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A not so witty retort
While cruising the f-list, I saw a writer's opinions on pirated e-books linked many times, and as usual, it got me thinking.
In that post,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pbray discusses how she feels that downloading or providing free, pirated e-books is wrong and tantamount to theft.
I won't say I disagree with her basic premise. She's right. You download something you didn't pay for and didn't get permission to take, something the writer, editor, and all the other folks involved didn't get paid for, and yeah, you're stealing the results of their hard work. And that's not cool. No matter what your reasons, downloading books you didn't pay for (with a few exceptions) is completely wrong.
I speak both as an aspiring, completely unpublished writer and an avid reader. Let that inform your opinion of what I say as it will. But mostly, I'm speaking as a reader and a buyer of books.
As justified aspbray's anger is, I don't know that it's ultimately useful, nor do I think the tactic of going after the end users or the providers of such pirated wares is at all fruitful. The problem with that is that when you focus your energy on being angry at these folks, you're playing an unwinnable game of wac-a-mole where there are infinite moles and infinite holes and they can work much faster than you.
You take down one site, you take down a few downloaders, good for you. Their replacements are already been trading their black market literature under your nose and will continue to.
I think there are two things are work when people download these books illegally. One is an attitude, the other is a set of market conditions that is actually chasing away readers, making easy downloading a much more viable option.
The attitude at work is one that stems from ignorance of how the industry works (from the reader's perspective) and an economic climate that encourages people to cut corners wherever they can. Whether those corners can or should be cut.
pbray says (with no shortage of sarcasm):
Well, actually, that's sort of the problem. How much can you really expect the average reader to know about how much an author makes from a book? After all, it's been much touted in the media that J.K. Rowling is richer than the Queen of England. We see books that tell us over and over that this author is a Best Selling Author and 500,000 copies sold!. Where, precisely, do you expect your audience to get information on your income from?
You're not exactly doing a lot to convince the reader that you need the money when you do that. Or rather, when your publisher does that on your behalf. Readers have no way of knowing what your cut of the profits (if, indeed, there are any) are. So as rightfully angry as you are, there may be a reason that readers are making such assumptions.
Yes, you're hurting for money. So are your readers! Many of them are in the same boat as you are, or even worse boats. Their jobs (if they've kept them) aren't paying enough, their houses have been devalued, their dollar isn't going as far as it used to, the price of everything is just going up, up, up. You think you're alone in your economic woes? You're not.
Which is where the market conditions come in. The current system of publishers and booksellers is just not working for the reader. Not at all. I wish I could find the right statistics to back me up here, but it's clear that the publishing industry is not doing well. I can tell you that retailers are definitely not doing well, including the big chain booksellers.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Some of which are the industry's own goddamn fault. Not the writers, not the readers, but the companies that have been doing business in the ways that lead to them needing to make record lay offs.
And it doesn't need to be that way. The way to lick piracy is not to take a defensive, entrenched position. It's to make piracy less and less appealing and less and less necessary. I think nothing has done more to stem the tide of piracy in the music industry than such things as iTunes, where a song can be easily and reliably downloaded for a mere 99 cents. I, like most people, feel that 99 cents is a fair price to pay for a song you want to have. Especially when you can, if you like, cherry pick from albums to get only the songs you care for without having to buy the inevitable crappy studio songs that some artists do.
Somebody in the publishing industry needs to understand the principle behind this. iTunes works because it's cheap and everything you want is there. The problem that piracy has is that no matter how unstoppable it is, the collections that people are able to offer are always incomplete, unreliable. Very new or very old texts are not to be found. Rarer books by an author are also not to be found. Not even the best piracy sites can offer everything.
A legal, cheaply available library with an extensive collection would easily attract people AWAY from illegal downloading, and ebook formats have, so far as I am aware, lower overhead. Plus, if there were some company that were willing to share collections among major publishers? They'd own the market.
Second, if somebody, somewhere would invest in making a viable and affordable e-Book reader, the revolution would finally begin. While the new Kindles are sexy beasts, I can't afford that shit, to be blunt. At $359, it'll be years before I can afford that shit. I can't think of an ebook reader that is currently a viable option for me to buy.
Not to mention that formatting is a problem, and availability of books.
These problems are not insurmountable. If somebody in the industry would actually make the push for a cheap eBook reader that is under $150. If iPod can make a device that plays music, videos, and games and sell it for $149 (the price of an iPod nano) and a tiny shuffle for under fifty bucks (before tax), then somebody ought to be able to make an eBook reader that's actually affordable for those of us who have to pay rent next month.
The problem is that the solution to these things does not lie with the readers. The solutions lie with publishers and booksellers.
So, yeah, you're right to yell and be furious with the purveyors of these illegal goods, but save some of that vitriol for your publishers, because they're hurting you as much as anything else. In fact, I'd submit that they may be doing more to prevent you from getting the sales you need and turning away YOUR potential readers. More than that, I'd wager that it's not piracy that's taking your sales. The people who pirate those books were probably the least likely to purchase those books anyway and probably would just have given you a pass if they didn't have the piracy option. Not that it justifies their actions or makes them right, but it does mean that your anger may be more beneficially redirected in a way that ends up putting money in your pocket for the hard work you've done.
In that post,
pbray discusses how she feels that downloading or providing free, pirated e-books is wrong and tantamount to theft. I won't say I disagree with her basic premise. She's right. You download something you didn't pay for and didn't get permission to take, something the writer, editor, and all the other folks involved didn't get paid for, and yeah, you're stealing the results of their hard work. And that's not cool. No matter what your reasons, downloading books you didn't pay for (with a few exceptions) is completely wrong.
I speak both as an aspiring, completely unpublished writer and an avid reader. Let that inform your opinion of what I say as it will. But mostly, I'm speaking as a reader and a buyer of books.
As justified as
pbray's anger is, I don't know that it's ultimately useful, nor do I think the tactic of going after the end users or the providers of such pirated wares is at all fruitful. The problem with that is that when you focus your energy on being angry at these folks, you're playing an unwinnable game of wac-a-mole where there are infinite moles and infinite holes and they can work much faster than you. You take down one site, you take down a few downloaders, good for you. Their replacements are already been trading their black market literature under your nose and will continue to.
I think there are two things are work when people download these books illegally. One is an attitude, the other is a set of market conditions that is actually chasing away readers, making easy downloading a much more viable option.
The attitude at work is one that stems from ignorance of how the industry works (from the reader's perspective) and an economic climate that encourages people to cut corners wherever they can. Whether those corners can or should be cut.
pbray says (with no shortage of sarcasm): Everyone knows authors are rich and we don't need the money.
Well, actually, that's sort of the problem. How much can you really expect the average reader to know about how much an author makes from a book? After all, it's been much touted in the media that J.K. Rowling is richer than the Queen of England. We see books that tell us over and over that this author is a Best Selling Author and 500,000 copies sold!. Where, precisely, do you expect your audience to get information on your income from?
You're not exactly doing a lot to convince the reader that you need the money when you do that. Or rather, when your publisher does that on your behalf. Readers have no way of knowing what your cut of the profits (if, indeed, there are any) are. So as rightfully angry as you are, there may be a reason that readers are making such assumptions.
Yes, you're hurting for money. So are your readers! Many of them are in the same boat as you are, or even worse boats. Their jobs (if they've kept them) aren't paying enough, their houses have been devalued, their dollar isn't going as far as it used to, the price of everything is just going up, up, up. You think you're alone in your economic woes? You're not.
Which is where the market conditions come in. The current system of publishers and booksellers is just not working for the reader. Not at all. I wish I could find the right statistics to back me up here, but it's clear that the publishing industry is not doing well. I can tell you that retailers are definitely not doing well, including the big chain booksellers.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Some of which are the industry's own goddamn fault. Not the writers, not the readers, but the companies that have been doing business in the ways that lead to them needing to make record lay offs.
And it doesn't need to be that way. The way to lick piracy is not to take a defensive, entrenched position. It's to make piracy less and less appealing and less and less necessary. I think nothing has done more to stem the tide of piracy in the music industry than such things as iTunes, where a song can be easily and reliably downloaded for a mere 99 cents. I, like most people, feel that 99 cents is a fair price to pay for a song you want to have. Especially when you can, if you like, cherry pick from albums to get only the songs you care for without having to buy the inevitable crappy studio songs that some artists do.
Somebody in the publishing industry needs to understand the principle behind this. iTunes works because it's cheap and everything you want is there. The problem that piracy has is that no matter how unstoppable it is, the collections that people are able to offer are always incomplete, unreliable. Very new or very old texts are not to be found. Rarer books by an author are also not to be found. Not even the best piracy sites can offer everything.
A legal, cheaply available library with an extensive collection would easily attract people AWAY from illegal downloading, and ebook formats have, so far as I am aware, lower overhead. Plus, if there were some company that were willing to share collections among major publishers? They'd own the market.
Second, if somebody, somewhere would invest in making a viable and affordable e-Book reader, the revolution would finally begin. While the new Kindles are sexy beasts, I can't afford that shit, to be blunt. At $359, it'll be years before I can afford that shit. I can't think of an ebook reader that is currently a viable option for me to buy.
Not to mention that formatting is a problem, and availability of books.
These problems are not insurmountable. If somebody in the industry would actually make the push for a cheap eBook reader that is under $150. If iPod can make a device that plays music, videos, and games and sell it for $149 (the price of an iPod nano) and a tiny shuffle for under fifty bucks (before tax), then somebody ought to be able to make an eBook reader that's actually affordable for those of us who have to pay rent next month.
The problem is that the solution to these things does not lie with the readers. The solutions lie with publishers and booksellers.
So, yeah, you're right to yell and be furious with the purveyors of these illegal goods, but save some of that vitriol for your publishers, because they're hurting you as much as anything else. In fact, I'd submit that they may be doing more to prevent you from getting the sales you need and turning away YOUR potential readers. More than that, I'd wager that it's not piracy that's taking your sales. The people who pirate those books were probably the least likely to purchase those books anyway and probably would just have given you a pass if they didn't have the piracy option. Not that it justifies their actions or makes them right, but it does mean that your anger may be more beneficially redirected in a way that ends up putting money in your pocket for the hard work you've done.
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That's very unfortunate, because the people who are most paying for such bad decisions are the authors themselves. And they're paying in sales they don't get and royalties they can't collect. They're paying for it with the careers, actually.
Honestly, I don't understand why any company would fail to want to do this, or something like it. Because it would cut overhead considerably and could put companies in very advantageous positions. Plus, it would allow for companies to take chances on more authors with less risk!
Not to mention that if the eBook library came straight from the publisher themselves, they could cut out any middleman!
There really should be an industry wide, all-inclusive author's union for this type of thing. Because it's honestly something that is actively hurting writers, and it's turning a lot of readers who might have been customers into pirates, basically. These companies are shooting themselves in the foot and their authors with them.
Not to mention that I'm not sure why Apple hasn't come out with an affordable, marketable eBook reader. If anyone could make this all happen, from getting licensing agreements with companies to having an affordable reader, it's them.
So far, Sony's model and the Kindle are kind of duds in my book. Sony's reader breaks down in the cold and the Kindle is too costly.
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The thing is, I've worked in a publishing company. And I've seen the realities of global corporate life, and I've also seen sometimes it just takes somebody who is willing to scream and shout and be difficult and make demands and keep screaming for something to get done.
I think one of the problems is the industry has allowed itself to say, "Oh, well, that's how things are done. You can't change 'em!" when that's not as true as they think it is.
The first company to come to their senses and realize what needs to be done in the literary market is going to own the game for the next century.
Which is where I think a union might come in handy. One or two writers, even big name ones, try to protest and they're expendable. 98% of the current writers working for these companies protest? Well, the game changes.
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I admit to being bugged because I thought your very fine reader-side analysis then slid into precisely the same sort of ignorance about publishers you rightly criticize when it comes to authors' ignorance of readers' situations. At least, if you've actually studied the conditions modern genre fiction publishers (or other kinds of publishers) work in and what they're on record as supporting and agitating for, I missed it.
Hoping that doesn't come out mean. I am mean today, but it's about something completely else, and I don't want to dump it on you.
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Oh, dude, it's okay. I probably should have mentioned in the entry that I did once have an internship at a big publishing company and I was there when our company got bought by such a fairly big media conglomerate (I won't say who, because I'd like to be able to find a job again at some point!), who proceeded to do stupid things that damaged our company's ability to do business successfully, but at the same time? Our company was already doing some really bad things that were decisions made by people at the top who ignored what was happening at ground level. And those got changed by people who kept making an issue of it, kept making complaints, kept at it.
You can get changes made within a big conglomeration, but you have to know how to get it done. And since this was a reader-side analysis, I figured that wasn't relevant.
I do think that some market studies might go a long way in convincing the right folks that they're missing out on money they could be making. And nothing gets those guys moving faster than untapped profit potential.
I think you're right about contract terms. I think there needs to be an organized movement of writers, agents, editors and such to not only educate readers as to what's going on, but to be able to scream loud enough to be heard at the top levels.
I do know that saying "hey, publishers should do this" sounds naive. I know that starting up such an operation would require a company to do so massive work, including learning how to work the technology and getting all the bugs out of such a system.
So I can't blame you for getting slightly annoyed with me. And no, you didn't seem mean.
ETA: I forgot to add that I understand. Because it seems like the people you'd complain to don't actually have the power to make the decisions that need making. I'm sure there are plenty of editors and other folks inside the industry who would do this in a heartbeat, but it's not up to them.
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But yeah, greater openness all around. It doesn't solve things; it just explains them.
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Here's to hoping somebody can make Steve Jobs see sense.
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Once Apple enters the market, the game will be all over. But that would be because they would be entering a nearly mature market with imperfect players (Amazon, Sony et al) who have done the scut work of creating ebook awareness and so forth. I could see Apple coming in late in the game with a polished, fairly expensive ereader; I don't see them saving or defining the market in the near future except by accident (ebook apps on the iPhone). What I'm hoping is that things get better than they are right now. I just doubt that Apple is going to be key in channging things that way.
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Well, I'm no good at making market speculations and what not. Economics, not exactly my speciality. I do think Apple could do it, whether they will...I leave that to smarter people than me to predict.
I, too, hope somebody gets their stuff together with the whole eBook reader and eBook thing, because I think it could really do a lot to help the literary world as a whole.