Book Piracy — Less DRM, More Data 304
macslocum writes "Ambiguity surrounds the real impact of digital book piracy, notes Brian O'Leary in an interview with O'Reilly Radar, but all would be better served if more data was shared and less effort was exerted on futile DRM. 'The publishing industry should be working as hard as we can to develop new and innovative business models that meet the needs of readers. And what those look like could be community-driven. I think of Baen Books, for example, which doesn't put any DRM restrictions on its content but is one of the least pirated book publishers. As to sales, Paulo Coelho is a good example. He mines the piracy data to see if there's a burgeoning interest for his books in a particular country or market. If so, he either works to get his book out in print or translate it in that market.'"
Just wait (Score:4, Insightful)
Soon you'll need a DRM chip in your optic nerve just to read a book or watch a movie.
When the pirated content is higher quality (Score:5, Insightful)
If you decide to only sell DRMed books, then you are selling a lower quality product than the pirates are given away. DRM can be a huge bother.
So I hope they are taking into account people who would have bought a non-DRMed ebook, but will pirate ebooks if only DRMed ebooks are available for sale.
Why I pirate books (Score:2, Insightful)
If ebooks were in the $3-5 range I would buy everything, but $10 is a rip off. It's not my fault the industry hasn't laid off all the middle men and are trying to protect their jobs. So until they fire the extra costs, I say pirate away.
Odd that books have so much DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
Music has by and large ditched DRM efforts on purchased content (may still factor in subscription/streaming services, I'm not paying much attention there. I think music has found a comfortable low price point that renders the point mostly moot. Music may be DRMed on streaming, and the best protection their is that a lot of people who would deobfuscate their stuff have no motivation to since purchases aren't afflicted by DRM. It's almost reaching a point of sanity, that the per-unit cost can be brought low because the distribution overhead is minimal (even more minimal without DRM) and the production cost is sizable, but not horribly bad.
Books, on the other hand are still DRMed by the dominant vendors. They also charge outrageous amounts and want to compare the price to the hardcover editions, completely ignoring the fact that per-unit cost is next to nothing compared to even paperback. They don't even have a significant up-front cost to recover (Movies/TV have actors/sets/etc, music has engineers and sound studios that are really needed for respectable sound, books don't *need* much more than a diligent author with a computer, though editors and artists frequently help). The DRM on at least the epub stuff is laughably easy to remove (because without removing it, it's pretty damn hard to actually put it on many devices, so they get a large volume of people out to get it). I wonder if publishers are keeping prices high and the distribution overly complicated just to slow down the electronic market because they know full well they play a negligible role if distribution becomes trivial to do.
Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because if the only way for me to load text onto a text reader is to buy it an inflated price from the company's book store, then I'm just not going to purchase the device..
Isn't that exactly what the publishing companies want? Ebooks are a threat to the publishers' bottom lines. They're easy to share, they don't get old or fall apart, and authors can self-publish for basically nothing. Anything they can do that make ebooks unpopular keeps them relevant a little longer.
Kindle is a great example (Score:4, Insightful)
The seemingly most popular eReader can't 'legally' load copyrighted ebooks from Borders, B&N, or public libraries. Any user doing so violates the DMCA to get it there.
It's worse when you see people advocating buying dedicated eReaders per store as a reasonable thing to have to do with the reasoning 'why would you expect to use Gillette blades with a Bic handle?'.
Re:Baen Books (Score:4, Insightful)
You need to read more Keith Laumer.
DRM is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
It's impossible for DRM to work. The customer has to have both the lock and the key or they can't use what they paid for[1]. If the customer has both the lock and the key then it's impossible for DRM to protect anything.
What vendors need to realize is that a lot of piracy is done simply because they can. When the cost of acquiring things is literally 4 seconds of your time you go crazy and acquire all sorts of shit that you will never use.
Is the cost of the DRM more than the lost sales? Yes piracy does generate some very small number of lost sales but not a significant amount.
Stop catering to non customers!
[1]Yes there are central server methods but until we have 100% uptime wireless, usable anywhere, with central servers that have 100% uptime forever this method will never work.
Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy. (Score:5, Insightful)
You might be looking at the wrong end of the dog.
Plain text eBooks (or ones using open unDRMed formats) represent a threat. However, book publishers have found a way to have their cake and eat it too with DRM.
Through DRM, they eliminate the used market and lending, make it a challenge to share, and through obsolescence of the hardware will "get old and fall apart." Also, authors can't self-publish as easily, because while there's nothing stopping anybody from making a .mobi file that will load on just about everybody's platform, it won't have any of the DRM protections and none of the distribution advantage.
With DRM, eBook readers are a publisher's wet dream. /Disclaimer: I actually own and read books on a Kindle. I'm part of the problem.
Re:When the pirated content is higher quality (Score:4, Insightful)
Plus you get the bonus of having all your books and historical documents redacted and updated to the current version available from the ministry of truth with out any fuss or fear of the thought police busting down your door.
Re:Why I pirate books (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's an absolute SIN that they charge the same or more than the dead tree version of the product. The costs are so much less compared to physical books -- no distribution costs, printing costs, materials cost, less middle men costs, etc.
But if you look at it from the publisher's point of view, he doesn't see a $1 eBook sale as a new $1 of revenue, instead he sees it as a $20 hardcover that didn't sell.
So he charges $10 for the eBook to make up for the fact that eBooks are eating into his paper book sales. Worse, he's still got to maintain that whole paper distribution model, but now instead of a title selling 100,000 paper books, it's only selling 70,000 so his cost per paper book is increasing making it more important to make up the revenue in eBooks.
The advent of eBook readers may expand his market and let him sell more total books than before, but that's not a given and I don't think that's proven to be the case (yet). I suspect that the eBook early adopters are many of the same readers that would have bought the new release at a bookstore.
Re:When the pirated content is higher quality (Score:4, Insightful)
The average consumer doesn't understand that. The average consumer has already purchased their copy of "Neverending Story" on video tape and now DVD, and is waiting in queue for their copy on BluRay. Yes, they've bought the same movie three times over the last 20 years (four if they paid for a movie ticket).
Yes, you and I know (as geeks) that today's current crop of monochrome-display eInk readers are almost identical to tomorrow's crop of color display ones, or today's tablets. Being as the latter can run Kindle/nook/Border's store, that's not a big issue.
Most people don't honestly care about library retention, and they never have in any other mass electronic medium to any large degree. Most consumers expect tomorrow's technology to not play today's media. Very few consumers who invested in large Laserdisc libraries yelled very loudly when they had to repurchase their libraries on DVD.
Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy. (Score:4, Insightful)
authors can't self-publish as easily
There is nothing in the DRM encumbered market that makes this true. The stewards of the DRM are the likes of Amazon, B&N, Kobo, etc. Even if an author *did* consider DRM a must-have for him to be comfortable publishing, the vendors will gladly help that author self-publish with DRM in order to cut out the publisher middle man. The publisher doesn't implement any technical infrastructure required for DRM to function.
Even if it were the case that DRM is inaccessible, sure they don't get DRM, but they also don't have to let a publisher gouge them for money in the middle.
Re:Odd that books have so much DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
"They also charge outrageous amounts and want to compare the price to the hardcover editions, completely ignoring the fact that per-unit cost is next to nothing compared to even paperback."
Per-unit costs of paperbacks are next to nothing. (The physical book, shipping, etc., come in at less than 50 cents.) Fully half the book price goes to the retailer or store where you buy the book. So for a $7 paperback, that's $3.50 to the store and $0.50 physical costs, which leaves just $3 to the author and to the publisher, who typically fronts the advance to the author. (That would be an "up-front cost" to you.)
Sorry, but $3 for something that takes a year or more to create isn't much money. Especially when the majority of titles only sell ten thousand copies or so. 100,000 copies or more is exceptional. Only a handful sell in the million copy range, and the profits from those help subsidize the vast bulk of a publisher's list.
And if you want to bring up paperback pricing, nearly any book on Amazon in paperback form is available for basically the same price as an ebook, the price again split between Amazon, the publisher, and from there to the author. Not everything is "outrageous".
Finally, I'm tired of people only looking at costs and using that to justify piracy. There's more to any business than per-unit costs. And if you think you're entitled to everything at cost, just go into MacDonalds and try paying a dime (cost) for a Coke.
I'll keep print books, thank you (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate so sound so, "get off my lawn", but I really don't like ebooks or digital readers. I can appreciate having your whole library on a single device, etc. But there are too many disadvantages to ebooks as they currently work.
To illustrate: right now it's looking like Books A Million will be going out of business soon. That is a shame. However, I don't have to worry if that happens because I will still be able to read all the books I've bought from them over the last 20 years if they go out of business. Additionally, short of fire or flood, I do not have to worry much that their pages will get scrambled, lost, or damaged -- at least not in my lifetime. I also don't have to worry that anyone will steal my books, nor do I have to worry that Books A Million will come in my house and take my books back.
The only way I am going to enjoy and use ebooks is if they are in plain ASCII text format, like those in Project Gutenberg.
I do have an open mind. If someone can give me some overwhelming benefits of having ebooks over print books, i would love to hear them.
Re:I love my Kindle (Score:5, Insightful)
> It seems like revisionist history to imply that Apple put DRM on iTunes because they wanted to.
Except for the fact that the music on iTunes is only the tip of a very big iceberg. Or at least it should be.
It's fascinating how the blindered Apple fanboys ignore all of the other stuff on iTunes not to mention
everyone's old files that are still locked down unless you pay an extra fee to unlock them.
There's DRM in audio books, books, video, phone apps and desktop apps.
Apple's music is swimming in a sea of DRM including some stuff that is entirely under Apple's control.
Apple benefits greatly from that lock-in and the fact that you are forever married to them and the fact that
you must continue buying their hardware if you ever want to play the stuff you "own" ever again.
Re:Baen Books (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree entirely.
I would say that while their entire library is science fiction and fantasy, very little of the Baen library is "hard" science fiction/fantasy. It's much lighter reading than that, but then again I probably read more Sci/Fi and Fantasy than you so it's really hard to mark where your tolerance is for prose since you cite no examples of texts you tried.
I will however point out that Tor, Harper/Collins, DAW, Del Rey, are all publishing the same quality books and authors as Baen. And you'll find that ALL paperback books can be found in used bookstores for a dollar if they're older than 10 to 15 years with a decent print run. It's the nature of the used paperback market itself.
Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy. (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, authors can't self-publish as easily, because while there's nothing stopping anybody from making a .mobi file that will load on just about everybody's platform, it won't have any of the DRM protections and none of the distribution advantage.
Bullshit.
I do all the technical heavy-lifting for my wife's self-published book, for both print and electronic editions. We currently have it out on Kindle as a .mobi with their own DRM, in the Kobo store as Adobe Digital Editions protected ePub, and on iBooks as an ePub with Apple's own protection. Two people, a family partnership as the business structure, and a presence in three reasonably significant e-book distribution channels, all with DRM. Kobo treat us just like any other small publisher - that could in part be due to them being Canadian rather than American. Admittedly, iBooks requires use of an aggregation service unless you're huge (in our case, Lulu), but the point is that there are ways for even the smallest to get into some of the more significant DRM-protected distribution channels.
B&N appear to be where Amazon were a couple of years ago, and unless you're in the US or are a foreign business with US bank and tax details they're damn hard to deal with. So, we're not in there yet.
We initially considered DRM important, as we're still trying to sell her other work to traditional publishers and didn't want to de-value what would become her "back-list" through having uncontrollable non-DRM copies in the wild, but both the Kindle and Adobe DRM are easily bypassed and we hope that tech-savvy acquisitions editors will realise this. We're in the process of putting together a non-DRM edition through Smashwords, which will make its way into the Sony, B&N and Diesel stores. We intend to take up all Smashwords distribution options initially, with the exception of Kindle, iBooks and Kobo, who we have existing distribution arrangements with. We may re-visit that, as dealing with a single payment source that will use Paypal is a lot easier than dealing with several that will only send us cheques. That will mean completely foregoing DRM in all channels, but given how trivial the current schemes are to defeat I don't see that as any kind of problem unless the publishers we're trying to sell her other work to see it as one; they may publicly state that it is, but deep down I think they know how things work these days. In fact, by foregoing DRM we'll be increasing the breadth of her distribution, and that's a good thing as it's all about increasing readership and accessibility.
Re:The real problem with ebooks (Score:3, Insightful)
At the same time you can import a real book without such problems.
Now, if only international shipping weren't so expensive and books so heavy...