January 18, 2011 / Business, Sale

Arguing Book Piracy

Last week, I saw a lot of authors linking to “Free” Books Aren’t Free, a blog post by author Saundra Mitchell talking about the costs of book piracy.

Let me state up front that illegally downloading books is stealing. If you’re doing it, at least have the guts to admit you’re committing theft instead of spouting off excuses.

With that said, I disagree with some of Mitchell’s reasoning. She argues:

If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list. If the 800+ downloads a week of my book were only HALF converted into sales, I would earn out in one more month.

Yes, and if my dogs pooped gold, I could quit my day job. But it ain’t going to happen. Author Scott Nicholson guesses that 10,000 illegal downloads equates to maybe 5 lost sales. I suspect he’s underestimating, and the true numbers are somewhere between his and Mitchell’s, but I don’t think there’s any way to say for certain. I’m just not buying the argument that half of those downloaders would have actually bought Mitchell’s book (particularly since we’re talking about a hardcover.)

She goes on to say:

[M]y book is never going to be available in your $region, not for lack of trying. My foreign rights agent is a genius at what she does, and has actively tried to sell it everywhere- UK, AU, China, France, you name it, she tried to sell it there. SHADOWED SUMMER will only be coming out in Italy, because that’s the only place there’s a market for it.

The implication being that piracy killed her chances at foreign sales? I’m confused on this one. Does the availability of a pirated English book really reduce demand for a Chinese edition of said book? I suppose it’s possible … most countries are more multilingual than the U.S. But it’s a stretch, and I’m not convinced.

[T]he sales figures on SHADOWED SUMMER had a seriously detrimental effect on my career. It took me almost two years to sell another book. I very nearly had to change my name and start over. And my second advance? Was exactly the same as the first because sales figures didn’t justify anything more.

The thing that makes me hesitate here is that piracy is an across-the-board problem. Every commercially published author’s books end up on torrent sites. Some authors are still doing quite well. Others, not so much. So does it make sense for struggling authors to blame book pirates for low sales when other authors are selling well despite said pirates?

Mitchell says a lot I agree with, too. If you can’t afford books, go to the library. Try to get review copies. Or maybe if you can’t afford the books, you just don’t get them. Wanting a book doesn’t give you the right to steal it.

I agree with her that, “People who illegally download books are more interested in their convenience than in supporting the authors they want to read.”

I’m NOT saying book piracy is harmless. (To authors or to readers either, for that matter. Laura Anne Gilman recently pointed another example of a torrent site which was installing malware with downloads.) Bottom line, it’s a dickish thing to do.

And it does hurt authors. How much, I don’t know. I suspect it will hurt us more in coming years, as electronic reading becomes more widespread and book scanning technology improves. Lost productivity alone is a serious cost for authors who try to keep up with DMCA notifications to various sites.

It pisses me off when I find people illegally sharing my books online. And I think it’s important to educate readers. But I don’t think it helps our cause to distort or exaggerate the problem.

Discussion welcome and appreciated. I expect some disagreement on this one, and as always, I reserve the right to change my mind.

91 Comments

Nina L
January 18, 2011 @ 10:23 am

On the productivity note, I know Penguin has some piracy peeps, so hopefully you can just punt it all over to them and say hey, I noticed my book on here, can you deal so I can keep writing teh awesum books?

As for the rest, I think you make entirely valid and interesting points, particularly about educating readers and fans. I think changing the dialogue and making it *not cool* is going to be the single biggest step to winning this battle – or at least staying abreast with it. And I think that can only happen when authors are upfront and transparent – like you are – about the realities of being an author. So thank you!
Jim C. Hines
January 18, 2011 @ 10:29 am

DAW has a contact person too, and I’ve sometimes forwarded things to them to deal with. (Shifting, but not eliminating, the productivity cost.) Often though I find it quicker to just do it myself than to wait for it to reach the top of the To Do Pile at the publisher.

And thank you! Or you’re welcome. Both, I guess 🙂
D. Moonfire
January 18, 2011 @ 10:34 am

http://boingboing.net/2009/11/01/heavy-illegal-downlo.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music

I wonder how stealing ebooks verses buying would equate to the studies where they found that people who pirate music were more likely to buy music? I happen to lean toward the 2000:1 ratio since that is closer to what you see in the indie games market when they post piracy rates (2D Boy/World of Goo had a blog post on that, as did Gratious Space Battles).

I’m also curious about people who do it only for format shifting (obviously since I’ve talked about that before) of books they already own. Yeah, it is still stealing and I agree that you have to call it stealing, but I’m also interested in the reasons why people are doing it. If anything, it might give publishers an idea of possible business opportunties or price points.

While stealing is bad is a good thing, I also think that the writing industry as a whole would benefit from accepting that stealing is going to happen and find ways to integrate it into their income streams. Obviously it can be done, as it has for movies on YouTube and Hulu.com, not to mention music with Pandora, but I think it would be a good realization to have. As much as the idea of ad-supported ebooks terrifies people, its probably going to happen.

Side Note: The price point is an interesting one. Every Christmas, the Humble Indie Bundle (http://www.humblebundle.com/) has a “pay what you want” for a bunch of computer games. You can pick a dollar or more and you get the game without DRM and in the format (operating system) you want. I initial expected the average to be around $1.01 but it actually came around $7.84 or so ($13.78 for Linux users) and there were people donating hundreds or thousands of dollars. While that had a donation thing associated with it, it also pointed out a natural price point for the games, something that the average person would pay. I seem to recall that being part of the maximizing profits efforts in my economics class. This year, though, they gave you a bonus game if you paid above average. 🙂
Lynn Flewelling
January 18, 2011 @ 10:35 am

Jim, as always you address the issue calmly and rationally, perhaps more so than I did on my LJ. We had a long discussion and I got jumped on by a “sudden new arrival” who took me to task about legal terminology. They contended that under the law, copy right violation is not the same as theft and gave me this link: http://www.metafilter.com/78478/Illegal-Download-Lost-Sale as an example.

I don’t know if there has been a similar ruling in our arena yet. But the Constitution specifies “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Art 1:8:8

If someone takes a copy of my work, electronic or hardcopy, whether they would have paid for it or not, is that not therefore theft? They have in hand a copy of my book, and can give it to anyone they want to.

On the bright side, the owner of the torrents site in the above example was found guilty of conspiracy and felony copyright infringement. Maybe this is the answer, to go after the distributors and make piracy a dangerous business to be in. Never mind the desist letters. Jail ’em.

And in other news, be prepared for people who show up on this thread suggesting that you are a greedy little money grubbing piggy for caring about piracy. Which do you really want, Jim? Fame and the love of your fans all over the world, or filthy lucre? It’s an either/or situation, Jim. Choose wisely. 😉

Lynn
Dwagginz
January 18, 2011 @ 10:38 am

I think ‘piracy’ is fast becoming a cover-all excuse, just as our politicians use ‘the current economic climate’ to cover things like budget cuts. The reason for bad sales could be anything from poor writing, people disagreeing with the ethics/morals of the author (Sadly it doesn’t happen too often, so I doubt it’s a ‘real’ reason – Just look at O.S. Card’s success), lack of availability in a region (Well, considering how unavailable her book is, I can hardly say I’m surprised) and so on.

Piracy in the four main medias is due to many things, and in my opinion one of them is no incentive to buy (Or even buy new). The author is this invisible person who you’ll never meet, whose life is of no meaning to you. They’re just a name on a book, that’s it. The person who sings on an album is just a voice, the game made by a ‘name’ (Such as Nintendo – They have no meaning to you beyond you knowing you like their products). You buy a DVD, and you have this disc. That’s it. I’m not saying it’s the only reason, but I think it’s a fairly big one – Perhaps one more applicable to gaming than books, however. If publishers teamed up with stores to give incentives, people might buy more books. An example could be, say, buy Snow Queen’s Shadow and get a free collection of bookmarks depicting the characters of the series. You get the book, you have this ‘free gift’ and the publisher has your money. In some stores I often see things like ‘Buy Book Y and get £X off Chocolate Z’, and stuff like that needs to be more prevalent, in my opinion. Bring the customers into the store, get them to pick up a book, and maybe they’ll buy another there at the same time.

I know this is also going to sound naive and perhaps stupid, but book prices need to change. £9 for a 300 page novel is horrific, especially when it’s sat next to an £8 book with 1200 pages. I still think publishers should charge for page quantity rather than use a set price. Upto 400 pages, £5. 400 to 700, £7. 700+, £9. Something like that. Again, another incentive to get people to buy books, and it’s a ‘fairer’ pricing scheme – Or at least more sensible.

My problem lies with companies doing things to stop piracy that affect the end-user – DRM being the huge one, and I believe it’s a fairly recent issue with eBooks. As a gamer, I encounter DRM with pretty much every game I get for my PC, and whilst I’ve been lucky in that it’s largely unaffected me in a negative way (Only one game I can think of refused to run because of it), it’s never really been a benefit for me. I think that it may even contribute to piracy as some people will download it without this protection on. People don’t want to spend time finding out which store’s eBooks will work with their eReader, they just want the book. That needs to change, too.

Piracy won’t go away, I think it’d be silly to think it would, but it’s not the only factor in why books aren’t selling, nor is it the only threat to writers or publishers. As you said, Jim, there are thousands of writers out there who are having success, even with piracy and ‘the current climate’, so to say piracy is the only reason is preposterous.
Lynn Flewelling
January 18, 2011 @ 10:42 am

Hi Moonfire.

I wonder how stealing ebooks verses buying would equate to the studies where they found that people who pirate music were more likely to buy music? I happen to lean toward the 2000:1 ratio since that is closer to what you see in the indie games market when they post piracy rates

I admit I’m not versed in that situation, but it seems quite a different thing to me to sample a few songs and then buy the album, than to steal an entire book, not just a few sample chapters. Or were they taking the whole album?
Jim C. Hines
January 18, 2011 @ 10:46 am

“I wonder how stealing ebooks verses buying would equate to the studies where they found that people who pirate music were more likely to buy music?”

I honestly couldn’t guess. I think music is the closest parallel we have to books and piracy, but it’s not an exact match for any number of reasons. The data-geek in me would love to get beyond the articles and take a look at some of the actual research on piracy and buying habits. For example, pirates spend more on music … but would they be spending even more if the downloads weren’t available? No clue, and I can’t figure it out from the articles.

I would like to see more bundling of different formats. We got a Blu-Ray movie for Christmas that included a DVD and a digital copy of the movie. Baen has been known to bundle CDs of e-books with big new releases. I’d love more of that.
Jim C. Hines
January 18, 2011 @ 10:48 am

Well, I got a grand total of one snarky/argumentative response to yesterday’s post, so obviously I needed to escalate if I was going to get a good scrap going 🙂

As for the terminology, a lot of the words we use is legally imprecise, and for the most part, I’m okay with that. I’ll also continue to talk about rape, even though rape has no legal definition in the state of Michigan. But it’s a useful term for describing the crime, and one which people understand and can talk about. (I’m *not* equating piracy and theft here, by the way; just pointing out another example of imprecise terminology.)
D. Moonfire
January 18, 2011 @ 10:56 am

Judging how a friend got her music, I would say there are people who do 1-2 tracks and love it and there are others who get entire albums, realizing they like it and just buy the whole thing. Of course, this was closer to the age when CD’s were your only choice, so it was an all or nothing approach. I haven’t paid attention to music piracy in a world where you can download a single track (Amazon has DRM-free music therefor I buy music that way, but I always do albums at a time).

I just remember when I was younger, I got some bootleg tapes of music. And then, at some point I realized I was tired of having hand-written labels of the music and just bought a proper copy. But then again, I do the same with fansubs of anime (always buy the legal copy when they get a US license).

But, I think music tracks/album would equate more to story anthologies (except for a few choice cases). Movies are more in common with novels, at least in terms of a large piece that goes together. And, there is obviously ways of getting around it since you can download full movies on Hulu now. It makes an easier “path of least resistance” and still gets income to the distributor/publisher.
D. Moonfire
January 18, 2011 @ 11:01 am

As I mentioned above, I think movies equate more to books because they are large pieces that are effectively atomic. People don’t break apart a book like you do an album.

Yeah, the problem with studies is that you can never get the full picture. Some of the indie game people are trying to find the reasons, I see a “if you pirated my game, please fill out this survey” requests on occasion. Hopefully, we’ll get a bigger picture.

That would be utterly awesome. Or like O’Reilly who lets you buy an ebook cheaper with proof that you have the physical copy. If there was a CD or thumb drive with the ebook along with the physical, I would probably snatch it up in a second. Wait… I do already; at GenCon there were a few publishers doing that.

… with the caveat of DRM. The digital copy movies don’t work on my movie player of choice because of DRM. I’ve regretfully tossed dozens out over the years because they wouldn’t work. Nor do they promise the DRM stuff will continue to work a decade down the line.
Jim C. Hines
January 18, 2011 @ 11:05 am

I deliberately posted Goldfish Dreams as a DRM-free e-book. I’ve lost material I paid for due to DRM malfunction, and I don’t want my readers running into that problem.
KatG
January 18, 2011 @ 11:27 am

“The implication being that piracy killed her chances at foreign sales?”

Yes, this can happen. Especially for certain kinds of novels. While a lot more mid-list books are being bought for foreign sales these days, those decisions are still weighted towards top sellers. So if you aren’t having enough sales in the U.S., legit Chinese, French, etc. publishers are less inclined to take you as part of their small percentage of import titles that they translate into the host language or buy from the U.S. publisher as an English language import item.

The problem is not the bulk of pirates who would do it no matter what the circumstances. The problem is that percentage of people who now have e-readers who claim they would buy the book if X,Y, or Z was done. These people may not be lying, though they are lying to themselves about what they are doing, and there are enough of them to make a real difference to authors trying to build an audience, at home or elsewhere. As another author pointed out, if you are downloading a U.S. book illegally because the e-book isn’t available in Australia yet, then the U.S. publisher doesn’t know that there is an actual market for the book in Australia. Whereas if you harass the U.S. publisher about getting you the book electronically, the publisher then knows there’s enough of an Australian market to go after it. Even if you buy the print book in Australia, that indicates a market for the book in that country. Likewise, if you illegally download a book in the U.S. because you don’t like DRM (and at this point, DRM really isn’t a problem,) then the publisher doesn’t know that there is a real e-book market for the title and won’t put the book out in more formats. Or if you illegally download because a legal e-book isn’t available yet, again, that doesn’t tell the publisher that there is enough of a market for an e-book version to be worth making a legal e-book version. So that percentage of people who claim they would buy but don’t are the ones really hurting the authors a lot individually in the market. And right now, if you are not bringing in sales, it then becomes very hard to sell another book and build up more of an audience of legitimate buyers.

As the e-book market becomes larger, more global and more standardized, piracy will have less of an impact, but in the meantime, e-book sales are becoming more important, and there is a lot of pressure on authors to sell both in print and electronically, so for the up and comers, piracy is an annoying factor. Book prices are not that high compared to the prices for other forms of information and entertainment and the print editions last longer than most other forms of information or entertainment. There are also many ways to get a book legally for free if you’re not willing to pay.
“The thing that makes me hesitate here is that piracy is an across-the-board problem. Every commercially published author’s books end up on torrent sites. Some authors are still doing quite well. Others, not so much. So does it make sense for struggling authors to blame book pirates for low sales when other authors are selling well despite said pirates?”

It makes sense to an extent. Piracy means that debuting authors and mid-list authors take longer to build an audience. If your publisher is willing to ride it out, then you can end up doing well. But if your publisher isn’t willing — and in this economic climate and especially in certain sectors like category romance, they may not be — then that slight bump in sales figures that you might get if only a tiny percentage of people illegally downloading your book bought a legal print or e-book instead becomes critical to you being able to keep going. Top sellers aren’t significantly hurt by book piracy, but authors lower down on the food chain are. That may be compensated with really good word of mouth and good print sales, but as we know, it can take time for word to get out about any author. If you need that time, piracy also steals it from you.
T.N. Tobias
January 18, 2011 @ 11:31 am

Arguing about piracy is useless. It’s 100% agreed upon that stuff for sale ought to be purchased rather than swiped, whether you would have bought the think in the first place or not. It’s an untenable moral position to promote piracy as a legal and beneficial activity. But people still do it and if you gain even a modicum of name recognition, your stuff will end up in the hopper for digital bandits. Crying about it, worrying about it, stomping your feet and calling your lawyers about it won’t slow down the process one bit. Do what the retail chains do, build in shrinkage as a cost of doing business and move on with life. If your book doesn’t sell, it doesn’t sell and all the torrent sites in the world shutting down isn’t gonna bring the author stardom they think they deserve.

TL:DR; People suck. Live in reality.
Jim C. Hines
January 18, 2011 @ 11:33 am

“Yes, this can happen. Especially for certain kinds of novels. While a lot more mid-list books are being bought for foreign sales these days, those decisions are still weighted towards top sellers.”

Well, yes, they’re going to want to buy the books that sell better. And while piracy does cost a certain number of sales, like I said, this is an across-the-board problem, and I don’t buy that piracy killed her chances at foreign deals.

I think you’re greatly overestimating the research publishers do into what’s selling where, though. Most of my foreign deals have come about from my agent working with an overseas agent. “Hey, here’s a cool book. It’s selling pretty well here.” “Great, I’ll pitch it to the publishers, and we’ll get you an offer.” I don’t think the trickle of sales of the English paperback in those countries have much, if any impact at all on those decisions.
D. Moonfire
January 18, 2011 @ 11:35 am

I disagree that DRM isn’t a problem. My library has ebooks for loan, but only if you use Adobe’s Digital Editions software. Since I use a Nokia n810 for reading ebooks, it doesn’t work since it uses FBRreader instead of Adobe. I also use Linux as my primary platform, so I can’t even use Adobe’s software if I wanted to.

I agree that if you pirate, publishers won’t find out about the markets. But, the same thing is true if you don’t buy it because it isn’t available, so you buy something else. Many people pick up books on the shelves of stores. If it isn’t in the story, then it doesn’t exist for those look at the shelves (out of sight, out of mind) and you get the same effect: no market.
Steve Buchheit
January 18, 2011 @ 1:02 pm

I think people mistake those who pirate for those who are interested in their stuff and miss the whole pirate culture. Pirates are (or historically have been) connected closely to the hacker community (hacker, after all, was once synonymous with pirate). Many pirates collect and gain prestige with their collection. They have no intent of every actually using the data they’ve collected (you can think of them as dragons showing off their horde to other dragons – or really any kind of horder, the physical object or pet horder). They collect for collection sake.

Now, there are others who pirate to actually use what they’re pirating. In that case, books are fundamentally different than either music of movies (how we consume the media – why Shades of Grey was doomed to fail – and the actual size of the files, although the later isn’t as much as case as it used to be). It’s easier to share 500 books than it is to share 500 movies or songs.

But take hope, the music industry, for all their bluster, hasn’t collapsed. Even with the immense amount of music piracy going on. Their profits are down, sure, but we’ve also had several bought of economic downturns (which three months later we typically hear about how poor music sales are). You would have thought the RIAA would have imploded by now. But they still chug along. The bonuses they pay themselves, though, are smaller. Also looking at the music industry, even a decade after the MP3 revolution and widespread digital piracy, still makes the majority of unit sales by selling physical CDs (at least according to the latest data I was able to find, 2008 numbers IIRC).

Piracy should be stamped out when it can be. It is illegal activity after all (sure, we can fight over what copyright is or should be). The black market (of which piracy is a small part) can distort the legitimate market activity and if it gains too much creates a third grey market (which is even more trouble to stamp out). I would need charts and a few weeks to update my research, but legitimate markets require black markets to function fully and well. Every economy I can think of that eliminated the black market effectively experienced collapse soon after.
Jim C. Hines
January 18, 2011 @ 1:08 pm

“I would need charts and a few weeks to update my research, but legitimate markets require black markets to function fully and well.”

Any chance you might expand on this? It seems counterintuitive, and I’d love to understand better how this works.
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Jesslyn H
January 18, 2011 @ 2:34 pm

Im embarrassed to say that I have pirated a few books in the past. I switched to all ebook use after I got my first Kindle in 2007. Even though I know it’s no excuse, I would buy the physical book, then go get the electronic version.

Sometimes I would sample a complete book, then if I liked it, go pay full price for the ebook as I’m a rereader.

These days, I just stick to what is available in ebook format and ignore what isn’t and/or is overpriced (over $11). And although I always remove DRM, I just couldn’t take the guilt that I felt when going thru the torrent sites and I NEVER share files. Even with family.

In case anyone is paying attention on the ebook front, my entire typical middleclass family of readers, Mom, sisters, daughter and numerous cousins, have ALL switched to ebooks only.
Steve Buchheit
January 18, 2011 @ 3:44 pm

I should say first that here I’m talking about global markets and economies, not individual market segments. That is, the black market is the grease on the axle of most world economies, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t distort markets for individual products to the point of destroying the legitimate market for them (what almost happened with Steva – or say, just because Jig books are available on the black market doesn’t translate to higher sales for you, but it might mean higher sales for SF/F in general). Almost any product can be bought on the black market. IIRC, when the iPod first came out, there was a such a demand for it here in the US, exporters were reimporting them for sale in the US (a grey market activity as those iPods were specifically for export). Often the black market is involved in the roll out of new products (especially those in limited release). Some of this can be accounted for by legitimate resellers (such as the release or sale of a book well before the publicized release date), or through those grey marketers who see an opportunity to resell product above it’s MSRP.

The first data point I would make is the US$100 bill is the lingua franca of black markets. It is a decent percentage of our actual economy (that is, the movement of money). When the treasury started updating the bills, they started with the US$100 because it was the most commonly counterfeited bill world wide (being the currency of the black market, counterfeit bills usually start circulating in the black market first, when they aren’t the Treasury is pretty quick to stop them). And when they started advertising the new bill, they spent more money in Russia than in the US (Russia at the time had, and still has, a thriving black market for goods and services) (back in 1996, the first revision, but if you google the current roll-out, you’ll see mentions of Russia come up very often). If you check statistics, the US$100 is one of the most circulated and in demand bills outside the US. Stop the black markets, or make the Euro more attractive the black market, and our economy would lose more value than if OPEC decided to price oil in Euros (instead of US Dollars), mostly because people would still pay for oil in US currency.

Even in the US there is a thriving black/grey market (most people have more experience with the grey market), although here it is mostly about avoiding federal and state taxes (payments under the table, etc. see news articles about the Gulf Oil Spill reparation payments and the difficulty of documenting fishing income because a lot of the payments were in cash to avoid documentation and taxes). If you order a book through the Amazon UK site, you’re engaging in the grey market. In Australia this is a particular problem (see Australian SF Markets and the issue of selling books legitimately there a few years ago, I forget the distributors that were pushed out of the market because of censorship/internal distribution, it was a big story about 3 or 4 years ago, there was a subtext that the books would still be sold there, from the same publishers that had been printing them, it’s just they would go through illegal channels instead of the taxed-channels).

Estimates of the black market economy to the US range from 3%-18% (and are sort of like the “unemployment” figures, they’re a little bit lower when you take out felons and others who are of age, but for whatever reason are excluded from the employment market).

And that’s not even counting the illicit drug trade, or the grey market of drugs from Canada. And all of this is before we start talking about the secondary markets for products (ie. reselling).
SylviaSybil
January 18, 2011 @ 5:06 pm

I don’t read ebooks because I disagree with the publishing industry’s stance on consumer rights, so I’m a little hazy on some of the terminology.

A number of comments here are classifying the download of a second copy of a book you’ve already paid for once as piracy. (I think that’s also what’s meant by format shifting.) The publisher/author/everyone else already has your money, don’t they? I suppose there might be a difference if you buy a physical book and then download an ebook, although I don’t see it. But for people who buy an ebook from Amazon and then want to put it on their Nook, or those who buy from a website that doesn’t allow a second download if your computer crashes or something, why *should* they have to pay for the same thing twice?
Jim C. Hines
January 18, 2011 @ 5:31 pm

So by this logic, if I buy a trade paperback of a book, I should be able to walk into the bookstore and take a hardcover without paying? Why should I have to pay for the same thing twice? Everyone already has my money from buying the first book, right?
D. Moonfire
January 18, 2011 @ 6:09 pm

What about secondary markets (used book stores)? The author doesn’t get anything from them. So, if I got a trade paperback of a book, then a hard copy over at the used bookstore, the author/publisher gets the same amount of money as if I got the trade paperback and then downloaded a copy.

Not saying it is right, just mentioning that the publishing industry already has a secondary industry that is “stealing” in some ways from the author. They don’t get money for every time a book is passed hands.

I’d also include libraries (one sale, many readers) in that.
Steve Buchheit
January 18, 2011 @ 6:33 pm

No, the publisher has the money from your paperback and the original hardback sale. And more than likely the person who sold the book to the second-hand shop got money to buy to help buy another hard back. Plus, the library sales and resales are apart of the original market plan.
Jim C. Hines
January 18, 2011 @ 6:37 pm

The used books/libraries =/= piracy thing has been covered many, many times.

1. Like Steve said, the author gets paid.
2. Used books and libraries are dealing with a finite, physical resource (as opposed to a file, which can be shared an infinite number of times).
3. Libraries in non-U.S. countries also pay authors additional fees based on how often their books are checked out.
4. Libraries are actually a significant chunk of the market for hardcovers, which result in much larger royalties per-copy for the author.

I could go on, but bottom line, the analogy doesn’t hold up.
Jim C. Hines
January 18, 2011 @ 6:39 pm

I downloaded my share of music when Napster came online. Biggest issues were that I didn’t understand the problem and, to be honest, I was an idiot kid and didn’t think about it. Eventually I got it through my head that this wasn’t okay, and stopped. I don’t hold it against people if they’ve downloaded this stuff in the past. How could I? I’d be one heck of a hypocrite.

But I really appreciate it when people recognize that it’s problematic. Especially when they’re faster on the uptake than I was 🙂

DRM annoys me. I made sure Goldfish Dreams was DRM-free, but unfortunately, I have no control over what my publishers choose to do when they release the books.
Jim C. Hines
January 18, 2011 @ 6:41 pm

Re: prices, I need to do more of a survey of book prices. My feeling is that books actually are cheaper here in the U.S., relative to other countries. I don’t know if that’s because the U.S. has a larger population and thus can afford bigger (and cheaper) print runs, or what.

And yeah, I have some problems with DRM. I get why the publishers worry, but I don’t think that’s the way to fix the problem.
Jim C. Hines
January 18, 2011 @ 6:42 pm

Thanks, Steve. If you need me, I’ll be spending the rest of the night trying to wrap my brain around this 🙂 (Not a comment on your explanation; rather on my grasp of global economics and such.)
Ben J
January 18, 2011 @ 7:08 pm

I’m an Australian and here is a quick guide to retail prices (in Australian dollars) of fiction published in Australia by Australian Publishers. These prices are from examing books for sale in the two main bookstore chains.

Mass market paperbacks range from $18.99 to $21.99, trade paperbacks range from $28.99 – $32.99 and Hardcovers generally start from $45.00.

There are 3 department store chains that sell books, and while their prices are generally cheaper they only spec fic sub-genres they carry are a very small range of urban fantasy and paranormal romance.

As an aside, in the chain bookstores as far as fiction goes my observation is that sci-fi/fantasy gets the smallest amount of shelf space. Fantasy titles take up 75%, Urban Fanatasy 15% and Science Fiction 10%

I hope that this information is of some use.
Jim C. Hines
January 18, 2011 @ 7:23 pm

And the exchange rate is fairly even, right? Yikes. So you’re paying about twice what we do here in the states, and closer to three times for the mass market paperbacks.
SylviaSybil
January 18, 2011 @ 7:43 pm

Okay, I see your point on the difference between an ebook and a physical one. But I don’t see how it applies to different formats of ebooks. No one tells me I can’t read a physical book purchased from Amazon when I’m sitting in the Barnes & Noble cafe, so why can they tell me I can’t read it on my Nook? Or to make the analogy more realistic, it’d be as if every book I bought from Amazon had a HOME stamp on it and could only be read at home, while I’d have to buy the same book from Barnes & Noble to get a CAFE stamped copy and the same book a third time from Borders to get an OFFICE stamped copy.

Piracy is wrong, absolutely. I’m trying to figure out where piracy stops and where legitimate consumer usage begins. Wanting to read something I’ve paid for in multiple locations seems like legitimate usage to me. Wanting me to pay twice for the same thing seems dishonest to me.
Jim C. Hines
January 18, 2011 @ 7:46 pm

Wait, do you mean like you’ve bought the book in one format for the Nook, but then if you wanted to read it on the Kindle you’d have to buy it again?

I don’t have an answer, but the lack of a universal e-book file format is frustrating to me and to a lot of authors and publishers, too. I *think* we’re starting to see a shift more toward devices being able to handle multiple formats, but yeah … having had to deal with the file conversions for Goldfish Dreams, the more we move toward standardization, the happier a lot of us are going to be.

The other aspect of that problem, if I’m understanding you, is the DRM piece. Which … yeah. Also frustrating.
Ben J
January 18, 2011 @ 7:49 pm

In Australia, Australian Authors and Publishers are compensated for books purchased by libraries.

“Public Lending Right (PLR) and Educational Lending Right (ELR) are Australian Government cultural programs that make payments to eligible Australian creators and publishers in recognition that income is lost through the free multiple use of their books in public and educational lending libraries. PLR and ELR also support the enrichment of Australian culture by encouraging the growth and development of Australian writing.” The Public Lending Right Act 1985 provides the legislative framework for this scheme.

In a couple of interviews, with children book authors, that I’ve read, this scheme is one of their major sources of income – one author in particular has an extensive backlist and her works are very popular – she receives annual payments for books published over a decade ago under this scheme. So I can’t see how libraries equate to piracy.

I’ll admit to being a heavy user of my local library system and the other library systems that I can do inter-library loans through. My main reason is that I have easy access to a vastly larger range of authors than if I bought books through the local retail sector (for example in the two main bookstore chains in Australa, SF/Fantasy gets the smallest amount of shelf space and SF usually gets 10-15 % of this shelf space – and stocking of any authors backlist is really incomplete). I returned to reading fiction a couple of years ago after a close to two decade break and my rough estimate is that approximately three quarters of the authors I have read have only been possible through using the library.

Also in Australia, the 3rd tier of government, local council, collects rate payments from those that own and/or have mortgages and a percentage of the rates that I pay is used to pay for my local library system – so I feel that I should get some value for this percentage. I also feel that regular patronage shows that the library system is a valued part of the council’s services.

I haven’t embraced e-books because of the regional issues of availability and there is no way that I would download any “pirated” e-books because I believe that creators deserve to be financially compensated for their efforts.

Cheers
SylviaSybil
January 18, 2011 @ 7:54 pm

“Likewise, if you illegally download a book in the U.S. because you don’t like DRM (and at this point, DRM really isn’t a problem,) then the publisher doesn’t know that there is a real e-book market for the title and won’t put the book out in more formats.”

http://www.LostBookSales.com is up to 1100 stories since November 2010. Hopefully as it grows publishers will pay attention and learn what their would-be customers want.

And yes, many people there agree that DRM really IS a problem. 🙂
Jim C. Hines
January 18, 2011 @ 7:56 pm

The very first “lost sale” that came up was for Laura Anne Gilman’s latest. Apparently this is a lost sale because the book’s not available in any digital format.

Because the book isn’t out yet. The official release date isn’t until next month, and while some copies have started to leak into the bookstores, the e-book won’t be available until the release date.

As a first imrpession, this leaves me somewhat unimpressed by the site.
D. Moonfire
January 18, 2011 @ 7:58 pm

True, but I feel that the analogy you gave (“So by this logic, if I buy a trade paperback of a book, I should be able to walk into the bookstore and take a hardcover without paying?”) didn’t hold up either. Taking a hardcover and downloading a digital download are different for the same reasons you mentioned. One is a physical item the other is a digital download (as you mentioned). One allows unlimited copies and the other doesn’t. So, I don’t think the analogy is really accurate.

The computer industry also had the same thing, which is why they shifted to the licensed approach instead of selling software. With the recent AutoCad decision, it basically confirmed that there is no First Sale with electronic goods and you can’t resell licensed goods. The same is with most digital files, including ebooks, because it really doesn’t make sense to have resells.

Because of that, I think ebook piracy is different than physical stealing. Both wrong, but very different beasts.
Kristan
January 18, 2011 @ 8:02 pm

“It pisses me off when I find people illegally sharing my books online. And I think it’s important to educate readers. But I don’t think it helps our cause to distort or exaggerate the problem.”

Yes yes a million times yes.

Ugh, I was going to blog about this, but now I don’t see the point. You said everything I thought, but more eloquently. 😛
KatG
January 18, 2011 @ 8:02 pm

Your agent(s) assures them that sales figures are good. While your agent can fudge a little there and hope that the foreign publishers will love the book, they will check home sales figures before they buy and it is now easy for them to do. So if your agent is lying and the sales figures aren’t good, you can lose foreign sales if your domestic numbers are not showing growth. Twenty years ago or so, the foreign publishers wouldn’t usually buy mid-list genre novels at all. They would only buy the top sellers for foreign reprint or import, in part because those showed up on the bestseller lists, so they could be sure the numbers were there, and because those would be the only author names their audience would recognize. Now, a book with smaller numbers can get foreign sales, which is why you initially got foreign sales, but that’s in large part because we have BookScan where the foreign publishers can check sales figures rather than rely on bestseller lists and the word of domestic publishers and agents. The key thing is that your agent has to say that it’s selling pretty well here. If she said, it’s not selling very well here, foreign sales are less likely. You are a top seller now, as well, so you are getting more foreign sales.

While I don’t necessarily agree with this woman that it was piracy that chiefly cost her foreign sales, gentle piracy — the non-hacker customers — does effect sales figures which has a bigger impact in those who are still building an audience. And right now, with the economic situation, that impact is bigger. What I’ve found in so many of these discussions is that the gentle pirates, ultimately, don’t care. They want the author’s work, but not at the inconvenience of legal restrictions, and they don’t care if the illegal downloads have any effect on authors’ careers. It’s not the downloads per se that do it, it’s the refusal to invest in sales or library use over simply taking it.
SylviaSybil
January 18, 2011 @ 8:03 pm

Yes, right now if you buy an ebook in one format you have to strip the DRM to read the ebook in another format. And depending on who you ask, stripping the DRM is illegal, quasi-legal or only legal if you have a disability. Of course, there are some publishers (mostly small press) who issue their ebooks without DRM altogether, so their books can be read freely.
SylviaSybil
January 18, 2011 @ 8:10 pm

They have moderators who go through and weed those out. It is irritating, I agree, but it’s a side effect of the wiki nature of the site and I don’t know of any better way to tell publishers what consumers as a collective think.
Lynn Flewelling
January 18, 2011 @ 8:14 pm

One answer, probably not a great one, is to get an iPad. It (and iPhone) can run both Kindle and Nook software, as well as iBook, so you can have both and read on one device. It supports some other format, too, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head.
KatG
January 18, 2011 @ 8:16 pm

Yes, in both cases, piracy or not buying, there are no sales. They are both bad for the author, and having people bugging the publisher, if they will, is better. But when someone decides not to buy an author’s book because it’s not available in the format they want or at the price they want to pay, they are not deliberately hurting the author and they don’t get the author’s work. When they download illegally, they are hurting the author deliberately and they get the author’s work without helping the author at all. If they would buy the work, in print if necessary, or borrow the print edition from the library if they can’t borrow the e-book yet, this helps the individual author and fiction publishing in general. You could buy the e-book in the format you want usually, for instance; you just can’t get it from your local library in e-book form yet. That’s an inconvenience for you, but that does not require punishing the author for it. Availability and pricing are sufficient arguments for not buying or attempting to borrow a book. They are not sufficient arguments to justify taking books from authors illegally.
KatG
January 18, 2011 @ 8:26 pm

First off, the idea that it is only publishers who want DRM is inaccurate. Book vendors want DRM. Amazon wants their Kindle DRM. And publishers have to provide it to them. The e-book market is growing and in transition. Publishers are making more formats available as they can and as they go. It’s required them to hire a lot of additional personnel, which increases costs. And each vendor wants different things from them, so it’s going to be slow. Things are standardizing however into a group of formats and DRM in the case of purchases is relatively easy to get around. A lot of people with non-Kindle e-readers or tablets are buying Kindle files, for instance, and Amazon is actually trying to make it easier for them. So increasingly DRM is not a problem and as the market grows, it will be less and less a factor. Likewise, availability in different regional territories of titles will get better over the next five-ten years, as negotiations occur between both companies and governments. Doing this business is a lot more complicated than people are willing to accept. They know what you want; they just can’t give it to you yet. And that’s not a sufficient excuse for piracy.
Sean
January 18, 2011 @ 8:33 pm

I break DRM as soon as i buy an ebook for a completely different reason. I purchased George R. R. Martin “A Game of Thrones” from the sony ebook store. The formatting was horrible, the paragraphs were not indented and there was a blank line between paragraphs. I e-mailed the sony ebook store and they said there was nothing they could do it was completely dependent on the publisher and how they formatted the epub book. I had to snap the DRM and reformat it (of course i have not started reading it yet cos it still pisses me off something fierce). I almost found a pirated copy…….

Whether people will admit it or not most everyone has pirated something online. I use to pirate software because i could not afford it and wanted to learn it (now since i have income and no college i actually have no pirated software on any of my machines). Never pirated an ebook though, if i really wanted it i would just go to a used book store, we have them all over San Antonio and you can pick up new paperbacks for a couple of bucks.

sean
SylviaSybil
January 18, 2011 @ 8:46 pm

I don’t know who makes the decision for publishers to put DRM on their books; I just know that DRM varies by publisher. And really, pressure from other parties does not absolve you of responsibility for your actions.

“DRM in the case of purchases is relatively easy to get around” I’m not sure what you mean here: it’s easy to strip? Yes, that’s true, but its legality is questioned. And Little Consumer versus Big Business rarely ends well.

“So increasingly DRM is not a problem” I’ll agree as you added the qualifier “increasingly”. But I disagree with the cause: DRM is less and less of a problem as more and more people leave it off altogether.

See, it’s the attitude of DRM that bothers me. Including it treats everyone as pirates. It’s the same reason I’ve stopped flying (the TSA has no right to touch my body) and it’s why I don’t shop at stores that ask me to leave my bag at the front counter (they have no right to take my stuff). I don’t pirate, because it’s wrong, but neither do I do business with companies that treat me like a criminal.
Jeffe Kennedy
January 18, 2011 @ 9:09 pm

I agree, Jim – ranting on a topic turns people off. People *can* easily steal books. We have to focus on developing a paradigm where they’re happy to pay, rather than steal.
eefster
January 18, 2011 @ 10:44 pm

Saw your comment thread on your LJ, so I thought I’d come add one more set of data for your collection:

In Ireland, paperbacks generally run from about 7 Euro for some kids’ books (and also, say, the Harlequin novels discounted at a supermarket) up to 13-15 for the non-sale big hitters. Maeve Binchy has a new one out for 17 Euro, for example, which I imagine is mmpb.

Because I tend to buy SF/F, which seems to be larger and more often in trade paperback, I’m often hit with prices more like 25 Euro, edging towards 30 during the boomingest of the boom times. Hardbacks, depending on subject, can range from 15 to 50 or up, and of course specialty books just go as high as they’d like.

Obviously, the equivalent in USD will be entirely dependent on exchange rate. For the most part, it seems pretty steady around 1.33 USD to the EUR, meaning books range anywhere from $9.30 to $39.90 for the various paperback formats, and up to $66.50 for a pretty normal hardback. When the exchange rate sat around 1.58, back in 2008, that meant standard book prices were roughly between $11 and $80, with my own (fiction, paperback) purchases between $23 and $47 per book. I spent a lot of money on Amazon around then. At least I could always say we didn’t have it as bad as the Australians! 😉

You can also take a look at http://www.eason.ie/bestsellers for some more current prices.
Anke
January 19, 2011 @ 2:46 am

The last German paperback books I bought had a cover price of €9,90 (unless the last one was Colorado Kid by Stephen king, which was €5, and has a low page count – and I suspect Stephen King gets pretty big print runs.

They do look rather nicer than the English mass market paperbacks I have – bigger (7.5 inches tall), cream-white paper instead of recycling grey, and I don’t end up with black fingers when I read them.

There’s legal stuff that complicates book prices.
First there’s the Buchpreisbindung: A book produced for the German market may not be sold under its cover price unless it’s used or damaged. I think there is some time limit on it, 18 months… not sure if it’s after publication or after it goes out of print. It’s supposed to protect independent bookstores and to encourage publishers to not only concentrate on lowest-common-denominator big sellers. Something about books being a medium of culture, not a product. I can’t say I fully understand the arguments.

Second, there’s the fact that books, like food, get a VAT of only 7%, rather than 19% like nearly everything else. (Oh, and VAT is included in the cover price. That’s why there are two values pre-printed, for Germany and Austria, even though both use euro: Austria has a higher VAT on books. I think I’m starting to ramble.)

English-language dead tree books, at least ones that are produced by big publishers rather than small press, can be bought via amazon.de at a price of the original one converted to Euros according to the current exchange rate, or even marked marked down from that.
Anke
January 19, 2011 @ 3:06 am

I find it interesting that HERE you acknowledge the fact that an electronic copy isn’t the same as a physical book, when elsewhere you keep repeating that an illegal download is the same as theft of a physical object.
Jim C. Hines
January 19, 2011 @ 7:25 am

Anke – Which comment/commenter are you responding to?
Jim C. Hines
January 19, 2011 @ 7:32 am

Thanks for the info. I had heard the Buchpreisbindung mentioned in passing before, but this lays it out a bit more clearly. And I agree with you — the mass market paperbacks I get of my books from Germany are just nicer than the mass markets printed here in the U.S.
Jim C. Hines
January 19, 2011 @ 7:44 am

Thanks!

I’m also starting to look at places like http://www.bookdepository.com/ and trying to figure out how they fit into things (as far as I can see, the prices are set, and the shipping is free worldwide).
Thiago
January 19, 2011 @ 11:28 am

KatG

“The problem is that percentage of people who now have e-readers who claim they would buy the book if X,Y, or Z was done.”
“So that percentage of people who claim they would buy but don’t are the ones really hurting the authors a lot individually in the market.”

Sorry, that doesn’t make any sense. So what you’re saying is I should buy a product, even if that product isn’t what I want, just to support the authors? I’m all there with you on the whole “piracy is wrong” thing, and whenever an ebook I really want isn’t available (and that happens a lot since I live in Brazil) I simply don’t buy it. But I also don’t buy them when I’m not confortable buying them (for whatever reasons, DRM, poor quality, being more expensive than the current paper version, etc.), and even though I don’t ilegally download them the publisher still doesn’t know that I’m not buying them (despite having gone to the trouble of contacting several publishers about these issues, I should add).

Look, all I’m saying is I agree piracy is theft, but I’m shocked at how entitled authors and publishers can be to suggest that readers should buy whatever crap they put out regardless of what custommers need or want.
Jim C. Hines
January 19, 2011 @ 11:37 am

“I’m shocked at how entitled authors and publishers can be to suggest that readers should buy whatever crap they put out regardless of what custommers need or want”

Maybe I missed it, but where did anyone say you should buy crap you don’t want? The arguments I’ve been seeing are that if you don’t want to buy it, that’s fine — but don’t steal it, either.
Lynn Flewelling
January 19, 2011 @ 11:41 am

Look, all I’m saying is I agree piracy is theft, but I’m shocked at how entitled authors and publishers can be to suggest that readers should buy whatever crap they put out regardless of what custommers need or want.

I’m not sure what you mean by an author’s sense of entitlement and crap customers don’t want. About all the author has control over is the content. It’s the publisher who makes all the other decisions: formats, price, whether they produce a properly formatted e-book, cover art and the like. I don’t feel “entitled” to people buying my work. I’m pleased when they do, but it’s not an expectation, just a hope. I suppose you could say I do feel entitled to not being pirated, but again, that’s more of a hope than an expectation, these days.
Alana Abbott
January 19, 2011 @ 12:28 pm

I have to say that I *love* it when Baen does the free e-book thing. I do wonder if the way they do it will change now that e-books have a bigger market share — because they give away *so much* material!
Anke
January 19, 2011 @ 12:32 pm

I think you took those statements out of context. The paragraph you plucked them from starts with “The problem is not the bulk of pirates” (emphasis mine), and talks about illegal downloads throughout, so I take “people” in those sentences to mean “people who download books illegally”, rather than “people at large”.
Alana Abbott
January 19, 2011 @ 12:33 pm

I do think that DRM makes sense for libraries, though — and, more recently, for galleys. I don’t want DRM on books that I *own*, but I think it’s appropriate on books that I’m borrowing. Otherwise, I’m just likely to forget to give it back, completely unintentionally! I’d rather have my rights expire with the due date.

Sucks that Adobe doesn’t work with your reading platform, though.
Anke
January 19, 2011 @ 12:41 pm

I was referring to the bullet point “Used books and libraries are dealing with a finite, physical resource (as opposed to a file, which can be shared an infinite number of times).”

It might be a pet peeve of mine I should really shut up about, but since nobody is suddenly lacking a book after someone downloads a copy, the explicit analogies with theft of a physical object really don’t work for me.

Thanks for explaining in detail how a library book is different from an illegal download and gets the author paid, though. I’m currently working on adjusting my thinking away from “library or download is the same: I read a book without paying anything”.
Alana Abbott
January 19, 2011 @ 12:42 pm

But then you have to read on an LCD screen with backlight.

The only reason I’ve gotten into e-books is because the e-ink platforms are easier on the eyes — and more closely mimic the reading-on-page experience. I suspect they’re also why the e-book market has taken off. People could have been reading on their computers for years, but many hold outs — like me — didn’t want to read on a back lit screen.

But that’s a format argument. 🙂 My desktop computer can also run Kindle and nook, plus it can run Adobe software and Calibre (which is the freeware that I use for my e-book organizing). I’m sure that the iPad can do most of that, too. 🙂
Alana Abbott
January 19, 2011 @ 12:47 pm

I’m NOT saying book piracy is harmless. (To authors or to readers either, for that matter. Laura Anne Gilman recently pointed another example of a torrent site which was installing malware with downloads.)

Okay, this may be schadenfreude, but I think that the malware being installed in tandem with illegal downloads is kind of funny. And could be a great propaganda source — “Don’t download illegal copies, or the malware will get you!”
Lynn Flewelling
January 19, 2011 @ 1:00 pm

It might be a pet peeve of mine I should really shut up about, but since nobody is suddenly lacking a book after someone downloads a copy, the explicit analogies with theft of a physical object really don’t work for me.

Theft can be defined as taking that which is not yours. That’s how I define it. Doesn’t matter what the format, you’re still in possession of the same content when you pirate a file as you are if you steal a paper book.
Jeffe Kennedy
January 19, 2011 @ 1:22 pm

This reminds of when I bought a drawing from an artist friend who was at the Ucross residency with me. (Kind of a neat fellowship program because composers, writers and visual artists are in residency at the same time.) She commented that it seemed unfair that I shelled out a decent amount for her one drawing, while she could only buy my book once, for much less money. I said that lots of people could have my one book, though, whereas only I had her drawing. It came down to that we were both happy to support each other’s hard work, regardless of the numbers.
Steve Buchheit
January 19, 2011 @ 1:23 pm

Anke, I think it’s because you’re viewing the issue from a singular side, the consumer. Understand that publishing is a business. They recoup their initial investment in a book (the smallest part of which is typically the physical cost of the book, followed closely by the royalty) by selling copies of that book. If you understand that you can see how reading a copy in the library is not considered stealing since the physical object has been paid for (sometimes at a higher cost for a “library edition”), and the publisher can view the multiple views as a “marketing” expense (typically against future publications, that is, if a lot of patrons like it, other libraries will buy the book, and those libraries will also buy the next one from the author). However, to illegally download or copy a file reduces the number of copies of the products sold (that point could be argued, in this case let’s say it is a desirable object the downloader will consume/read/use). It’s an economic loss, which is the definition of theft.

When you buy a book, from a consumer side you’re getting a physical object (which then you actually have rights to, not all rights, but rights of property of the physical object which you can then loan out or sell). From a publisher’s view, they’ve recouped a percentage of their original investment in both licensing the work from the author, their cost in editing, proofing, creating art, etc as well as printing the book (the price of the physical object is quite small, see arguments on why e-books are not free). Publishers size their print runs very specifically to make sure they either come out a little ahead or at least break even. When then offer an ebook, they don’t just pull a price out of their hat, they do the math on “we think these many ebooks will sell, the ebook sales have to cover this much of our costs to produce the book to begin with, make a division, there’s the price of the book” (it’s a little more complex than that, but that’s a good shorthand). So when you “take” an ebook without compensating the original owner for it, you begin to distort that whole model.

By your original logic, counterfeiting wouldn’t be a crime because nobody is “taking” a physical object from another person. Point in fact, they are increasing the “product” available on the market. However, if you see it as counterfeiting as infusing an economy with more tender, which then lowers the actual value of all the other legal tender (money being valued in relation to it’s scarcity and trust), it also becomes theft of a kind (the theft form everybody who uses the currency as it’s worth slightly less than it would be). Which is exactly why it’s prosecuted as a crime.
KatG
January 19, 2011 @ 1:31 pm

That wasn’t what I said at all, and I think you know that. As I said earlier up in the discussion thread:

“Yes, in both cases, piracy or not buying, there are no sales. They are both bad for the author, and having people bugging the publisher, if they will, is better. But when someone decides not to buy an author’s book because it’s not available in the format they want or at the price they want to pay, they are not deliberately hurting the author and they don’t get the author’s work. When they download illegally, they are hurting the author deliberately and they get the author’s work without helping the author at all. If they would buy the work, in print if necessary, or borrow the print edition from the library if they can’t borrow the e-book yet, this helps the individual author and fiction publishing in general. You could buy the e-book in the format you want usually, for instance; you just can’t get it from your local library in e-book form yet. That’s an inconvenience for you, but that does not require punishing the author for it. Availability and pricing are sufficient arguments for not buying or attempting to borrow a book. They are not sufficient arguments to justify taking books from authors illegally.”

This isn’t about someone deciding not to buy a book because of price or availability of the legal version. This is about someone deciding to steal a book because they 1) want it; 2)can get it illegally without buying it. We keep getting these dual arguments from people. First off, they argue that e-books are so valuable to them that they must have them, even if they already have a print version of a book, they absolutely must have the electronic version to the point where they’ll steal it instead of just going without it. And then second, they argue that e-books are of almost no value to them, that really e-books should be free or barely anything or it’s not worth bothering, that e-books being made up of electronic binary code are not the same as a physical object and so worth nothing, etc., and so there’s nothing wrong with them taking the book for free since they’re mad at the publisher for saying something worth nothing — that they must have — is worth something. All the people that are necessary to involve to produce e-books legally for sale who have to be paid — they don’t exist or they don’t count and their efforts are worth nothing, etc. They’re trying to have it both ways. And the negotiations that are needed for a company in one country to sell legally a tech product in another country when rights licenses for publication were issued by territory? It’s a huge amount of negotiations by people who also get paid.

So again and again, I have these conversations with people who have laptops and cellphones, who pay $300 for an iPod, $100 for a pair of sneakers, $80 for a concert, $50 for games and $30 for updated modules to their games, $12 for a movie ticket, who waited years for iPhone service to be available with another company in the U.S. besides AT&T, but no, ebooks’ prices and availability — something that is constantly changing and rapidly improving — are a crime against nature that totally excuses theft. If you don’t want a book or e-book enough to wait for a legally available version or pay the legal price, fine. Leave it be. No one is forcing you to buy a book. But no one is forcing you to go to a bit torrent site and illegally download the book for free either. And pretending that the piracy doesn’t have any effect on authors’ careers and livelihoods and that authors shouldn’t complain or be upset just because piracy is big and can’t be shut down, that for me is a baseless argument. If you choose to illegally download instead of buying or not buying, it does hurt people.
KatG
January 19, 2011 @ 1:58 pm

I’m sorry, but yes, you do business with companies that treat you like a potential criminal all the time because all companies treat you like a potential criminal. They legally have to in most cases. When you buy something online, you have to provide a billing address — so they can track you and to prove you aren’t a criminal. You often have to provide the short code on the back of a credit card to prove you have the actual card and aren’t a criminal, and the expiration date. Your pin numbers for bank cards, phone cards, etc. are all about making sure you’re not a criminal. Your Social Security number or other country equivalent I.D. numbers. Your member number on your health insurance card. When you buy something at a store and it doesn’t have the bar code on it, they have to go get the bar code from an identical item rather than just take your word on the price; they are legally obligated to do it. And the store will have security cameras and mirrors throughout because you might be a thief. Your Internet service provider whom you are using right now treats you like a criminal, not only needing a billing address and credit card codes, but if you look in the terms of service agreement you went with, you’ll find all sorts of things where you assure them you aren’t a criminal and detailing the penalties if you turn out to be one. The equipment they use to provide you the service has all sorts of safeguards to keep you, their customer, from hacking and profiting from their stuff as a criminal. Software companies as well. When you go to a movie or watch a DVD and they flash a warning that it is illegal to record the film and sell it, that’s treating you like a criminal and they are legally required to do it, in case you get arrested and try to claim that they didn’t tell you it was illegal. To avoid being treated like a potential criminal, you’d have to live in a box and have your family bring you food.

DRM is not a highly effective idea. But Amazon wants DRM on its Kindle books, for exclusivity issues not just piracy ones, and the Kindle still makes up 50% of the U.S. e-book market and good chunks of other major markets. So publishers can’t tell Amazon to go stuff it on that particular issue. But Amazon is also making Kindle books available to non-Kindle owners. We’ve got four or five standard formats, most of which don’t have DRM, being established over the last couple of years as publishers work to convert their lists into those different formats for different vendors. Publishers put DRM on some of their formats, particularly for those vendors who insist on it, but if you have a legal e-reader or computer to get legal e-books, DRM at this point usually does not cause a lot of pain, and it is causing less and less pain as the market grows and develops.
Thiago
January 19, 2011 @ 2:47 pm

KatG

You said: “Likewise, if you illegally download a book in the U.S. because you don’t like DRM (and at this point, DRM really isn’t a problem,) then the publisher doesn’t know that there is a real e-book market for the title and won’t put the book out in more formats. Or if you illegally download because a legal e-book isn’t available yet, again, that doesn’t tell the publisher that there is enough of a market for an e-book version to be worth making a legal e-book version.”

According to you pirating ebooks hurts authors because then the publisher can’t know there’s a demand for that author’s books elsewhere. By not buying ebooks, even if I don’t pirate them, because they’re not available or because X, Y or Z wasn’t done, I don’t help publishers know there’s a market also. Therefore, by your reasoning the fact that I don’t buy books which I’d like to, but which are not within reasonable standards of quality or price, also hurt authors by making it look like they’re not in demand or that they’re not so successfull here in Brazil. What should I do then? Should I buy stuff that’s not within my expectations or budget just to show publishers there’s a market and help out authors? Cause I’m running out of options, since so far all my messages to publishers have been ignored.

I want to buy ebooks. I spent a fortune getting an ereader because I want to buy ebooks. I don’t want to ilegally download them because I firmly believe that authors should be justly compensated for their work. But I’m shut out of buying the ones I want because they’re not available and because publishers think I’m either a sucker who should pay more for an ebook than others pay for a print book and get a substandard poorly edited product or a thief who’s going to take that which I just payed for and give it away for free to others. What is left for me to do?
Thiago
January 19, 2011 @ 2:52 pm

Oh, and let me be quite clear about it, in case I wasn’t before. I don’t condone piracy. i don’t donload ilegal ebooks, and I think people who do are thieves. I don’t think there’s any excuse for it. I’m just asking authors and publishers to let me buy their books.
Anke
January 19, 2011 @ 3:13 pm

e-books being made up of electronic binary code are not the same as a physical object and so worth nothing
Since I argue the former, I’d like to point out that I don’t believe the latter. Or that ebooks should be free.

Personally, for an author whose other books I liked, or a book I read already and liked and want to re-read whenever I want, or something recommended by someone whose taste I trust, something in the ballpark of $7-$8 sounds worth it to me (though of course I’m more excited about lower prices…). I’d get disgruntled if the book was more expensive than the mass market paperback, but I might go as high as $10 with a bit of grumping. (Note it makes sense to me if a publisher priced an ebook higher before the mass market paperback is published. “Early adopter” fee, kind of thing; I kinda doubt the price gap between mmp and hardcover is ALL just in the amount of paper. 😉 )

That $7-$8 is if I don’t have the book already.

If I have the book already in print, it depends on the book. I bought Memory in ebook form for $6, because it’s the only book from the Vorkosigan series that was not included on the CD that came with the latest hardback, and I don’t like gaps in collections. (That hardback I would not have bought without the CD, because I find hardbacks unwieldy. But, over a dozen ebooks I know I like for €20? Yes, please! Totally worth paying, even if I could have just waited until someone shared the contents of the CD – which was explicitly allowed, and announced as such.)

With most books, I don’t think I could justify buying a book twice at full price. (For the sake of simplicity I’m assuming that ebooks cost the same as their mass market counterparts. Quite a few publishers seem to default to setting the digital cover price same to the mass market paperback edition.)
Something like, “If you buy, or have bought, the print version, you get 50% off the ebook version” would sound decent to me, but that’s just a gut feeling.

Books I’m not usually willing to pay that much for would be ones I heard of that sounded somewhat interesting, or that caught my eye by cover and have an interesting-sounding blurb, but I wasn’t reasonably confident I’d like them. The kind of stuff which I pull out of bargain bins. (Including my first Vorkosigan series book, for the incredibly low price of €1, come to think of it…)

I do think ebooks should cost less than their print counterparts, particularly considering that there is no legal option to re-sell or otherwise pass them on to recoup the “losses” from mis-purchases, where it turns out I didn’t like the book after all.
Anke
January 19, 2011 @ 3:21 pm

Yeah, my morals appear a bit tangled there. Thanks for the in-depth explanation.

I probably over-estimate the percentage of people who buy thing after getting an illegal copy because I have a bit of a habit of buying stuff I read for free, sometimes illegally.
I’ve got quite a few books I first read at a library, and a stack of manga I read as scanlations before they were available here, I bought print volumes of a free webcomic I like a lot, and the first ebook was a compilation of short stories I had all read already, since the author had posted them publicly on deviantart.com before a bit of self-publishing.

The scanlations were illegal, but since with me personally they created sales rather than replacing them, the idea that things like that create losses is counter-intuitive to me.
Kerry D.
January 19, 2011 @ 3:22 pm

This is coming from a reader’s point of view, and one who lives outside the US so runs into the frustrations of geographical restrictions all the time. (Don’t get me started; I understand why it’s there but it drives me nuts.)

If little or nothing can be done about the hardcore pirates (and DRM sure as heck isn’t stopping them), then surely it is a good idea to make it as easy as possible for the people who want to buy but can’t (or don’t for whatever reason) to do so. There is nothing more frustrating that wanting to give an author (and the publisher) your money and finding out that you can’t.

For books I really want, if I can’t buy an ebook (and that’s my preference) I might buy the paper anyway. If it’s an auto-buy author I will. But otherwise I’ll get it from the library or go without. And there are lots of books mentioned on blogs that tempt me. I’m probably not going to go to the effort of tracking them down physically, but if I could hop online and immediately buy and download a copy “for later”, the odds are good that I would. I would make more “splurge” buys.

For me (and like I said, this is from my reader’s point of view), if you make it easy for me to buy, I’ll buy. If you don’t, I won’t.

So lost sales aren’t just coming because people pirate. The more “honest” buyers are just going without or using the library. If those readers and the ones who are pirating out of frustration, could buy easily, I think they would. If you can’t stop the hardcore pirates, make it easy for the people on the borderline to buy instead.

Note, that’s a general “you”. I totally understand that authors have little control in when, where or how their publishers make ebooks available.
Anke
January 19, 2011 @ 3:22 pm

That was *meant* as a reply to Steve Buchheit … what an appropriate name for this discussion … at http://www.jimchines.com/2011/01/arguing-book-piracy/#comment-35782 – I don’t know why this happens.
Kerry D.
January 19, 2011 @ 3:26 pm

P.S. To add to the price data above, I live in New Zealand. The average price for a paperback is around $25. A trade paperback will range from $30 to $40. A hardcover will start at about $50. Right now the exchange rate is about 0.77 so I have to pay a huge amount more than the US prices to buy paper books. I buy almost all my paper books from The Book Depository, which I know doesn’t help local retailers but makes my book habit affordable.
Jim C. Hines
January 19, 2011 @ 3:26 pm

Anke,

Clicking the “Reply” link *should* post your comment directly beneath whoever you’re replying to, but I know the comment threading setup here isn’t ideal.

I’m torn between trying to adjust the comment structure and plugins, or just going to a single comment list (like John Scalzi has at his blog) and allowing folks to address other commenters by name when they respond.
KatG
January 19, 2011 @ 4:29 pm

“Likewise, if you illegally download a book in the U.S. because you don’t like DRM (and at this point, DRM really isn’t a problem,) then the publisher doesn’t know that there is a real e-book market for the title and won’t put the book out in more formats. Or if you illegally download because a legal e-book isn’t available yet, again, that doesn’t tell the publisher that there is enough of a market for an e-book version to be worth making a legal e-book version.”

Okay, Thiago, you misunderstood me then. If you want an e-book and it costs more than you want to pay, then you can complain to the publisher — which does actually in large groups or continued complaints have an effect over time, as does e-book customers buying large amounts of low priced e-books and not very much of the high priced ones — and not buy it, or wait and see if the price comes down, which it usually will in time. (Most SFF titles, for example, are out in print only in mass market paperback and the e-book price for these books is usually the same as or somewhat less than the mass market paperback price. The smaller number of higher price, first run, hot bestseller hardcovers you have to wait for if you want a lower price, same as print, or pay up to get the book before other people who are more willing to wait. You pay to get in first, same as any other service.) If the legal e-book is unavailable where you are, you have to wait or settle for the print version for now. If you buy the print version, that tells the publisher that there is enough of a market to make an e-book version. You can also, if you don’t want to buy the print version, tell the publisher that you want an e-book version, which lets the publisher know that there is an e-book market and so an e-book version may get made. This is how a normal, legitimate market works. Whereas people taking books by piracy doesn’t give that market any signals at all except to be worried no one is going to buy anything.

Anke: “With most books, I don’t think I could justify buying a book twice at full price.”

That’s perfectly understandable. But you aren’t buying the book twice if you buy the e-book and print versions. You are buying two different forms of the book, two different products that provide the book — a printed physical book made of paper, ink, glue, art, etc., and an electronic file that has been assembled, debugged and repeatedly formatted and proofed so that it can work in your special computer device, a service for you, the electronic consumer who needs stuff the print customer does not. The electronic form costs extra for the publisher to make, costs personnel and services in addition to and separate from the production of the print versions. This extra cost to provide you with the service of an e-book version, which has to be done repeatedly in multiple formats, is a very real set of costs that effect the price of e-books.

“(For the sake of simplicity I’m assuming that ebooks cost the same as their mass market counterparts.”

Currently, they cost more because they have to hire extra personnel and services to do them,and because instead of one print version that is formatted once and proofed and then done for good, they have to do it numerous times separately, formatting, debugging, reformatting, proofing, reformatting, proofing again, reformatting, etc. for each format and in relation to different vendors who want different things. It’s getting better and the personnel and infrastructure are more in place, and sales are climbing fast enough that it’s starting to offset costs, but e-books still often lose money for publishers. But if they price e-books for mass market regularly a good bit more than mass market, that does effect sales, so they may take a loss by pricing them the same, and hope to make it up in bulk now or later.

If you want the extra product of an electronic version in a format that will work for your particular machine, you have to pay for that service because it costs money to provide that particular service. I think this is the thing that confuses people because they are used to other groups paying for the services that they get on the Net — venture capitalists, advertisers and data miners for advertising who pay companies who provide those services for free to net in a customer base who is then used for data and advertised to. And because they don’t really think about how much they spend on electronics equipment, software, accessories, Internet service, etc. to go play on the Net. Right now, e-books are not cheap to provide in the legal market, which also limits their availability, and the sales aren’t there yet to make them cheaper. But improvements and availability are developing as the market grows.
KatG
January 19, 2011 @ 4:30 pm

Sorry to go to town on your blog about this Jim. I’ll sit out beyond answering any replies/questions about my specific posts.
Jim C. Hines
January 19, 2011 @ 6:52 pm

No worries. For what it’s worth, the mirror of this post on LiveJournal is up past 200 comments.

I do question whether some of the exchanges are going anywhere, but if I ever feel it’s time for a conversation or argument to stop, I’ll step in and say something about it.
SylviaSybil
January 19, 2011 @ 7:50 pm

If you think a passive warning that it’s illegal to sell copies of a DVD is the same as active software preventing the copy of ebooks, then we will have to agree to disagree on the subject.
KatG
January 19, 2011 @ 9:47 pm

I think it’s similar to the active software your Internet service provider uses to prevent you from doing things. I also think you’re totally within your rights to not buy e-books with DRM, to not buy products from Amazon, etc. Why should you if you don’t like it? But it’s also entirely possible to buy e-books from many vendors and publishers without DRM in the main markets and it is less and less of an issue as the market develops.
Anke
January 20, 2011 @ 2:48 am

I guess people underestimate how much work the reformatting is – assumptions on the lines of “they just have to run the digital file they have already through a conversion script!”. Particularly people who have had bad experiences where they bought an ebook that was poorly formatted.

So, thanks a lot for the detailed description. I can see now how that format-jungle would raise prices more than lack of material, shipping, storage, etc. would lower it… Must keep in mind that ebook sales are only a small fraction of book sales.

It’s one more reason to hope that vendors settle for one standard format soon. (As in, next couple of years.)

If the legal e-book is unavailable where you are, you have to wait or settle for the print version for now.
Yeah, that’s something that looks pretty weird if you are not familiar with publishing arcana. I can buy most US paperbacks for their cover price, without shipping charges. Getting a file on my computer should be easier, not harder, yet I run into “you are not allowed to buy this in Germany” a lot.
I’ve read explanations how splitting markets makes it easier for authors to sell their books to publishers, and can earn them more money, just saying that it looks pretty weird before hearing things like that.
D. Moonfire
January 20, 2011 @ 9:36 am

I only hope that the format they do settle on works for my platforms. 🙂 But, ePUB (which is my favorite) is still near the top, so I’m hopeful.

When I made my novel into an ebook (ePUB of course), it was a fair amount of work but fortunately, I already had it in a format that made it a lot easier to convert it into xhtml (ePUB’s internal format). Don’t know about the other formats, but I could see it being a fair amount of work.

Re: Regional Markets. I think this is something I’m seriously hoping will erode as globalization continues to evolve. Region encoding/limitations for games, television shows, movies, and (effectively) books is up against the increasing connectivity of the Internet. And, while it means less money for people in some ways, I’m really hoping to see it break down and you ‘just buy a book’ and it is available anywhere the Internet is.
Anke
January 20, 2011 @ 11:24 am

Explaining how exactly limiting sales by region means more money if in some regions things are not available at all takes some explaining. I don’t think I get it. (Must have something to do with expecting to get money from someone who licenses the material in that region, but then no-one does.)

Thinking of a tweet I saw recently, “Dear Nintendo, region locking loses you money. Had it been on the DS, there’d be almost 170€ worth of money you’d never gotten from me alone.” (This is about games that never made it to Europe.)
KatG
January 20, 2011 @ 1:36 pm

They aren’t trying to artificially separate territories. It’s just that countries do actually matter. When it was mainly all print, we had the system — U.S. publisher has U.S. territory, author or U.S. publisher sells Australia publishing rights to Australian publisher who then has the exclusive license for the Australian territory. And this continues. Just because the Internet makes it easier for people to communicate does not mean that one company can take over the globe and have a massive monopoly, that this would be a good thing. If the U.S. publisher comes in flooding the Australia book market with e-books, the money for which goes only to the U.S. publisher, you can understand why the Australian publishing industry might not be too happy about that. And then there’s the Australian government, which isn’t just going to let a U.S. or global corporation waltz in and do anything it wants while ignoring the country’s regulations either. And if that weren’t bad enough, e-books involves more than publishing — it involves 4 or 5 different branches of the electronics industry and it’s even worse for them, which is why in some countries you can’t have a Kindle yet. So that means lots of negotiations. With lawyers. Who have to be paid. And that’s happening, but the viable legal e-book market started in 2007. So the legal market is slower than the black market because it follows the rules and it’s new. But the legal market helps authors and book publishing keep going, slow as it is. The black market most definitely doesn’t.
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January 21, 2011 @ 9:06 am

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Ben J
January 25, 2011 @ 8:20 pm

To put the pricing in perspective, Australia’s estimated population is just over 22 and a half million (which is less than California’s population and less than Texas’ population). So the potential market for book sales is much less than in a country of over 300 million.

During the past few years on-line shopping has started to mature in Australia. The prices and ranges of goods overseas, compared to Australian brick and mortar retailers, has been a real opener for the Australian consumer.
Anke
January 26, 2011 @ 5:49 am

I just found something that might fit into a “do people buy after downloading something for free?” mosaic.

http://www.jamendo.com lets people download free music, and offers a “support the artist” link both when offering the download, or at any time on the artist page. There are statistics about how many people downloaded something from an artist, and how many people donated (not how much, but the minimum is €5).

I just had a look at the statistics of a dozen or so bands, which not-really-representative sample brought up something like 15-30 donations per 10,000 downloads as occurring relatively frequently.
Jim C. Hines
January 26, 2011 @ 8:34 am

There are some good arguments out there about why the music industry isn’t an overly accurate predictor for the publishing industry, but honestly, those numbers fall within the range I’d expect. (One author recently posted relatively similar results, where her free book was downloaded 3000 times and resulted in one sale.)
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