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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I read an arti­cle recently that said authors and pub­lish­ers shouldn’t be con­cerned about ebook piracy yet for quite a few rea­sons. First because the books most stolen are geek guides, self-help, and how-to man­u­als. Sec­ond because the amount of read­ers with means to read dig­i­tal copies are few and far between as eread­ers are exclu­sive by being cost prohibitive.

That made sense to me. Sure there are other ways to read pirated ebooks other than a Kin­dle or Sony Reader, but most peo­ple are too lazy to do it and too dis­tracted to read on the computer.

In addi­tion, I think the aver­age reader isn’t com­puter lit­er­ate enough or doesn’t care enough to probe the inter­net for stolen copies of books. Music? Sure. Movies? Def­i­nitely. Books? Not so much.

Isn’t there stud­ies some­where that show how few peo­ple in Amer­ica actu­ally read books? Or how lit­tle they read? I’m fairly cer­tain I read some­where that the aver­age Amer­i­can adult reads less than 10 books a year. How many sales can an author actu­ally lose?

Found the arti­cle about ebooks: http://​tor​rent​f​reak​.com/​p​u​b​l​i​s​h​e​r​s​-​f​e​a​r​-​e​b​o​o​k​-​p​i​r​a​c​y​-​b​u​t​-​s​h​o​u​l​dnt

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