Kindle e-book piracy accelerates
Several months ago I set up a Google alert for my book, "Knife Music,"
to keep abreast of anything anybody was saying--good or bad--about the
thing. Over the months I've received news of the occasional blog post
and tweets, but more recently I popped open an alert to learn that my
book was being pirated--both as a separate file and part of two larger
Torrents called 2,500 Retail Quality Ebooks (iPod,
iPad, Nook, Sony Reader) and 2,500 Retail Quality Ebooks for Kindle (MOBI).
I had the strange reaction of being both dismayed and weirdly honored
that someone had selected my book to strip free of its copy-protection
(DRM) and include as part of a collection of "quality" e-books, many of
which were from very good authors.
OK, so the use of the term "quality" was a reference to the formatting
of the e-books and not the quality of the actual work, but for a moment I
wasn't too bothered. After all, if someone downloads 2500 books, what
are the odds he or she is going to even bother looking at yours? I was
probably only losing a few bucks, especially considering my e-book is
currently priced at $3.99, which only leaves me with about 50 cents a
book after the publisher, e-book seller, and agent, take their cuts.
Even if I missed out on selling 200 e-books, that's a mere $100. No big
deal, right?
Well, obviously, for big authors, this whole pirating thing presents a
bigger problem--and a bigger loss. But that isn't what dismayed me so
much (sorry, but when you're a little guy, you don't care so much about
how much the big guys are losing). Rather, what's shocking, and what the
publishers should be most concerned about, is the fact that a library
of 2,500 books can be downloaded in a matter of hours. E-books are small
files and 2,500 of them can be packed into a single download (Torrent)
that's only about 3.4GB. If you set the average price per book at a
measly $2, the worth of said download would be $5,000. Bring it up to $4
a book and you're at $10,000. (In fact, publishers charges much more
for some of these books).
By comparison, a single DVD movie is
usually larger than that, as well as many retail PC games, which tend to
run in the 4GB to 7.5GB range. A "major" PSP title is about 1GB,
sometimes a bit larger (yes, the PSP has been severely impacted by
piracy).
I probably don't need to point this out but I will. I have about 600
books in my paper book collection, which took me years to gather and
prune during various moves. Digitally, that same collection could be
downloaded in around 30 minutes and stored on a cheap 1GB thumb drive,
which could then be copied in a matter of seconds and passed on to
someone else.
A lot of people think moving away from paper is a good thing. Maybe it
is. But what should also be alarming to publishers is that the number of
people pirating books is growing along with the number of titles that
are available for download. As I've written in the past, the rise of the iPad
has spurred some of the pirating, but now the huge success of the
Kindle is also leading to increased pirating. Yes some companies, such
as Attributor, have done some studies about the issue,
and seen increases. But for my evidence one only need glance at Pirate
Bay and see what people are downloading and how many of them are doing
it.
The most popular e-book download on Pirate Bay is the Kindle Books
Collection, which has something like 650 e-books in it (it's just less
than 1GB), and is ahead of a 224-page PDF e-book called "Advanced Sex:
Explicit Positions for Explosive Lovemaking." At the time of this
writing, 668 people were "seeding" the Kindle collection while 153
people were downloading it. A few month ago, the numbers of people
downloading e-book collections like this at given moment were in the 50
to 60 range with fewer seeders.
Now some of you in the comments section are going to inevitably say, who
needs 2,500 books? And most people don't read all that much anyway. But
the point here is that there may very well be a dark side to the
success of e-books, which some are speculating will make up 50 percent of the market in as little as 5 years.
You can argue whether it was Napster or the rise of the
iPod--or
most probably both--that led to the huge amount of music piracy, but the
book business will also take its share of big losses as it moves
further into the digital realm. True, it's much harder to get someone to
invest the time to read a book than to listen to an album, watch a
movie, or play a game, so chances are piracy won't hurt the book
business as much as those industries. But on the flip side, as I said
before, it's also much quicker to download a huge collection of books or
a number of New York Times bestsellers with a single click of a button.
How much will price play into all this? Well, you already have plenty of
folks out there who think it's outrageous for publishers to price an
e-book at $12.99 or $14.99 when the hardcover is first released. And
some of those folks may feel justified in downloading pirated versions
of books in protest--or just because they say they don't like getting
ripped off. And while some pricing decisions by publishers are clearly
bad, pricing may be a smaller part of the piracy equation than you might
think. What a surprising number of people have told me is that they
pirate stuff for the same reason that a lot of people like the Kindle:
it's all about instant gratification.
As one friend put it, "You want something, you click a button,
you get it." He has a Netflix account and knows he can get a particular
movie within 36 hours delivered to his door, yet he he says sometimes
uses Bit Torrent to get the movie so he can watch it faster.
This is something publishers will have to contend with going forward.
They know it, and Scott Turow, the President of the Author's Guild and a
practicing lawyer, is acutely aware of how much of a problem it is and could become.
"It [piracy] has killed large parts of the music industry," he said in
an interview. "Musicians make up for the copies of their songs that get
pirated by performing live. I don't think there will be as many people
showing up to hear me read as to hear Beyonce sing. We need to make sure
piracy is dealt with effectively."
Alas, so far it hasn't been dealt with effectively and I doubt it ever
will be. It won't cost me much now--and it may even help me find a few
readers who might not have read my book--but in the long run, it could
really hurt. And unlike the New York Time's David Pogue, I've got no
live act. Perhaps I need to get one, though I think I'd have a hard time
matching his rendition of "Apps, I did it again."
2 comments:
I know its crazy. Everyone always ask me why I purchase music from iTunes when I can easily download it. My answer " I wanna support the music I love". So it goes the same for books. Like with my giveaways that are funded by me, I make sure that they are purchased as gifts and sent directly to winners. I love the books and authors I read, so why not support them. I guess the issue arises with I bought it so it's mine and I can give it to anyone. Ebooks can be shared in the form as "purchase
this book for a friend" which can be found on most publishing sites!
It never crossed my mind that people downloaded books for free the way they downloaded movies and music. I don't know if there is a solution. I'm sure the music industry would have tried it years ago. This is an unfortunate consequence of advances in technoglogy.
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