Attributor’s Flawed Piracy Study
Publishers Weekly posted an article talking about a book piracy study released today by the Attributor. PW article is here; their link to the original article wasn’t working. My thanks to Rich at Attributor, who contacted me with a link to their study results, including methodology, here.
From PW:
Publishers could be losing out on as much as $3 billion to online book piracy, a new report released today by Attributor estimates. Attributor, whose FairShare Guardian service monitors the Web for illegally posted content, tracked 913 books in 14 subjects in the final quarter of 2009 and estimated that more than 9 million copies of books were illegally downloaded from the 25 sites it tracked.
Anyone seeing any possible problems here? Here are two that jumped out at me right off the bat.
- The $3 billion figure assumes that everyone who downloaded an illegal copy of the book would have otherwise gone out and purchased a legal copy.
- Attributor is a company specializing in anti-piracy solutions. Hardly an objective or trustworthy source, in this case.
Please don’t take this as approval of illegal file-sharing. I’ve made some stories available for free over on my web site (left sidebar), so I’m all for sharing some free fiction. But when you upload a copy of one of my books to a file sharing site, you’re being a dick. (Downloading a copy? Lesser dick.) If you don’t want to pay $7.99, no problem. Go to a used bookstore. Go to your local library.
That said, I don’t think piracy is the end of the world. I just wish we could get more trustworthy data & discussion, and less dogma.
::Takes a deep breath:: So please feel free to talk piracy and file-sharing, but be aware that over-the-top extremism may be heavily mocked, regardless of what side it’s coming from.
Rich Pearson
January 14, 2010 @ 12:37 pm
Jim,
I’d be happy to discuss the study methodology if you have any questions. We posted some more specific title examples in our blog, including a clear statement to address your 1st point.
This study does not to answer the question, “How many of these pirated books would have been purchased legally if piracy was not an option?” Previous piracy studies assume a one-to-one substitution, meaning all pirated material would have been purchased and thus the market value of pirated books is equal to the actual loss, though Attributor feels this is an overly optimistic assumption. This issue will be addressed in a future research phase.
On your second point, I certainly agree that we come into this with an anti-piracy bias, largely driven from interactions with our customers who certainly view it as bad.
You can reach me at rich(at)attributor.com
Steve Buchheit
January 14, 2010 @ 12:46 pm
Suddenly I feel like the Yugo engineers who, when they heard that Rodney King had been beaten after driving 80mph down city streets in a Yugo, exclaimed, “We didn’t know it would go that fast!”
Wait a sec, $3 Billion from 9 Million copies? Those must have been college textbooks they were tracking. (yeah, yeah, I know, only looked at a quarter and I’m sure it’s $3 Billion a year, yadda yadda yadda sadistic statistics).
Me thinks someone is priming the billing well here. And just in case, so what are the publishers’ stats on sales during that same time? Up, down, flat? I would think with $3 billion in pirated copies, AND the economic downturn, sales would be in the dumper.
KatG
January 14, 2010 @ 12:56 pm
Hmm, I’m tempted here, because I’d be curious to see what full-on Hines mocking looks like. (Separately, how is your wife doing?)
But I’ll be more circumspect and just stick to exasperation. So a firm hired by publishers to track piracy finds some and puts out its findings in order to get more clients. Yes, that would be rather suspect. I don’t mind publishers trying to track down piracy. It hurts their business. But what I don’t understand is why publishers are continuing to make the argument at conferences and on the Web that because of piracy, electronic publishing is a bad thing.
The Kindle is not going away. Nor the Nook. Dozens of more e-readers are flooding the market from really big electronics companies (as expected,) and book publishers are starting to make money off of it and will make a lot of money off of it. Which is why the publishers are fighting with the authors over the electronic rights. More legal e-publishing and sales are not going to make more e-piracy and publishers have no choice but to feed the legal e-publishing market. They are not going to stop the legal industry from developing or slow it down, and they want its money, so why are they still moaning like street corner preachers?
Electronic piracy and file-sharing have been a problem since the 1990’s when they invented scanners. Before that, there was plenty of print piracy. (Taiwan was famous for it.) It’s got nothing to do with legal e-publishing. And the continual attempt to confuse the two and declare them the harbingers of death to print works entirely against publishers’ own interests. The only reason I can come up with for them doing this at this point is that they’re trying to scare the authors into letting them keep electronic rights on the grounds that the publishers can keep the authors’ works safer from pirates and fraudulent e-publishers than the authors can, which is a highly suspect idea. That, or they’re trying to use the piracy argument as a way to get better terms with the legal e-publishers and distributors. Otherwise, it seems to just be a product of publishing people scared that they’ll get fired if they don’t paint themselves as saviors. It makes no sense.
Rich Pearson
January 14, 2010 @ 1:26 pm
@Steve – we did indeed track college textbooks and many other genres in the study. The research includes a breakdown by genre. You can view this on the blog as well as in the .pdf research
Jakob Barnard
January 14, 2010 @ 2:08 pm
Jim – interesting post. I actually like it because it isn’t taking a hard stance one way or another. One thing that the “anti-piracy” groups often seem to skip over (may or may not be the case here, haven’t fully gone through the linked information yet) is the root cause of file sharing.
With books though, it seems to often come down to publishers either being unwilling to distribute in ebook format, delay release in ebook, or other such tactics to make it difficult to read an ebook. If it were just as quick and easy to purchase something legit at a reasonable price (which is a whole different debatable topic) that would be addressing a root cause.
Myself I like the occasional free ebook as something to entertain me on the computer occasionally, however in general I would have to say since I never get rid of books I like I probably qualify as a collector. (I am now working on slowly adding your books to the collection 😉 )
One of the greatest things publishers/other authors have started to do once is release “free” content. (Like you have on this site, or Baen releases a lot of Book 1’s) Gives readers a taste of an authors work and if they like it they should want to support the author.
Jim C. Hines
January 14, 2010 @ 2:16 pm
Thanks, Rich! I’ve updated the post with the links. Very much appreciated.
Jim C. Hines
January 14, 2010 @ 2:19 pm
Sadly, I’m still a bit wiped from the ER trip the other day, so the mockery would probably be sub-par today.
I haven’t seen publishers saying e-books are a bad thing (though it’s possible they are, and I’ve just missed it), but I do think a lot of publishers are very wary of electronic books and the impact they’re having. I know DAW took their time before starting to release their books electronically, and I was very impatient about this 🙂
I don’t take the “PRINT IS DYING!!!!!” arguments very seriously.
Sean
January 14, 2010 @ 8:33 pm
I have a sony reader, had it since 2008. One question i would ask is are all the books that were pirated available for purchase in digital format? Would you as an author consider it illegal to download a digital copy of a book you have purchased? How many of these downloads were in the US verses other countries where people cannot afford to buy books?
I do not have any pirated books, but i have a few in hardback that I would not mind having digital copies of. Some of us do not have room to store lots of books, so readers make the most sense (do not get me wrong some books you just have to buy in print).
I guess soon the BIAA (Book Industry Association of America) will form and sue people $15,000 per pirated book. Don’t people learn anything from what has already happened with the recording industry?
ebooks are not going away, perhaps if they priced them accordingly there would be no piracy. I mean when i bought my electronic copy of “Mermaids Madness” it was the same price as purchasing the regular book. I do not have the luxury of doing that due to the limited space i have available to me.
I do not know where i am going with this post, and probably no one else will either. Oh well i will go read my legally purchased electronic copy of “Once a Princess” (hope it is a good book i saw it on this site).
bird is the word
sean
Steven Saus
January 15, 2010 @ 8:19 am
Thanks for bringing this up, Jim. Without looking at the study itself, I obviously can’t come to any conclusions about the results. However, raising these questions is *exactly* the kind of example I needed for my Research Methods class – we’re going over Ethics next session. 🙂
Jim C. Hines
January 15, 2010 @ 9:00 am
Sean,
“I guess soon the BIAA (Book Industry Association of America) will form and sue people $15,000 per pirated book.”
Have you seen anything at all to suggest that publishers are doing this? Even a single case where a publisher, author, or agent tried to sue an individual reader?
Personally, I wouldn’t mind if buying a print copy of one of my books also gave the reader an electonic copy. I know Baen has experimented with this sort of thing. That said, right now most books don’t include that, which means it’s not a matter of opinion. Downloading a file-shared copy of a book is still illegal, even if you own the print copy. We could argue the ethics, but the legalities are pretty clear.
I’d also note that there’s a lot of work that goes into the production and distribution of an electronic book. It’s not so quick and easy that the publishers can just sell them all for a nickel. (I agree that some of the pricing has been ridiculously high, but I don’t see $7.99 as unreasonable for an e-book.)
Let me know what you think of Smith’s “Once a Princess”!
KatG
January 15, 2010 @ 11:05 am
I think the study was perfectly professional about tracking the piracy, as far as it goes, and it does seem to have been of textbooks in the educational publishing field. But it is a question about exaggeration of loss to these publishers and the industry at large. Presumably, most of the folk who are illegally downloading in such numbers are then turning around and selling the files to someone else or printing them out and selling them, probably largely outside the publishers’ countries of origin, and also to students who don’t know or don’t care. Essentially, it is a secondary shadow market, but it may largely hurt the used book market more than it does the publishers’ front list, especially as textbooks and educational publications are often contracted in batches from institutions. As Jim points out, most of the buyers of the illegal downloads wouldn’t otherwise be buying these books. In terms of free illegal downloads, again, the people downloading would not necessarily be buying the book if the illegal download was not available. As the e-market develops, though, and prices settle, that sort of piracy is likely to drop but not go away. The other form of piracy — the profit-making kind — always has to be fought, whatever the technology involved. Identifying pirates and trying to shut them down is great, but the losses to the book industry are not necessarily so extensive.
Sean
January 15, 2010 @ 8:24 pm
I have not seen or heard of anyone getting a lawsuit for a pirated book, i was being a bit facetious (have to deal with managers all day, my life it literally a Dilbert comic strip).
I agree 8.99 or even 9.99 for an electronic book is not bad, and if the book is larger or newer maybe a few bucks more. believe me i understand about wanting to get paid for work. But consider this, the next book on my queue at the sony book store is “The Line Upon a Wind”, in ebook format it is $24.50, in hardcover at amazon.com it is $20.34 (with free shipping). So pricing does seem a little odd, and of course i will wait for the price to lower).
Also the quality of the ebooks they charge for. I bought the electronic version of “A Game of Thrones”, $7.19, it is in epub format at the sony bookstore. It has no right justification, no indented paragraphs and a blank line between each paragraph…I contacted sony about this and they said they could not fix it because it comes from the publisher like that (never fear Jim, your books from DAW were formatted correctly and looked fine).
“Once a Princess” is good so far (on chapter 6 or so) but the first person POV to third is kinda strange until i got use to it.
It is Friday night so margarita’s are on me if you are in Texas…
Sean