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.'"
The real problem with ebooks (Score:5, Interesting)
The other major problem with ebooks is that the selection outside of the US is shocking. Most stores refuse to sell to us, the others will have something like "This book is not available in your region" for most of their titles.
Re:Baen Books (Score:2, Interesting)
Came here to say exactly this.
A lot of Baen's catalog is dry, hard sci-fi and fantasy, and a lot of it is sold in used bookstores for 25 cents to $1 a copy.
There's not a lot in Baen's catalog I'd really be interested in reading as a casual sci-fi/fantasy reader. Most of their stuff I find to be impenetrable and/or very dry reading. I'm sure the hardcore fan base will mod this down, but there's a lot to be said for "Baen's content is DRMed by being completely inaccessible to the mass market."
Here's my contribution (Score:4, Interesting)
While I'm still in the middle of writing a bunch of short stories (and working on one long-form story that could potentially extend past 1,000 pages), I only have one that I feel is "ready for release".
"Reversion" tells the story of a zombie that is slowly coming back to life. The whole story is done from the perspective of the zombie, although it's told from a "god's eye view". Completely and totally free to read/download. Enjoy! [scribd.com]
Re:Don't try too hard to crush piracy. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I love my Kindle (Score:5, Interesting)
But just like with Apple and the itunes, Amazon is never going to convince me that the DRM they use is for my own good. It's about control and monopolies and always has been. (And yes I know itunes is DRM-free now that the ipod dominates the market).
It seems like revisionist history to imply that Apple put DRM on iTunes because they wanted to. What evidence we have indicates the contrary - Apple wanted to be DRM-free, but the record labels wouldn't allow it.
Then please stop trying to revise histroy. Apple always wanted DRM (their whole OS is DRMed on a hardware level. Want to install OSX on non-Apple hardware? Lots of cracks needed. The OSX DRM is to check to make sure its Apple only hardware.) Apple only got rid of its DRM in its music because Amazon was in the final steps of getting the labels to agree that they would be able to sell DRM music on Amazon.com (look when Jobs wrote that letter declaring 'Oh we don't like DRM, we were strong armed...' a few months before Amazon started selling DRM free music). Apple had to drop the DRM in response to the threat Amazon was about to cause. Because if Apple really didn't want DRM they would remove it from every other digital product on iTunes. They just don't though because they love DRM, helps lock you to them.
Re:The real problem with ebooks (Score:5, Interesting)
When I got a nook for christmas, I was looking forward for buying bunch of books from the country where I grew up. I would like to read some of the books that are being published there now, but shipping them across the ocean is pretty expensive. I was extremely disappointed by the small amount of ebooks that are available. In addition, when I tried to buy some, it turned out I would have to have a mobile phone number in that country. The only books that are available to me are either free out of copyright books that were digitized by libraries or volunteers, or pirated and illegally digitized books.
Re:Odd that books have so much DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, but $3 for something that takes a year or more to create isn't much money.
That argument would make sense if incremental cost were the dominating factor or even a major contributer. Even if a paperback costs 50 cents to create as an incremental cost, that's still probably two orders of magnitude higher than a digital version. With negligible incremental cost, you can play all sorts of games with the demand curve and so talking about an individual purchase without the context of how that price increases/decreases volume of units sold is kind of pointless. If hypothetically charging $5 gets you 10,000 copies, but $1 got you one million copies, then $1 *is* a lot of money for a man-year of work, it's even more than $5. It's hard to play those games with even mass-market paperback, because you need to guess pretty well in advance what the required run will be or else get eaten alive by the incremental costs.
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
I consider this to be unreasonable. If I were going to buy an eBook and get no physical copy, I should benefit from the decreased cost from not having to create the book and carry stock that may or may not sell. If you insist on gouging me for the eBook, then I should be able to buy a physical book and be entitled to an eBook copy to go with it. If you insist on new-release pricing being high, then do hardcover only and save the e-book for paperback time. An 'early adopter' for a book getting a hardback at least gets a product with extra value that persists after the paperback comes out, but the eBook edition will be *identical* before and after a hypothetical price drop, leaving the original purchaser with nothing tangible to show after that arbitrary point.
Finally, I'm tired of people only looking at costs and using that to justify piracy.
I'm not doing that, my stance is abstain from the industry. I feel the need to make it known why I'm almost abstaining from the market (have taken advantage of some appropriately priced ebooks when they are on 'special'), and how I (and presumably others like me) could be persuaded to participate. Pricing is one issue and DRM is another. DRM makes it damn near impossible for law-abiding (since DMCA screwed over fair use) people to do things like move a book from their Nook to a new Kindle they got, but it's absolutely useless at deterring unauthorized copies for people willing to break laws (just run two commands and poof, all DRM gone from your eBook library).
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.
Well, for one, I won't pay the $2.50 many restaurants charge for tea or soft drink and instead go for water. But in the larger scheme, incremental cost is a key factor in contrasting digital distribution from physical distribution. The cost of producing a copy, of stocking surplus, of risking spending money on copies that will never sell, of shipping that stuff all over the place, that cost is significant and yet consumers don't see any significant savings at all by participating in a model that saves the vendor and publisher from all of that.
They better not lock out screen readers or the ADA (Score:5, Interesting)
They better not lock out screen readers or the ADA will hit them hard and by law they may be forced to let a screen reader be able to read your book.
Re:When the pirated content is higher quality (Score:4, Interesting)
I have over 100,000 ebooks and I've paid for exactly 5 of them. Maybe 10,000 of those books are in the public domain and the remainder I grabbed in a few mega torrents since hey, they were available. I set up some scripts to have MobiPocket convert them all to a format my Kindle can handle, and they all fit onto the memory card my (original) Kindle can read.
The whole process of getting those 90,000 books and converting them so I could read them was easier and took less time than it took me to deal with Amazon customer support when, erroneously, the 5th and final book I paid for from their site, disappeared from my device when I was in the middle of reading it. It turns out it was just a software error, but it made me decide that as much as I like the device, I will absolutely *not* let Amazon have anything to do with what I put on it.
I am not the kind of person one would normally think becomes a pirate, but in the last few years, the behavior of those who hold copyrights abusing the system to ensure that their copyrights NEVER expire coupled with DRM that punishes ONLY legitimate customers and not pirates have made me basically decide, fuck it - I'm just not going to worry about paying for things like this.
Mind you, I am also the kind of person who paid on the high end for the Humble Bundle (and didn't play any of the games) and who bought a few "name your own price" tracks and albums just to support those models, bought songs on iTunes when they dropped the DRM to show support for that, and I also tend to send a few bucks to various OS projects when I find their stuff useful or neat. But I'm done paying unless I feel like it, and I can't even bring myself to feel guilty about it as I would have just 5 years ago.
I've got a lot of disposable income (more now, thanks to piracy), and I just choose not to bother spending it on people that treat me preemptively like I'm shit.
Re:I love my Kindle (Score:4, Interesting)