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No, David Pogue, Ebook Piracy Is Not a Given
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jun 05, 2008 08:27 PM
from the not-necessarily dept.
from the not-necessarily dept.
adamengst writes "David Pogue recently wrote a widely read blog post in which he explains that piracy is the reason he doesn't make his books available in PDF format. But in this article, TidBITS publisher Adam Engst disagrees strongly with Pogue's opinion, using sales numbers from the Take Control series of ebooks (150,000+ copies sold since 2004 with virtually no copying) as proof that making electronic versions not only doesn't necessarily lead to piracy, it may be the best way of preventing illicit sharing."
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The best way to prevent eBook piracy... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The best way to prevent eBook piracy... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The best way to prevent eBook piracy... (Score:5, Funny)
1) Jessica
2) Alba
3) Simpson
4) Anna
5) Faris
This could probably be simplified down to one word, I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Parent
piracy is a given regardless (Score:5, Funny)
Learn to live with it, the pirates always win. [thepiratebay.org]
Re:piracy is a given regardless (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone steals for the sake of stealing. Some steal because it's the only way to get it, or at least the only way to get it in the form they want. If you find a lot of people pirate your products, then you can probably make legit customers out of most of them by altering your distribution and control methods. Carefully consider your price points too, since the true value of something is what people are willing to pay and not always what you think they should pay.
=Smidge=
Parent
Re:piracy is a given regardless (Score:5, Interesting)
How about anime series and films that just don't get picked up by a licensing company? Just because I watch fansubs doesn't mean I'm not willing to pay for the series--QUITE the opposite in fact. And seriously, I'm sick of anime licensing companies packing DVDs with figures and other collectibles to jack up the price. I pick up a box thinking I found a box set of a series, only to find out that there's only one DVD and a bunch of fluff.
Putting aside foreign stuff for a second. I want all of the Dexter's Lab episodes and Courage the Cowardly Dog episodes on DVD or mp4. I can't get them in this fashion unless I get some burned bootleg DVD on eBay. Why? The series "Reboot" only offered the first and third seasons on DVD. How does that make ANY sense?
Or how about old Lucasarts adventure games? They aren't exactly rushing to put them out for digital distribution. Id, Epic, Eidos, Take Two, and other companies are offering their back catalog on steam, yet I have to rummage through garage sales to find Maniac Mansion.
I pretty much have my pick of music that was made in my country, and even some of the more popular foreign stuff. But I want access to EVERYTHING I'm interested in, not just what business deals and International Copyright Law say I can buy.
I don't pirate because I'm "sticking it to the man." I pirate because I tell the man "Let me give you money!" and he says "No."
Parent
Re:piracy is a given regardless (Score:5, Interesting)
Monopoly pricing always creates an unfulfilled market; revenue is maximized at a pricing point far above the fulfillable market.
A classic economic example would be this: You have ten customers who would pay 1, 2, 3
Set the price at 10 dollars and you get 1 customer paying ten dollars; $10 in revenue. Lower the price, $8 gets you 3 customers, $24 total revenue. $7 gets you $28. Subtract 4 times $2 for unit costs and you get $20 profit. Try $6 price, that gets you $30 income minus 5 times $2, the same $20 profit.
Turns out $7, with 4 customers would maximize your profit. That leaves the 5 people between $2 (minimum production cost) and $7 unfulfilled. In a free market, competition would force prices down towards $2, maximizing the total wealth in the market. In the monopoly market, the wealth created by fulfilling the market is lost (well, unless the potential customers pirate the material).
Parent
Re:piracy is a given regardless (Score:5, Informative)
First, books are an odd special case.
I can't fit the analysis in a slashdot post... if you haven't read McCauley on Copyright, and if you haven't read Eric Flint's analysis of copyright, piracy and e-books as they effect modern authors, do so.
Start here:
Spillage: or, The Way Fair Use Works in Favor of Authors and Publishers http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos8 [baens-universe.com]
then go here and read _all_ the salvo's columns...
http://baens-universe.com/authors/Eric_Flint [baens-universe.com]
Meanwhile, there's been very little said about copyright in the last century that McCauley didn't already address... http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm [baen.com]
Parent
Not a big market for piracy surely (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not a big market for piracy surely (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Required reading IMHO. (Score:5, Informative)
Eric Flint on making books available online: http://www.baen.com/library/palaver6.htm [baen.com]
nuff said.
Re:Required reading IMHO. (Score:5, Informative)
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/ [thefifthimperium.com]
Because I know that people who read these books end up buying more books, maybe not everyone, but enough that they're still running this program with more CD's each year
Parent
PSP eBook Reader (Score:5, Insightful)
I like dead trees (Score:4, Interesting)
That applies to reference books as well, like Mr. Pogue's. I've got shelves of them. But in the case of reference books, I wouldn't mind a searchable version as well. Hm, perhaps I should pay a visit to thepiratebay.org...
Re:I like dead trees (Score:5, Informative)
It's a bit more complicated than that. The byproducts of pulp production are a problem. Pulp mills vent small particles that are bad for the health and must be removed. They also vent a number of chemicals including some nasty smelling sulfur compounds. This is locally referred to as "the smell of money". The official view here in Canada is that these smell bad but are not toxic, but a lot of people question that. When I lived in central part of the city, I noticed a strong correlation between days when I woke up feeling crummy and days when the pulp mill smell was strong. I made a point of moving uphill to the outskirts where the odor is not as strong. We have three pulp mills and air quality is a major local issue. Levels from air quality monitors at three sites are reported every day on the news.
Pulp mills also produce really nasty liquid effluent. Even with the current treatment, studies here show that it causes mutation in the genes of the salmon. Some information from Environment Canada is here [hc-sc.gc.ca].
Parent
Paper book piracy is also rampant (Score:4, Insightful)
David better not release paper copies either.
Reality, learn to live with it (Score:5, Insightful)
If there are eBooks that are not being passed around on P2P sharing networks, it is not because there is any increased respect for eBooks than music or movies. It is because nobody cares about the content.
If I were to publish an eBook on the mating habits of the German Cockroach, I would expect that it would not be heavily pirated. Equally, I would expect a photoeassy on the day in a life of a proctologist would similarly be immune from piracy. However, an eBook of any popularity would immediately be copied and passed around freely regardless of the wishes of the author.
Does eBook mean piracy? No, clearly not. However, anything that is popular is likely to be pirated regardless of any wishes of the author. The author (like Stephen King) can make the content available online free or not, as they choose. However, once it is in digital form the author loses the ability to control the outcome. This much should be obvious to everyone by now.
Paper books can't be pirated by ass... (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words if your book is popular it will be pirated without too much difficult no matter what format it's in. If it's not popular than likely no one will care enough to pirate it no matter what format it's in. On the other hand if I can't easily get an non-pirated copy of you book then well the pirated version will be tempting simply because its more convenient.
Real-World research has proven Mr. Pogue wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is what Eric Flint has to say about ebooks and piracy:
Why are we doing this? Well, for two reasons.
The first is what you might call a "matter of principle." This all started as a byproduct of an online "virtual brawl" I got into with a number of people, some of them professional SF authors, over the issue of online piracy of copyrighted works and what to do about it.
There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was with handcuffs and brass knucks. Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences!
Alles in ordnung!
I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow. My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:
1. Online piracy â" while it is definitely illegal and immoral â" is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.
2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.
3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market â" especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people â" is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.
In the course of this debate, I mentioned it to my publisher Jim Baen. He more or less virtually snorted and expressed the opinion that if one of his authors â" how about you, Eric? â" were willing to put up a book for free online that the resulting publicity would more than offset any losses the author might suffer.
The minute he made the proposal, I realized he was right. After all, Dave Weber's On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a "loss leader" for Baen's for-pay experiment "Webscriptions" for months now. And â" hey, whaddaya know? â" over that time it's become Baen's most popular backlist title in paper!
And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.
Sure enough, within a day, I received at least half a dozen messages (some posted in public forums, others by private email) from people who told me that, based on hearing about the episode and checking out Mother of Demons, they either had or intended to buy the book. In one or two cases, t
Two Things Not mentioned by Pogue or this article (Score:5, Informative)
For such reference materials there are two sides to this story:
A particularly good reference work that is about a particularly popular and long lasting subject would of course be worth getting in electronic form for free, especially if the 500-page tomb costs $50 and up retail (as such books often do). But I've bought my share of these and have (or had) bookshelves full of such reference works that I could often get my employer to buy, or claim as a deduction while consulting etc.
On the other hand, I've bought quite a few of these reference book and ended up not using them a single time. I could just as well wait until I had a question on a particular subject and taken pen and paper into the nearest Barnes and Noble and written down the answer. I bought these books "just in case" as I'm sure many people do when they get a new OS or new kind of gadget that they think they might need some help with. Would Pogue or authors like him be willing to give refund for unused copies of his book? I rather doubt it.
I think if Pogue as more of a humorist than anything else, his books pretend to be reference works, but like his NYTimes articles are generally more like stand-up routines, long on wit, short on actual information. He is probably a special case, and as such, might not want to be held up to a true usefulness test.
Light reading, not worth stealing? Sure print it in cheap paperback and let people drop it at the beach.
Hard info, repeated reference material? Might do better as a paid subscription service online. People would pay to get the info they need and the more that service proved useful the more they would try and us it. Furthermore, in this form, the more likely it would be that you could support the content with ads rather than subscriptions. That's the direction the world is going for technical info, which means that Pogue should milk his job at NYT for all it is worth. More people are using tools on the web now and expecting to find answers on the web as well, either included with the tool, or for free elsewhere. We aren't abandoning books to save the rain forests, we are abandoning them to use something better and more convenient. Just as I'd rather be typing this than writing it out in long-hand with a fountain pen, I'd rather solve my next puzzling OS X conundrum by doing a Google search than thumbing through fifty dusty books on my bookshelf. In the not too distant future, you will sell your "books" online, or not at all.
Re:Two Things Not mentioned by Pogue or this artic (Score:5, Informative)
Which is exactly what Pogue does with his books. They're on Safari [oreilly.com]. While not perfect - the site's a bit slow and clunky and it's really too expensive to justify ($40 / month for unlimited access, $20 / month for access limited to, I believe, 10 books) it is a useful reference site for computer related stuff.
It is more how I use his, and others, reference books. It's pretty rare that I want to read a reference book cover to cover and it's rare that any given computer reference book is really valuable for more than a year or two. If O'Reilly cut their subscription prices down a bit and sped up and cleaned up the site a bit, it would really be a great model for authors like Mr. Pogue, assuming he gets some sort of cut on the subscriptions.
Parent
Check that again, Senor Skimpage (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Freetard? (Score:5, Funny)
Yet, on the other side of this we see people who do stupid crap... They simply can't (or won't) understand that open source means that you are free to do as you wish with it up to, and including, not using it.
On the other side you have those people who insist that everything must be open source and if it isn't then there's something evil going on with it. There are too many people making judgments based on little evidence.
To the first folks I say, come on over to my house and you can chill on my lawn, party, spend the weekend, and all of that.
To the latter I say, just because I let you in my home to have all the free stuff you want (assuming you don't steal it from me) but if I say you can't go into my bedroom then you must accept that it is off limits.
Where am I going with this? Well, you have someone who obviously has an agenda. He obviously thinks that one can't be paid from their "free" work. The reality is, just with me, that I get paid quite often to work on free, open source, software to improve it or to integrate it with their current setup. He, probably, doesn't and he, probably, isn't smart enough to realize that there is a world beyond proprietary. Take what you can from him, as you seem to be doing, but what you do take from him I would automatically consider suspect given his prior inability to comprehend simplistic realities.
Parent
Re:That may be true (Score:5, Funny)
That explains the weight problems in the States! DAILY exercise people, daily!
Parent
Re:Control of work vs being paid for it (Score:5, Insightful)
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