simply makes us look like lying jerks to the youngsters who most engage in piracy. Instead, I prefer to refer to copyright — the right to copy works, granted to us by our nation's laws in compensation for our efforts creating those works — and infringement, violating our right to control copying of our works. That resonates with young people. They have experience with people violating their rights, they've been hassled by cops for standing on streetcorners waiting for their friends, they've been kicked out of malls for being young and unaccompanied by an adult, in short, they have an intellectual framework to deal with the notion that they're violating our rights by copying our works without their permission. But “theft” and “intellectual property”? Doesn't work. We know this. We in the computer industry have 30 years of experience showing this. It's a hardware problem, not a software (education) problem, so no amount of software modification (education) is going to change it. Thus the need to hack around the hardware by rephrasing it in terms of authors' rights.
Next up… business models. Look at what Baen Books does — they've been doing subscriptions and variable pricing of DRM-free ebooks for years (higher prices at initial release, falling off as it goes into back catalog). But that's a topic for another post, I think — what business models will work best for ebooks.
Don't have any plans for Bristol I'm afraid. I'm really trying to cut down
on the travel and appearances this year in order to write something a bit
different that requires a lot of extra work.
2010/1/3 Disqus <>
Me too, David – Thrillerfest is yet one more reason I'm glad I live in NYC!
Are you going to be at Crimefest in Bristol in May, by any chance?
I'm not sure how well that subscription model can work – the number of people who read five books a month isn't as large as it used to be. Certainly, the purchase model has roundly beaten the subscription model in the music industry, although, granted, it's a different medium.
I think the true challenge for writers is what MJ is saying, but more specifically getting readers to know our books exist against the background of the huge rush of previously unpublished authors who'll now compete on an even footing with authors who have the backing of publishing houses. Case in point, a couple weeks back I looked at the Amazon Top 10 Kindle Downloads: half of them were megabestsellers, the other five titles were offered for free.
If you think marketing is hard now, just imagine what it'll be like with continued shrinkage of newspaper coverage of releases, with fewer physical books in fewer brick and mortar stores, while competing against tens of thousands of new titles all given the same online positioning…
I think that's very true. The trouble is the eBook world lends itself to new
models. I'm not sure how the conventional printed book/distribution system
does, not without significant investment on someone's part.
Audible already have that subscription model for audio books of course. I'm
sure it won't be long coming for eBooks.
2010/1/3 Disqus <>
I think we need to focus on getting more readers to know our books exists and coming up with new models – ie – subscription models where for $25 a month a reader can download 5 books. There are more than enough people out there who read to support writers if we can reach them and tell them about our books. We need to get the 20 million people who bought Dan Brown all keep buying – if we can make that happen we don't have to worry about piracy.
Not really sure of the details. But these things always get cracked in the
end sadly. If you have one platform and one distributor it's not hard to
make something that’s reasonably secure. The trouble is that may make
technological sense but not commercial sense. Otherwise we’d all end up
working for Amazon. Or Google. Or whoever comes along next.
Looking forward to meeting up again in July!
2010/1/3 Disqus <>
Damn – I thought the Kindle DRM was tied to the account, rather than being just a proprietary format.
Actually the Kindle scheme does sound fine, though it has been cracked of
course along with that of the Nook =
http://hackaday.com/2009/12/24/kindle-drm-cracked/ .
But I don't think readers – or publishers – will allow one standard, tied to
one company, to prevail. Multiple open standards for multiple devices seem
inevitable, which puts us in the territory of Adobe's god-awful DRM as used
by the Sony ereader – and that can drive you nuts. I know I own one of the
things and it makes buying commercial books so damned hard I just use it for
reference and classics that are out of print from Feedbooks.
Also I am not feeling happy about DRM at the moment having had to fork out
£32 to Apple to unDRM my iTunes because I changed computers and forgot to
unauthorise one machine.
2010/1/3 Disqus <>
While I think that all DRM can eventually be broken, I think it's too easy to say that DRM will just deter the reader and drive them towards ripped-off copies instead. For now, I like the Kindle's DRM policy, which ties the purchased copy to the reader's account. More than one Kindle owner attached to the account can share the book, and I have yet to see bootlegged Kindle copies appear on the piracy sites. And if the owner wants to lend the book to someone whose Kindle isn't linked to their account, or to someone who has no Kindle, lend the physical Kindle itself – there are now libraries which lend out Kindles.
This may be a short term solution, but for now it seems to be working. I understand that it doesn't fit in with your multiple points of sale model, and I agree that's a huge weakness.
Hear! Hear!
With music, piracy partly the result of getting legitimate downloads (at a reasonable price). If booksellers make it easy to get (and pay for) ebooks in a range of formats, I think most adults will buy legitimately. What should be avoided is trying to criminalise would-be book buyers for trying to overcome restrictive DRM – I am not going to buy a reader until I find one that cover all the likely formats (one recently released seems to be a good candidate …)
There will always be some who will take something for nothing, but I would hope that will come to be seen as socially irresponsible as drunk driving or transmitting STDs