Impact of eBook piracy on sales

[DelActivisto]

In what was ancient Greece (now southern Italy), there was a city, Sybaris. The inhabitants liked their food and were always on the look out for a new taste experience. The eateries would invent new recipes to encourage customers to be patrons of their establishment.

Only one snag... as soon as one chef invented a recipe, the other eateries would copy that recipe. As it took time, effort and resources to come up with new recipes, the inevitable happened. Chefs stopped inventing recipes.

Of course the citizens were far from happy about this because they liked their food. So a law was passed. A chef who invented a new recipe would have exclusive rights to producing that recipe for the space of one year. The chefs went back to inventing recipes because it had once again become profitable and worth their while.

This all happened around 500BC!

This is to point out that taking someone else's 'copyright' material is far from a new problem. The ancients solved theirs by stopping their creativity until they could get a acceptable return on their investment, i.e. getting the 'culinary patent law' in place.

Word is already getting out that it is not profitable to be an author, unless you are very talented and work long hours to keep producing more work for publication. For all but a very few it's turned into sweatshop business or a hobby. The quantity of new fiction will inevitably reduce as the laws of economics dictate. Which means the copyright stealers will have less and less. There will come a point when it becomes unprofitable for them to continue in their thieving ways.

Unfortunately, I suspect by that time, the talented authors will have gone elsewhere - well those that are able to.

Unless of course a way can be found to make writing into a reasonable living. Any ideas anyone?

Sure, we have those same copyright laws, but they're simply not being enforced, at least not in the US. Unless you steal a really big idea, like some kid with glasses who goes to a wizarding school and has a scar and on owl, it's unlikely you'll face any repercussions. The Internet makes it too easy to distribute free stuff. You just do a google search and bam, there it is.

Now, I suspect some of this is authors not being able/willing to fight. We're largely nocturnal, coffee-consuming introverts, so the idea of harassing the publishing industry at large doesn't come naturally to us. Most of us are happy enough to just get published. We're also not really organized, so publishers are largely free to harass us, not the other way around. Publishers make a killing and many authors get paid a pittance. I'm not attacking or criticizing anyone, in case your offense radar is going off or something.

For instance, the music industry has also fared and similar fate. It's still only worth about half of what it was in 1995, before the Internet really become popular. Now the next best option is streaming services like Spotify, Deezer, and Apple Music, all well known for paying artists a relatively small amount of money. For many of the lesser known artists, they're making maybe a few hundred dollars a year.

However, lost sales due to piracy effect the publishing industry's bottom line, even if they tell us it's not a problem. Of course they're going to tell us everything's fine - they have their stock quote to worry about. "Oh, yep, we're losing a crap ton of money to piracy" doesn't make a good stock quote the next day. On the other hand, if they're not addressing it, it means less profit for everyone.

Another problem is our strict freedom of speech laws, if you'll excuse the oxymoron. We simply don't shut down very many websites or block them from US traffic. Our censors are not very well refined, because as soon as we try to regulate anything, everyone throws a Constitutional fit.

And I was thinking, well, only sell eBook versions that are secure, but that bubble was immediately burst by a quick Google search showing crap tons of EPUD to PDF converters.

So: Let people know this is a problem, bug people who can do something about it, petition Amazon to create better security for the Kindle, bug your representatives (or parliament members in UK?), and quite frankly maybe we need a writer's union.

 

[The Big Peat]

I have a different mind-set. Hence you must be younger than me I think it is because my formative years of access to content was the 70's/80's where things were not able to be instantly copied perfectly and access required careful consideration and a spending a bit of cash.

Now, if I am looking for a book, and I'm online, I go directly to amazon and peruse there. Then I'd think about buying it, sticking it on a wish list, or at the very least, think about getting library access if I was desperate and had no cash (very rare that happens!). I ignore practically anything else on any google list of hits.

I do admit that I am lucky that I can more-or-less afford anything that comes up. And I don't really like e-format - perhaps one day I'll get a kindle, but reading at a PC is not my idea of great fun.

You're older than you look

But yes, there is a generational thing here (and it would be interesting to see if the impact of a false download was so marked for a non-YA book). I got to try careful consideration and spending money, and then along came instant and free when I was a teenager. Couched in those terms, its not a contest. And at the risk of getting all WA, this is a generation that's not only found itself a lot less well off than it has expected, but has also been given numerous examples of how those above are quite laissez-faire about theft themselves.

We've also spent a lot of time reading at computer screens, come to think of it I don't have a kindle, but I've zero problems reading a book at a screen.

But at the end of the day, stealing is stealing. No matter how you dress it. For me at least even, 'I'm downloading this pirated copy to see what it's like, then I might buy it' is a cop out and excuse. On this tiny matter of morals my conscience is crystal clear. Hell, even if I've beta'd someone's novel and they've published it, I feel obligated to buy a copy because I've read it.

Also the thought of downloading something from a dodgy pirate website (I know that if you use it often it may turn out to be relatively safe) makes the computer side of me gnash my teeth. I spent ages trying to find a program that could play DVD's on my PC a few weeks ago...and then spent ages*2 getting rid of the hidden extension something had installed in my PC because of bad website choice!

Having said all the above, everyone's free to do what they want and it's up to them, I ain't no nanny. However, taking a Fallout 4 mechanic, if I know that someone is pirating deliberately in some manner then VB dislikes that so -1 on that person's character!

Yup, stealing is stealing. I try to avoid doing it. But that's more out of a determination to support good people and be civic minded than a general belief that all stealing is bad.

Which also leaves me in a mild quandry sometimes with second hand bookshops. After all, they're not supporting authors either. I suppose technically I should be anti-lending books to friends too. Although if I'm generally lending books that the friends have never heard of, that's as much advertising for the author at my own expense as anything else.

 

[Venusian Broon]

You're older than you look

Ooh your sweet

Which also leaves me in a mild quandry sometimes with second hand bookshops. After all, they're not supporting authors either. I suppose technically I should be anti-lending books to friends too. Although if I'm generally lending books that the friends have never heard of, that's as much advertising for the author at my own expense as anything else.

Usually the biggest problem with lending to friends is EVER GETTING YOUR BOOKS BACK ....

....

True that 2nd hand book stores doesn't directly benefit author - however it used to be that a good 2nd hand book store was stocked with out of print books that you just couldn't get anywhere else, and that at least felt like a positive for everyone, if for some only indirectly. Now with Amazon-type distribution systems and print-on-demand everything seems to be available.

 

[Montero]

With second hand book stores - the book you are buying was originally paid for. It also doesn't turn into multiple copies with the click of a button. To me, second hand books, second hand furniture.....not a problem. Pirated eBooks - problem.
Thanks to the internet I have on a couple of occasions been able to find a contact address for an author and send them an email to say "hey, did you realise that book 1 of your series is currently only available second hand?" Have actually had thanks for that.
Art has long had a very big unfairness that has never been fixed - how the second hand value of some paintings go through the roof once an artist is popular. Sold by the artist for maybe enough to cover the paint, frame and a bit of time, decades later is selling for millions. (Thinking van Gogh for example.)
Wandering back to piracy - well, it is also "the labourer is worthy of their hire". It isn't always working, but most of the time, people being paid peanuts for work does cause a stir and there are campaigns for better conditions. Need to get the link from rights for workers to rights for writers.

 

[Parson]

How do we hire Maggie's brother?

This is obviously a joke of some kind. I suspect Maggie to be Margret Thatcher, but still don't get it. Could someone explain this?

 

[Venusian Broon]

This is obviously a joke of some kind. I suspect Maggie to be Margret Thatcher, but still don't get it. Could someone explain this?

As someone from the UK I don't get it, if it's a Thatcher reference. 'Maggie's brother' reminds me of the Dylan song 'Maggie's farm' but that's because I've got a lot of Rage Against the Machine on the PC....

 

[Lumens]

Very interesting blog by an author who actually tested how much her eBook was being pirated.

Contents of Maggie Stiefvater's Brain

This is obviously a joke of some kind. I suspect Maggie to be Margret Thatcher, but still don't get it. Could someone explain this?

It is from the blog entry linked to in the OP where the author's brother made pdf copies of her book, which repeated chapters over and over instead of being the real deal, then flooded the internet with it.

 

[Parson]

It is from the blog entry linked to in the OP where the author's brother made pdf copies of her book, which repeated chapters over and over instead of being the real deal, then flooded the internet with it

Right, I did read it and now that you say it I do remember that phrase and I feel dumb for not catching it.

 

[Lumens]

Right, I did read it and now that you say it I do remember that phrase and I feel dumb for not catching it.

There's no reason to feel dumb, that's just stupid.