Piracy…Again

@Keira:

With all due respect, Keira, you’re wrong. Authors should be con­cerned. Piracy is a long and painful hill, but the ball was rolling a long time ago, and it’s only going to pick up speed from now on. If the pub­lish­ing indus­try con­tin­ues to treat dig­i­tal read­ers as it does now, it will run into the same prob­lems as the music indus­try — an entire gen­er­a­tion, their future prime con­sumer demo­graphic, will not believe in pay­ing for ebooks — and unlike the music indus­try, authors don’t have con­certs and tour mer­chan­dise to sus­tain them as it stands now.

Tech­nol­ogy and con­sumer demands both move faster than old indus­tries. I fore­see a lot of painful con­fronta­tions with real­ity in the next two decades.

How­ever, the reac­tion from authors IS mis­guided in many cases. Focus­ing on the moral­ity of down­load­ing cre­ative prop­erly ille­gally isn’t going to stop it. Noth­ing will.

That’s right, noth­ing. Not leg­is­la­tion (cut­ting off people’s inter­net access for down­load­ing a book is like repo-ing their car for dri­ving to Shop and Save and steal­ing a pair of argyle socks), not DRM (with every tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment, there are 1000 ‘crack­ers’ online wait­ing to unlock it or cir­cum­vent it for fun and share the keys with the world), not even low­er­ing prices and allow­ing swap­ping and all of the things ebook sell­ers and dis­trib­u­tors SHOULD be doing but aren’t. Preach­ing cer­tainly isn’t going to work.

Of course, mak­ing con­sumers happy through all of those open-access, lower prices strate­gies is the one path in the above list that will limit ille­gal down­load­ing to the igno­rant, the jerks, and the hoard­ers who don’t read them anyway.

But by all means, let some authors whine and cry about piracy and piss off old and poten­tial new read­ers alike. More sales for me when I enter the mar­ket.

The smart peo­ple adapt. The stu­pid die.

It’s a cruel, cruel world out there.

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