Re: answer to Bill's original questions...had to find his original post

On 3/10/10, Brenna Lyons <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Who pirates?
>
>  There are two types of pirates. One doesn't know it's wrong, and we try to
>  educate them. The other knows it's wrong and doesn't care.

I think it's more complex than that.

>  Incidental sharing is not a good thing. I have no problem with e-book
>  library systems (REAL ones) or with Kindle and Nook "sharing features,"

Which are very limited--the Nook's feature only works once per book,
and only for two weeks, and the Kindle's "sharing" feature involves
giving the other people full access to your Amazon account. If
publishers want to cut down on piracy, they need to facilitate easy
transfer of ebook ownership--a way to say, "remove this ebook from my
account and put it in my friend's account."

>  which work under the same principle, as long as the book was purchased
>  initially. I really don't have a problem with Mary letting Jo read a
>  particularly good e-book she purchased either.

How about a physical book? A general industry rule-of-thumb is that a
book is read by, on average, 6-10 people. But I haven't heard any
authors mention being comfortable with their ebooks being read by 6
people per purchase. (Except, indirectly, some of Baen's authors, who
seem to have grasped that the point is to *get new customers,* not
waste time & energy tracking down non-customers.)

> But, if Jo assumes she can do
>  the same and lends it to two friends and her two friends (who know nothing
>  about e-books) do the same... Assuming two hands to two hands and a 25% loss
>  on people not passing a book along, do you know how many passes it takes to
>  get to more than 10,000 illegal copies? 13. And that's not counting the
>  major piracy sites that share books with thousands at a shot.

However, those are meaningless numbers. The number of ebooks floating
around in the ether & situated on hard drives has *nothing at all* to
do with potential sales.

Which doesn't mean that none of them are missed sales, just that you
can't estimate the missed sales from the numbers. When Tolkein's books
were made available as legit ebooks, a lot of people who'd had txt
copies of them for years, bought the new versions. (Which included one
with a title page called "Tha Hobbit." Part of piracy is a choice: txt
version of ebook that's been carefully proofread by loving fans, or
auto-OCR'd content that's locked to a single format, possibly a single
device, and when you upgrade your computer, you might lose access to
your purchase.)

> On one pirate forum site, they had a discussion about
>  what they did for a living...the pirates did. You'd like to THINK they
>  didn't have the money to get books...single mother of three...starving
>  college student... No. Most of the ones taking part were earning above
>  $75,000 per year and owned something like a Kindle to read on.

And studies have also shown that the ones who pirate most are the ones
who purchase most. Pirates *care* about digital content in ways the
general public doesn't. (A "heretic" is someone who agrees with you
95%. Pirates are *on your side* on the issues of getting the word out,
on getting content digitized, on finding new ways to reach readers, on
getting people informed about the technology and how to use it. They
mainly differ on details of price & availability.)

>  many of them worked in tech fields and should KNOW BETTER than to do this.
>  That's galling. They can pay $400 for a reader but not $5 for a book?
>  Rolling eyes.

The recent Amazon/Macmillan kerfuffle is about the difference between
$10 ebooks and $15 ebooks; $5 ebooks aren't on the table. Convince
mainstream publishers that ebooks should compete with/supplement the
paperback niche rather than hardcovers, and the whole shape of the
discussion will change.

>>  What do they pirate?
>
>  The more responsible ones only share material that is OOP and rare finds, to
>  begin with. Most aren't responsible pirates, and no piracy is inherently
>  legal or responsible. They aren't just pirating fiction work, though that's
>  the lion's share of it, that I find daily. Many are pirating non-fiction and
>  resource material, as well.

There's a great deal of obscure occult/paranormal nonfiction available
as pirated ebooks; many of them are out of print; some are orphan
works with no known copyright holder. And almost the entirety of the
SF&F fields is available as pirated ebooks; sci-fi geeks have been
putting digital content online for over thirty years. (And a lot of
those are out-of-print books. I'm not seeing the loss to anyone when a
book that's widely available for $2 in secondhand shops, but can't be
bought new, is bouncing around online.) There's also a huge set of
comics & graphic novels available as scans, the majority of which,
again, have no legit version.

>>  What are the actual changes in the number of books bought as the result of
>>  the  piracy.
>
>  Cannot answer that. As someone noted, they don't give me a non-royalty
>  report.

Yep. No way to track that impact, except as industry-wide statistics:
how many ebooks are sold now vs how many used to be sold... and
there's no way to tell "how many were sold before/outside of piracy,"
because putting books online has been happening since the beginning of
the internet.

>  younger male readers. Among males aged 18-34, over 45 percent report
>  engaging in such downloading activity within the past twelve months. Nearly
>  13 percent have downloaded ten or more e-books from file-sharing services,
>  more than twice the level of the survey population as a whole."

Which says this has become socially acceptable, and no simple change
in warning policies or even legal threats is going to stop it.
Publishers and authors are going to have to deal with an active used
ebook exchange, and accept its effects on their market. Baen is one of
the few (only?) publishers to actively cultivate free ebook exchanges,
and say, "more readers is GOOD; how they got our books is not
important to us--if they liked the books, they'll buy books. They'll
tell their friends to buy books."

 The public is *willing to pay* for digital content--even content
that's freely available from download sites. iTunes proves that.
(Hell, the success of the bottled water industry proves that people
will pay for what's available for free, if you figure out how to get
it to them in the right time & place. And cheap. Don't forget cheap.)

$3 ebooks that can be downloaded to any device on a whim have good
chance of not only selling, but selling to people who *already own it*
on their other computer or their laptop, because people will pay $3
for convenience.  (J.A. Konrath is making his mortgage payments on $2
Kindlebooks, which are going to become $3 Kbooks when Amazon's pricing
system changes.)

>  How about finding a single vendor illegally reselling blocks of 37
>  individual titles of mine and knowing she's sold at LEAST 400 copies of
>  that...and that was NOT included in the 1000 entries comment. Yes, it's
>  hurting us. I can't say how much.

THAT is a different issue, and should be slammed *hard*. The free
ebook exchange dynamic is *not* the same as unlicensed resellers, who
should be nailed with everything copyright law has to offer. That's
the reason copyright law was created: to prevent unscrupulous
publishers from grabbing already-successful books and reprinting them,
cutting the author out of the profits.

>  I'm also not a fan of the civil disobedience type of pirates. If you don't
>  like the laws, change them the RIGHT way. I advocate for changes in
>  copyright law personally.

So do I, but the public is cut out of discussions of copyright law.
When copyright was extended, there was no representative for the
public domain. There's no representative for the public at the current
ACTA meetings, planning on basically turning the US's DMCA into
international law, complete with "three accusations of infringement,
and lose your internet service," with no need for proof. I don't have
the resources that Disney and the RIAA's lawyers can bring to bear.

>  Not to mention that the misinformation given about e-book pricing is
>  astounding to me. I don't care if Baen can pre-sale an e-book at $15 or if
>  the NY conglomerates are stupid enough to try and follow suit with things
>  that are not pre-sale. MY books are available for $5-7 in novel length and
>  as little as $1 for shorts. Lumping all e-book pricing together is
>  appalling.

Amazon & big publishers are working very hard to convince the public
that ebooks should be priced comparatively with trade paperbacks or
hardcover books; this clashes with the public awareness that used
paperbacks are under $5. Convincing them that ebooks should cost more
than used paperbacks is a hard sell.

Baen's $15 pre-sales for rough drafts are a marketing gimmick to a
niche audience.  (Note Baen also not worrying about those versions
hitting the torrents--which I'm sure they do--and preventing sales
later.)

>  According to the polling I am currently running on what readers are willing
>  to pay for a novel-length fiction e-book, the numbers are coming in
>  (unsurprising to anyone in indie press) as...
>
>  Less than $5, no matter who the author/publisher is- 8%
>  $5-7, no matter who the author/publisher is- 37%

I'm in this category. I buy new ebooks. I spend more on ebooks than
pbooks, which I only buy nonfiction. (Gaming reference books, which
don't work well in digital format, & religious books that aren't
available as ebooks.)

But I won't buy DRM, period, and I won't pay more for e than I would
for paper. I'm willing & able to buy a used copy, chop the binding,
and scan it myself if I want to read it.

>  Also, MY books are almost universally without DRM. The exception is Kindle,
>  because if you want to play in their pond, you play by their rules.

They're changing that rule; they'll allow self-publishing without DRM
in the future.

>  Too many out there blithely making excuses for infringement of author's
>  copyright and depriving an author of royalties.

When I buy used books at yard sales, or borrow one from a friend, or
pick up one from the box kept by our apartment mailboxes for people to
drop off stuff they no longer want, I "deprive authors of royalties."
Books have never had a "one purchase=one reader" dynamic, and
publishers and authors who thought ebooks would allow them to
capitalize on that were fooling themselves.

>>  Of all the copied files, how many people would have bought a legal copy?
>  No one can know, but here's the trick. Now they won't. Thanks for ruining
>  people's income.

Not true. As I said, plenty who had copies of Tolkein's books bought
them when they were released legitimately. Ditto, Ayn Rand's books,
which were released after a Kindle fiasco where someone uploaded them,
and Amazon took them back from people's Kindles. People have bought
Baen's books after receiving free copies, either because they wanted
to reward the author, or because they forgot they had it, or didn't
have it where they were, and Baen's prices are low enough that they
don't mind throwing a few dollars at them for convenience.

Me? I haven't bought the new Tolkein books because *the ones I already
have are better.* They work on my computer, laptop, downstairs
computer (that's not connected to the internet) and Sony Reader,
without having to install Python to strip the DRM. They've been
proofread, and the poetry has the right line breaks.

And yeah, that's a DRM issue rather than a price/pirate/whatever
issue, but pretending that DRM plays no part in ebook piracy is a
delusion that publishers promote to hide their unwillingness to
provide what customers actually want, and are willing to pay for.

>>  How many get a copy and also buy one in print or EBook form?
>  None or so close to none as to be negligible.

1) Plenty of Baen's customers buy print as well as ebook.
2) Plenty of *friends* of ebook pirates, buy print versions based on
their friends' recommendations.
3) I've bought ebooks I already had because I forgot where they were
on my hard drive--and they were cheap enough that I didn't care.

>  I've seen how many pirated
>  copies I have to deal with in a month (just the ones I FIND...not every
>  pirated copy) and how many sell. If I had even 10% of those in SALES...5% of
>  that in sales...I would be out of debt. But I'm not, because of pirates.

Don't kid yourself. While there are some lost sales in there, don't
delude yourself into thinking that those were mostly customers who
grabbed a free copy because it was available. Most of those were
people looking for free content, and if yours wasn't available, they'd
be reading someone else's.

Which you'd probably prefer, because you apparently believe that if
they got one copy free, they won't be buying the next thing you write.

I've received pirated ebooks, and bought more by the authors I liked.
I don't try out new authors very often, because my funds are
limited--with paper, I was very much a used bookstore customer; with
ebooks, there aren't used bookstores, so I'm relying on word-of-mouth
and free sample downloads. So I mostly buy from authors I know I like,
and get free content (legit, I mean; a lot of publishers release the
first book in a series as a free ebook when a new one comes out) as my
only legit way of finding new content to buy.

Sometimes I look to awards--I've bought Epic winners because they were
Epic winners. But "award-winning writing" doesn't mean "this book is
to my tastes," and after a couple of them I didn't care for, I
stopped. It's not like I can legitimately say to my friend, "meh, I
didn't care for this, but maybe you'll like it; you take it."

I'm kinda stuck. On the one hand, I don't want to upset the authors I
like and would like to keep producing good works. On the other, I
can't afford to waste money on books I'm not going to enjoy and can't
even give away. So recently, I limit myself to what I already know,
and what's available at Smashwords with substantial previews.

I should be an ideal ebook customer. I don't read print novels
anymore, and I tear through digital content at a pace of a few hundred
thousand words a week--mostly slash fanfic, which is free and pretty
much endless. Ebook authors aren't just competing with other ebook
authors and pbook authors; they're competing with some *very* talented
amateurs whose works aren't allowed to be sold.

I've got a short list of digital authors on my "buy *anything* when
it's available" list--but no easy way of expanding that list; why
should I risk purchasing something I might not like? I can't ask
friends to loan or give me a copy of interesting-looking e-novels.

So, back to the original questions: What's the actual effect of piracy
on the digital publishing industry?
Answer: Nobody knows in detail; it's all a big tangled mess involving
copyright issues, recommendations, technology problems (DRM & the
filetype wars) and random customer complaints.

It definitely hurts some individual authors; it's almost certainly
been a help to some others. How it connects to the print industry is
unknown. There's a lot of claims that "well, *that* detail doesn't
matter!" on all sides.

What we can be sure of:
It will never be harder to copy & share files than it is right now. It
will never be more difficult to remove DRM (at this moment, all forms
of commercial ebook DRM in use have been cracked--and that's not
counting the insane screencap measures); hard drive capacity will
never get smaller; files will never be more difficult to get from one
computer to another than they are today.

Publishers & authors will need to find a way to work *with* those
facts, instead of hoping the general public will ignore them. They
have to find a way to make sales sound reasonable when copies are easy
to make; they have to offer something other than "this is the only way
to get this content." (Options include brand recognition, author
sympathy, bonus site activities to legit customers, convenience of
download/usability, customized formatting, and so on.)

16gb of variable storage space is available for under $20. 8gb of
fixed storage is under $1, on a DVD. Filesharing sites & torrent
networks offer a lot of convenience, but the sneakernet is also
growing, and can't be tracked.

The authors & publishers who will be successful over the next twenty
years are those who will figure out how to make those facts into
advantages for their sales.

-- 
"I follow Eris blindly in all things. That She is the Goddess of Chaos
simplifies this immensely."  -- Christian the Pagan


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