Copyright Infringement of Books 468
Maximum Prophet recommends a NY Times piece on the growing phenomenon of unauthorized digital versions of copyrighted books showing up online. The problem has been growing exponentially, fed in part by the popularity of reading devices such as the Kindle and the iPhone. The article features the odd photographic juxtaposition of Cory Doctorow and Ursula K. Le Guin, who take opposite views on electronic editions, authorized or not. Ms. Le Guin: "I thought, who do these people think they are? Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?" Mr. Doctorow: "I really feel like my problem isn't piracy. It's obscurity." "Doctorow, a novelist whose young adult novel 'Little Brother' spent seven weeks on the New York Times children's chapter books best-seller list last year, offers free electronic versions of his books on the same day they are published in hardcover. He believes free versions, even unauthorized ones, entice new readers."
Competition for time... (Score:5, Interesting)
... there is really so much competition for peoples time these days it's little wonder companies like to blame lack of sales on piracy.
I'd really like someone to add up all the hours it would take to experience x's book or y's product and they'd soon begin to realize it would take someone an ENTIRE LIFETIME not even to get through a fraction of what is out there.
I usually only buy books that I think are worth something over the long term. People have way too many options today to fill their time. Also with the advent of the net discussing and sharing insights, any book that is published quickly becomes out-dated.
One thing I hope electronic books allow is real-time updates to books so that they can stay fresh, with a wikipedia like revision system that tracks version and revision history (for those that need it).
Personally electronic books when done right (when the software gets there) will allow copying and pasting a whole bunch of different things that you can't do with a real book. Both will have their place I think.
I'm a pro-piracy author. Ppl will still buy paper. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a two-bit, small time computer book author with just one book to my name so far. I love seeing my book get pirated. It's sold reasonably well for its niche (approaching 10,000 copies) but for the second edition I pleaded with my publisher to allow the e-book version to be free. Of the, say, 10,000 copies sold, only a couple hundred have been of the e-book edition, and I'm convinced that the wider exposure a free e-book would gather would result in increased print sales. When Seth Godin gave away the free PDF of his Ideavirus book, it led to me buying his various other books in print throughout the years. Doctorow is right that obscurity is a bigger hurdle than piracy, but I'm pretty convinced that even big name authors could benefit from extended reach thanks to freely distributed content.
My argument rests on people preferring paper to e-books, and I think they do. I sure do. Sadly, big name publishers tend to disagree, despite a number of convincing social media experiments, but over time perhaps change will happen.
Re:HA! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not a big fan of either one, but there's just no comparison between the two. Le Guin's works just have incomparably more depth and experience behind them. She's won two Hugos, and also managed to not only finish undergrad, but earned an ivy league Ph.D. in anthropology as well... as opposed to her "competition". (Please, don't bother "pointing out" that a Ph.D. outside of the hard sciences is worthless. It's not. Heinlein wouldn't dedicate a novel to a soft-minded pseudo-thinker...)
Doctorow is a small-fry gimmick writer compared to le Guin, and he knows it. Not that there's anything wrong with that per se. Doctorow's ideas and attitude are important; as they said about McLuhan, "even if he's wrong, it matters." But purely on authorial merit... please.
Re:It's called COPYright for a reason. (Score:2, Interesting)
if I write a book and don't want it freely copied, I think I should be allowed to have that right
The problem is Rights aren't immutable and at least have to have some correlation to their being enforceable. Rights are a by product of society and when society changes our rights and obligations change as well. Unfortunately peoples opinions and expectations often suffer from 'lag', and for the really stubborn my not change at all, which will just lead to a whole bunch of pain - here's looking at you Ursula!
Ever actually try to find a _specific_ book? (Score:2, Interesting)
In general, I find the books I want to read either 1) get popular enough that they eventually drop down to a reasonable price, 2) are just popular enough that it's available without a wait at the library, or 3) is so obscure that I can buy one of the 30 copies that are actually still available for a couple of hundred bucks on Amazon.
Note that the one I would most be interested in an electronic copy of (legal or not), is the one that is least likely to have an electronic copy.
There are only a few books out there that are both popular enough that a good number of people want to read them, and yet not popular enough that buying the book is actually easier than hunting down the torrent or scanning yourself. Those writers will probably get hit hardest, and the gap between immensely successful writers and sort-of-successful writers may widen because of it. As an industry-wide problem though, I doubt it'll ever have the effect that it's had on, say, the music industry.
Best two quotes from the article (Score:2, Interesting)
Guess which author these two quotes make me more likely to read?
Just submitted a related story (Score:1, Interesting)
Interesting, I just submitted a related story. It's now in the firehose, [slashdot.org] and deals with a philosophy professor in Argentina who is getting sued for posting Spanish versions of Jacques Derrida's work online.
The publisher claims - not sure how they explain it - that putting the texts online for free will harm the diffusion of Derrida's work. The philosophy professor responds that they are making Derrida die a second death by removing the texts.
Classics for Peanuts! (Score:2, Interesting)
take a look at the price of classics that have long since been in the public domain, as they're not cheap either.
Here in the UK we've long since had several different publishers releasing whole rafts of Classic titles for 99 pence, which is little more than a U.S. dollar in todays' money. And they are well produced too . . .
Re:HA! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not a big fan of either one, but there's just no comparison between the two. Le Guin's works just have incomparably more depth and experience behind them.
I wouldn't be surprised. I like Doctrow's work. However, it's more due to the subject matter and general concepts than the work itself. There are plenty of times I've felt something Doctrow wrote was more like story notes than finished story. But hey - still like his stuff. And I know who he is. ;)
Re:You wouldn't believe how many ebooks I have (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that people who read books, a small market to be sure, is made up mostly of people who go to a library to find out if they like something and, if the book is good enough, then go to Amazon or Borders or B&N and buy the book. I know that's what I do, and what a lot of other people do. Yeah yeah, anecdotal evidence, citation needed and all that, but I don't think the ebook reader is going to change the business any more than audio books did.
Re:You wouldn't believe how many ebooks I have (Score:1, Interesting)
Hundreds? Maybe if you pick and choose. If you just download big globs of all available ebooks, you'll quickly have a personal library that is in at least the tens of thousands of titles. (Of course 10% or more will be duplicates.)
When I walk into a library, the question I often ask myself is, am I bringing in more books than are otherwise in the building? :-p
Re:You wouldn't believe how many ebooks I have (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, it'd be great if the current laws were consistent with the 200-year-old stuff: [cornell.edu]
Congress has gone way beyond the Constitutional intent or meaning, and the Supreme Court has unfortunately upheld them on it. That is why copyright has so many problems. Copyright terms have been extended to make money for business interests, not to support creators and promote progress.
Congress should take seriously the task of calibrating the "limited time" to be just long enough that artists and inventors can earn a reasonable living -- and then inventions and cultural products go back into the public hands (where they can be modified, extended, and improved by anyone). If that were the case, copyright would be doing its job.
Not just assimilating information (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'm a pro-piracy author. Ppl will still buy pap (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's the best writeup on the subject I've seen by an author, at the Baen Free Library [baen.com]. Worth a read.
Along web their webscription.net Ebooks website [webscription.net], Baen seems to have a good handle on this whole digital media business.
old news; doesn't clearly depict controversy (Score:5, Interesting)
First off, the events they're talking about in the NY Times article actually came to a head in September 2007. It looks like a reporter dusted off some old notes simply because the Kindle is starting to get a lot of press, so it seems relevant now. The article doesn't really depict clearly what the controversy was about.
There's a guy named Andrew Burt, who has published a little science fiction, and had gotten elected to a middle-level position in the Science Fiction Writers of America. He noticed that scribd.com had a whole bunch of copyright-violating scans of books. He did an automated search of scribd's catalog, and based on that search, and without much consultation with anyone, he sent scribd a slew of what appeared to be DMCA takedown notices. The trouble was that he wasn't very careful, and, e.g., he got them to delete some fiction by Cory Doctorow, who actually wanted it on scribd as a form of publicity. IIRC, DMCA takedown notices are also supposed to be sent by copyright owners, and signed under penalty of perjury, but Burt's notices were sent without consulting the copyright holders, and were factually inaccurate in many cases; I think he ended up claiming that they weren't DMCA notices, but scribd apparently thought they were. Doctorow got very angry, and publicized his anger on his web site boingboing. Doctorow also published a very short piece by Ursula LeGuin on boingboing, without her permission, which made her furious. Burt ran for president of SFWA after this, and lost. The whole thing exposed a generational divide between older and younger SF authors. The older ones typically were suspicious of the internet, and saw it as a threat. The younger ones typically saw it as a way to publicize themselves. An old-timer named Howard Hendrix compared authors who gave their work away online for free to scabs, resulting in an ironic response called International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day [wikipedia.org]. Here are some representative opinions on the whole thing:
So first off, this isn't really a controversy about whether copyright should exist. The positions of all the different parties are quite similar on that issue. Scribd, Burt, Doctorow, LeGuin, and Hendrix are all pretty much in agreement that it's a bad thing to violate authors' copyrights. What they disagree on is mainly whether the internet presents more of a threat, or more of an opportunity.
Another thing to understand about this is that scribd is just a tool, in the same way that bittorrent is just a tool. I've posted some of my own nonfiction on scribd, simply on the theory that publicizing my work is always a good thing. However, just as The Pirate Bay has an extremely heavy presence of pointers to copyright-violating torrents, scribd also has a huge amount of copyright-violating stuff. Maybe the percentage is lower, but it's still a huge presence there. It's the classic situation where the web site is willing to devote x amount of effort to policing itself, but various people would like them to devote 10x (similar to Craigslist and prostitution).
Re:You wouldn't believe how many ebooks I have (Score:5, Interesting)
I still don't understand the "Because it can be done easily is is my right to do it" attitude of the pirate defenders.
Easy. You're criminalizing a big chunk of society, who are actually decent people. Because it's so easy to do it, there's no moral backlash, no higher ethics forbidding it like murder. How could it be illegal to use the internet you paid for, after all?
Do you really want to ruin university students' (read: theoretically the best and brightest of their age range with the most promising future ahead of them) lives because they downloaded some music to go with the exam material? Do you really want the police state needed to enforce these laws today?
Copyright was invented to protect those who owned a printing machine from each other. You don't think those rules should apply today, do you? And if you're worried about the author, ask them next time how much of the retail price they get to keep. They'd be better off if you sent one of them $100 and pirated for the rest of your life.
And if you're still brainwashed enough to defend copyright, google up all the ancient Greek works that were destroyed, and only their copies survived.
Re:Not just assimilating information (Score:3, Interesting)
I was with you until you've got there:
... Does the colour of the paper and it's smell tell me how long ago it was published? Can I look at the spine of an e-book and know the reading habits of the previous owner?/ ...
You know, with a few minor replacements, your post could just as well end in "... which is why we will always have phonographs".
As for the relevant parts of it (folding, marginal notes etc), it's either already here, or around the corner (i.e. working prototypes have been demonstrated already).
Re:You wouldn't believe how many ebooks I have (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean like how the US Music industry is posting profit growth of 4% annually over the last three years? Or perhaps you meant the Movie industry with its 3rd year of growth?
Or perhaps the OP meant that the publishing industry will, like the music industry, go through a few years of opposing digital media (which it has done) and predicting doom and destruction from piracy (which it is about to) , followed by willing publication of all their output in digital form, but with daft DRM (which in some cases, it is now doing). Before finally understanding the reality of the new market and dropping DRM so everybody who wants a copy can buy their product and use it on the device of their choice from as many outlets as possible. This is the outcome I'm hoping for. Not the death of the publishing industry. Publishers don't need to die out. At least, not for a long time yet. They can still find new authors, charge for creation of the books, and get them on the virtual shelves. They still have a purpose. Eventually, they will come to the same conclusion as the music industry. That it is better to sell a few copies than no copies. And the more devices the book can be read on, the more likely that someone will buy it.
Re:Not just assimilating information (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, and in that sense I'd expect books to persist, as luxury items for niche bibliophile audiences (and priced accordingly... if you think books are expensive now, just wait!).
But in mainstream, paper books will be dead in next 10-20 years.
Re:HA! (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing to point out about this is that the optimal strategy may depend very strongly on technological trivia that could change tomorrow. Right now, the average person has no easy way to take a pdf consisting of pages scanned from a novel and convert it into something more convenient for readers, like a plain text ASCII file. Similarly, the TV studios didn't have much to worry about until technology got to the point where a large number of people started to see the internet as more convenient than cable for watching TV shows.
Another thing to consider is that a lot of established authors seem to see free distribution as being in their own best interests. For instance, check out the list of titles available in the Baen Free Library [wikipedia.org]. A bunch of these authors are extremely commercially successful, but they seem to be convinced that giving away texts for free in digital form will actually increase their sales of printed copies. And Ursula LeGuin arguably has more to gain from free internet exposure than, e.g., Mercedes Lackey. Try browsing the SF shelves of your local chain bookstore to see which author is better represented, and which one's books are oriented face-outward rather than spine-outward. Lackey probably sells more than LeGuin. I suspect that the reason Lackey makes some of her work available for free is more a generational issue than a matter of cold calculation of economic self-interest.
The plain, cold truth is that probably nobody knows how this will all work out in the end. People are just trying stuff to see what might work.
Re:Copyright is a religion (Score:3, Interesting)
Copyright is an arbitrary, artificial construct "designed" (I use the word generously) to encourage creation.
Actually, if you dig into the history of copyright, you'll find that this wasn't at all true. The earliest copyrights were given by monarchs to publishers of texts such as the Bible. They clearly didn't do this to encourage the creation of more bibles. They did it to limit the production so the masses couldn't get and learn to read such texts on their own, but had to rely on their betters to read and interpret the holy texts. They also did it to collect the royalties (note the root of that word) from the publishers who were permitted to do the publishing.
The idea that copyright is to encourage creation is a bit of PR created by the publishers to justify their monopoly. But from the beginning of copyright, it was a total lie. And can anyone find a study (with valid scientific methodology) that supports the idea that copyright every has actually resulted in the creation of more literature? Yes, we can find lots of claims that this is true. But has anyone presented actual evidence that it works?
There's a competing hypothesis (which probably hasn't been well-tested either): Creative people like to create things, and will do so even if not rewarded. Copyright was developed by the people who distribute the creations to customers, as a way of creating a monopoly market in creative works, to the financial benefit of the distributors. This is widely believed by many of those creative people, mostly the ones who aren't making a living from their creation because the contracts they have to sign give most of the income to the publishers and distributors.
Re:Same song, second verse... (Score:3, Interesting)
Pal, I've heard this "being slow to release legitimate downloadable versions of their product while bemoaning the demand for a product they refuse to produce" before, and it's bullshit. There was a massive push to make e-books work between 2000 and 2002. I know - I was there. In fact, I even was the author of one of the front runners. I had the Diablo game franchise behind me, advertisement on Battle.net, and a tech-savvy audience that should have generated thousands of sales. Everything was going for me except the fact that I'm not Stephen King.
Guess what - the e-book tanked. For that matter, so did every single e-book that was released across the board. The major publishing companies did everything they could short of shoving the e-books down the readers' throats for two years to get these things to work, and the only thing that happened was that a lot of money was spent for a result of very few sales. Almost ten years later, e-books are being regularly tracked by the Association of American Publishers. The latest figures they have are for the month of February 2009...and in the last ten years, with at least one major push behind them, do you know how much of the book market the e-book currently occupies? In February it peaked...at 1.5%. And it only got that high because e-book sales dropped less respectively than regular books sales from the month before.
Don't take my word for it...do the math yourself - the link is here: http://www.publishers.org/main/PressCenter/Archicves/2009_April/Feb09stats.htm [publishers.org]
The simple fact is that people do not consume books in such a way that an e-book is anything more than a niche market. Books are not like newspapers, and while newspapers are becoming close to an endangered species - having to maintain a web presence for survival - books haven't even been touched by e-books. They're just consumed in a different way. The demand is minuscule, and that's not unfounded perception - that's up-to-date market figures, and a failed push that lasted at least two years.
The publishing industry is not a world of behind-the-times publishers ignoring technology. Publishers jumped on Amazon.com, and it revolutionized the industry. Something called an Expresso Book Machine is coming down the line, and it's going to cause a revolution too. Print on Demand caused a revolution as well. Things like editing and manuscript drafts are now been done by email rather than by regular post. But with the exception of the EBM, these were mainly revolutions taking place behind the scenes. Whether you like it or not, the publishing industry is an industry of early adapters...but they also aren't stupid. If something proves to be nothing more than a money sink, like the e-book, it gets treated like the niche it is.
Re:Same song, second verse... (Score:3, Interesting)
Something called an Expresso Book Machine is coming down the line, and it's going to cause a revolution too. Print on Demand caused a revolution as well.
I wouldn't really call the results of PoD a revolution, at least not in terms of fiction publishing (which, at least tacitly, is the topic at hand -- both Doctorow and LeGuin are fiction authors). PoD books are too expensive for mainstream purchasers to consider. While a typical novel will set you back around £7 ($10), a typical PoD novel would be more like £13 ($20) (e.g. most of the stuff here [lulu.com]). From what I've heard about Espressoo Book Machine it's likely to suffer from the same issue... you'll be paying around 50-100% over the odds to purchase a book from it. They currently have the catalogue of Lightning Source, a PoD printer, and are I believe selling the books for the same (overinflated) cover prices that you'd pay to order one from Lightning Source.
Re:Same song, second verse... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, seeing as I am one of the publishers who uses Lightning Source as their printer, and I thus know a fair bit about this end, you have a couple of your facts wrong here.
First of all, Lightning Source doesn't set the cover price - the publishing company does (they also set the wholesaler discount, although anything over 55% gets the book listed as a low-discount book, and that can adversely impact sales). Lightning Source takes care of production and order fulfillment. Are PoD books more expensive, though? As a rule, yes. But that's because it's a more expensive process on the production end. To give you an idea of how the actual pricing here works, I'll use one of my more recent public domain reprints, The Art of War: Restored Edition:
The cover price is $24.95 USD. The actual costs break down as follows:
Wholesaler discount - 55% - we now are left with $11.23 of the original cover (the wholesaler sells it to the bookseller for 40% off cover, which is how a place like Amazon can offer it for 30% off and still make a profit).
Printing cost - $5.74
Profit - $5.49
This doesn't stop people from occasionally putting in stupid pricing. I'm about to publish an edition of The Great War as I Saw It - the added value is a new introduction and a nicely formatted edition - at the same price as Art of War. There is another PoD paperback edition of the book out there on Amazon that has a cover price of $74.99. Whoever thought that price was a good idea was hopped up on something when they set it...
(Lulu, by the way, is not a good example - they're more a vanity press than a printer, and they are known for screwing around with cover prices every now and then.)
Second, as far as revolutionary goes, Print on Demand was INCREDIBLY revolutionary. Not only did it allow major publishers to continue to offer their back list in a practical way - so that they weren't having to print and warehouse over a thousand copies to satisfy a demand of 10 books per year - but it also allowed small publishers like my own to exist. You can now start a publishing company in your basement with worldwide distribution and a startup cost of not much more than your business license.
It was an across-the-board revolution, make no mistake. Titles have a longer lifespan, and the entire industry is now more accessible to whoever wants to get into it.