Speaking of books and book sales

[megwrites]

mizkit has some very wise, reasonable words concerning piracy of books (including her own) and the need of information to be free.

I have to take my hat off to Ms. Murphy. Because I think this is the most intelligent thing I've heard from an author on the subject.

There are two issues which I use as a litmus test, once and a while, for deciding what I think of an author personally. One is fan fiction, the other is internet piracy. I don't know C.E. Murphy's stance on fanfiction, but I do know that her opinions on internet piracy have me applauding.

Now let me be clear as day. I don't approve, in any way, shape, or form, of internet piracy. I don't think giving away other people's works for free without any consideration to the economic impact you're having on the author (as well as editors, marketing department, copyeditors, etc) who worked on the book is right. I think it's wrong.

I think that the site she links to is wrong, wrong, wrong. I definitely don't agree with this particular pirate putting up a donation button as though he/she is doing something charitable by giving away stolen works. That's absurd and rather on the nose, if you ask me.



However, I do think there is a great value in realizing that pirates, like weeds, prosper under certain conditions. And that trying to go after the weeds one by one rather than changing the conditions in the garden so that they are not favorable to unwanted menaces is futile at best.

Think, if you will, to prohibition in America. The government's unreasonable attitudes towards alcohol were a boon to syndicated crime organizations and indeed were part and parcel of it. Gangsters thrived not because of the alcohol, but because of the laws.

There is a great benefit, I believe, to authors and publishers alike in thinking in a different manner. In finding ways to change the environment in which books exist online. I think publishers are a bit too tight fisted about trying to protect their works, and that's making piracy more appealing and easier.

I think they have this very naive belief that if something appears on the internet for free, that automatically means nobody will ever buy it. That is a big fat lie, and they believe it because I don't think they're actually studying the actual behaviors of readers today.

Because the publishing industry, with all it's business know how, is forgetting one vital thing. They have a trump card that pirates will never have. And that is that they control the supply. Yes, a pirating site can get all the works by this author or that - but they'll never have a complete library.

If publishers got smart, they could make piracy redundant and thus obsolete. In three simple (though maybe not easy) steps:

1. An affordable, reliable, easy to use, marketable e-book reader that is able to read all formats. All. PDF, Word Docs, OpenOffice, HTML, and every other e-book format. And it must cost less than an iPod. It probably needs to be in the $50-$80 dollar range to really hit it big. Something that, if you read more than five or six books on it, it's paid for itself.

2. A vast online, easily accessible library with books in any format you want or a format universal enough to be used on readers and computers alike. iTunes for books, if you will. By having the kind of selection that no pirating site or torrent could match, you'll instantly attract people who might be willing to pay just because your site is easier and more convenient than searching torrents and flipping through sites and hoping there are enough seeds to download and all the other hassles. People will pay for certainty.

3. A very low, reasonable price for individual books. The lowest you can go, in fact. At start up, I might actually recommend that a company take a loss on really popular titles (Harry Potter, Twilight, the perennial bestsellers) in order to get the word out. I'd recommend keeping prices advertisably low. Under five dollars per book. Because this gives the company in question the ability to say to consumers (who are ever mindful of a recession being on and are crunched for cash across the board) - hey, it costs less than in a bookstore. This would allow a company to market their e-book reader as being extremely cost effective. You can say "for the price of (insert ten books) in a bookstore, you can have (insert name of ebook reader) and five books! And each additional book is only 5 bucks! That's less than a cup of coffee and breakfast at Starbucks! The more you can convince a customer that "it's not that bad", the more willing they are going to be to buy.

Right now consumers are very much aware of expenses, but not in a penny pinching sense. They're aware of it in a comparative sense. They're aware of this much money being equivalent to a meal or a house payment or the cost of a tank of gas.

And in those three steps? You will have invented and cornered a market. Then from there you can expand to have an e-reader that can subscribe to magazines and newspapers and have the online content waiting right there for them. Imagine if you could just dock your e-book reader for the night and wake up to find your favorite daily newspaper already uploaded, ready for you to read? Imagine getting each monthly edition of your favorite magazine *the day before* it hits newstands and not waiting for it to come through the mail? What if you could even put audiobooks, podcasts and music on this e-reader? Music *and* books.

Imagine if college campuses went paper-free? If instead of buying expensive textbooks, students bought an e-reader and paid for books that were a fraction of the cost of the big, bulky paper ones? Imagine the environmental and economic benefits that you could advertise. Telling students, "No more expensive books that cost a thousand or more dollars each semester!" (And yes, that's about what the sum total of books comes to if you're a college student with a full load). And you're saving the damn planet while you're at it!

If a company could get even one major, well known college campus to go paper-free, they would make a killing. An absolute, unabashed killing. Somebody would be the next Bill Gates if they could make this work.

Imagine being able to market a device that could save a lot of money across the board and generate revenue for the people who actually deserve it. What if the overhead of printing, storing, and shipping didn't take away from what people got paid? What if you didn't have to worry about print runs anymore because you didn't have to worry about print?

What if, because you didn't have to worry about print, a company could afford to take on authors who might only sell five or six thousand copies their first time out and nurture them until they're a big bestseller? Imagine if there were less layers of uncertainty - bookstores, distribution - in between the writer and the reader?

Suddenly, publishers could take on more authors, take more risks, allow more diversity in material (and authors) out there. A thriving e-book market would change the risk-to-reward factor for publishers. It would up the reward and down the risk considerably.

Yeah, okay, I'm dreaming a bit here. But look around and see how many people are texting on cellphones and listening to iPods. Our communications and music have upgraded - why haven't our books?

People will always want good stories, and right now in these times? We need great stories more than ever. That's what we do as humans. When it's dark and cold, we gather 'round the campfire and listen to someone tell us something compelling, something good, something that makes us happy or gives us a good cathartic cry or arouses us or gets our blood up or satisfies some itch we have.

The market for stories never runs dry. We just need to upgrade the digital campfire around which people gather to hear the stories, that's all.