Author to give up Writing due to Illegal Downloads

[alchemist]

So, what's the difference?

The simple answer is the scale of the sharing and the ease of the sharing.

A more nebulous answer is about the quality of the sharing. You share your paper with friends and family. You share the book and the experience. You can talk about it. If I wrote that book, I'd get a warm feeling knowing you're sharing your thoughts.

If you share with 1,000 random people in Norway, there's a qualitative difference to the experience. You don't know them and they don't know you. It's, for want of a better word, soul-less. If I wrote that book, I'd think you didn't value it, like you threw a paper edition into the street for some random person to find.

 

[Gary Compton]

It's a developing market to protection needs to be built in.

If I was releasing a download, I would want the purchaser to have to enter a key received by me in an email so they could read my book. Similar to when you buy a Microsoft product. It's not rocket science. That way when you lend someone the book, you lend them the key but at least illegal sites cant offer it and if they do you could restrict the key's uses to 3-5.

Simples...

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Point taken, HB and Alc, and I'm maybe playing devil's advocate, but I just wonder if we are getting worked up about something that's human nature, that we either find new ways to overcome technilogically or new models of financial payment to authors. I'm not sure what the answer is, but it is happening, it will keep happening, so it's not about the how and why moral issues but how it's made sustainable.

Can I just say, too, as a book lover first and foremost I agree with Alc that sharing books should be a thing of love, last year I did the world book night and had a party to give away 50 books I liked and we had a great time, but I'm also pragmatic. the model's changing, what goes in its place?

 

[HareBrain]

I think it's true that none of us really knows what will happen. The relationship between digital and print, and authors and publishers and readers etc, seems in a state of flux at the moment, and it might take a few years for things to become clearer.

 

[Ursa major]

Can I ask a really stupid question? you know I'm going to anyway.

When I was a kid there was a book in the library which was read by every single girl in my class and we all wrote a couple of words at the back about it; by the time I read it the 2nd time, there were about 40 of us who'd read it, without paying the author anything.

First, the library had paid for it. Second: in the UK, each time a book is borrowed, a small sum is paid to its author (up to a modest maximum figure: I think it was £5000 per annum quite a few years back).

Anyway, this particular book went out of print for years, and finally, by popular demand was reprinted (thus saving me hours in 2nd hand bookstores looking for a couple to sell on Ebay, it was worth a couple of hundred quid at one point).

Unless the author is the one selling the book on eBay, they don't get a penny of that money**.

Or, i bought One day; girl's night to the cinema and I reckoned I wanted to read the book first, I nearly always do. So far my mum's read ir, my best friend, my ex-childminder's best mate, my work colleague and her mum and one of the mum's at Rainbows. All one copy. Nothing unusual there; I could put my hands on many many books here which someone else bought and recycled to me, or vice versa, plus loads and loads of 2nd hand ones; I have a habit, I'm afraid, and the rest of the family are worse.

So, what's the difference? I've rarely paid full price for any book - or anything else for that matter - I'm happy to blag and I'm happy to also be the first in the chain, too.

I'm sure I'm being dense, but there you go; passed around books, nothing new.

But these are not passed around a few people, with a single book going from hand to hand. And if you liked a book so much that you wanted your own copy, you'd have to pay someone for it.

In theory, hundreds of millions of people (I did say "in theory" ) could be reading an ebook on the day it first became available. And they would all have their own copy, until they mislaid it or deleted it. The scale*** of what's possible is what makes the difference and can upset the economics of electronic (or, indeed, any sort of) book publishing.

If the author is going to make little or no money, neither are those who act as gatekeepers (i.e. quality control), or those who would have been paying for (some of) the marketing. And once these functions die off, there is nothing standing between the reading public and narcissist authors, like the ones we used to get posting in Critiques with their first post, who would get upset when their masterpiece (= drivel) was called out for what it was.

Now we here are lucky: we have plenty of members, some of whom have read hundreds or thousands of books and have an idea of what is good and what isn't. The general public, on the other hand, will have trouble finding the good stuff amongst the dross.


** - UK art dealers are currently claiming to be about to have kittens because an EU directive comes into force on the 1st of January 2012 whereby they will have to give a small percentage (4% I think) of the selling price to the artist (or their heirs, up to 70 years after the artist's death).

*** - I think this is why the unimaginative amongst government bodies don't grasp the need for the strictest data security for their data about us, the general public. In the olden days, you might (theoretically again) be able to sneak into an office and steal/copy the contents of a few files from a filing cabinet you've managed to unlock. Nowadays, if you manage to breach the security, you can, potentially, get hold of every record in a database.

 

[mosaix]

Springs, when a library buys a book they pay more for it than an individual would on the undertstanding that it will be read by lots of people.

But the key here is that the publisher reaches an agreement with the libraries, there is bargaining and choice being exercised on both sides.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I understand all this; I worked as a bookstore manager for 10 years, my husband has been a bookseller for 20, and a librarian for two previous to that. Now, I work as a strategic management consultant and what I would say if I was advising a market where their core market has changed, where there are threats to their business is that trading as you always have, staying static is a very risky option.

I don't have the answers; I'm not an economist, but the current model isn't working, evidently, so I would say that demographic change is always the only option for viable continuation, and that means changes in terms of author's expectations (NB not neccessarily no money! just maybe not a royalty cheque, maybe a different means of payment), publishers ways of working, and yes, the way the public accesses books.

But I see a change and the best practice is to accept the change, move your model to fit and do it early, not reactively. i'm not sure the book industry and publishers are doing that yet; but Amazon and Kindle are.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

We can all pontificate about piracy, but I think we've all done it.

That is a large assumption, and an inaccurate one.

 

[jojajihisc]

I have to admit, I'm tempted to file this under "prima donna tantrum".

Exactly what I was thinking when I read the thread title.

The case for the free ebook from Cory Doctorow's Craphound website:

Why do you give away your books?
Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money?
For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy. Mega-hit best-sellers in science fiction sell half a million copies -- in a world where 175,000 attend the San Diego Comic Con alone, you've got to figure that most of the people who "like science fiction" (and related geeky stuff like comics, games, Linux, and so on) just don't really buy books. I'm more interested in getting more of that wider audience into the tent than making sure that everyone who's in the tent bought a ticket to be there.

Ebooks are verbs, not nouns. You copy them, it's in their nature. And many of those copies have a destination, a person they're intended for, a hand-wrought transfer from one person to another, embodying a personal recommendation between two people who trust each other enough to share bits. That's the kind of thing that authors (should) dream of, the proverbial sealing of the deal. By making my books available for free pass-along, I make it easy for people who love them to help other people love them.

What's more, I don't see ebooks as substitute for paper books for most people. It's not that the screens aren't good enough, either: if you're anything like me, you already spend every hour you can get in front of the screen, reading text. But the more computer-literate you are, the less likely you are to be reading long-form works on those screens -- that's because computer-literate people do more things with their computers. We run IM and email and we use the browser in a million diverse ways. We have games running in the background, and endless opportunities to tinker with our music libraries. The more you do with your computer, the more likely it is that you'll be interrupted after five to seven minutes to do something else. That makes the computer extremely poorly suited to reading long-form works off of, unless you have the iron self-discipline of a monk.

The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper.

So ebooks sell print books. Every writer I've heard of who's tried giving away ebooks to promote paper books has come back to do it again. That's the commercial case for doing free ebooks.

The computer as a means of distraction is so true. He's way ahead of the game when it comes to understanding how to sell books in a world where it only becomes easier and easier to copy a book digitally.

 

[j d worthington]

A: Teresa's right; that's quite an assumption, and no, not everyone has.

B: While, as I said, if an author wants to give away their work free, that is entirely their right; it is their work. And with a select few, this may indeed work out well... but not for the majority, even of very good writers. indications are that precisely the opposite happens in most cases, and few writers can afford such losses. It has never been much of a paying profession, save for a tiny number, and most writers either barely make a living wage, or earn well below that, and generally for ridiculously long hours. Cut into what little earnings most writers have, and you pretty much eliminate that writer.

I must admit that this is making me think of the state of things prior to stricter copyright laws, and especially prior to international copyright law being a common thing, when even the best writers in the business would find it nearly impossible to survive, and usually would end up taking jobs which nearly eradicated their ability to write for extensive periods. These writers would include Poe and Hawthorne, for instance; and all because others could pirate their works with impunity....

For those who think this is the inevitable course of the future: Perhaps you are right; but it seems to me that this is a very cynical and defeatist attitude at the outset, not to mention one which excuses moral bankruptcy on this issue as "pragmatic" thinking. As others have said, if we allow this sort of thing to continue, eventually all we will have are either a tiny handful of writers who can afford such a situation, or the talentless hacks who just want to be published. The genuine craftsmen (and women) of good writing simply spend too much time and effort to put their stuff out there for others to take for free.

 

[Anne Lyle]

It's a developing market to protection needs to be built in.

If I was releasing a download, I would want the purchaser to have to enter a key received by me in an email so they could read my book. Similar to when you buy a Microsoft product. It's not rocket science. That way when you lend someone the book, you lend them the key but at least illegal sites cant offer it and if they do you could restrict the key's uses to 3-5.

Simples...

Yeah, right. That's just another form of DRM, and just as easy for pirates to crack. You only need one person to crack it; the rest will just distribute the cracked copy. Ask Microsoft about pirating of its software outside the West

What would go some way towards helping, IMHO, would be for Google to alter their algorithm to omit torrent sites when you search for a book. If you, the ordinary user, Google a book's title and author in all innocence, and get a mix of links to paid and free downloads, of course you're going to be tempted to click on the latter. There's really no good reason for the pirates to appear high in the listings when the person didn't actively search for torrent sites.

Of course the pirate sites are often full of malware, so it would be a kindness to naive internet users to guide them away from such places.

 

[geordie bob]

Ime a builder not a writer but if someone decided they wanted my hard work for free ide be round the next day with the sledgehammers to knock it down and most people wauld think I was completly justified to do so, sadly writers dont have this option available to them and I have nothing but sympathy for them, The fact that some people seem to think piracy is harmless is beyond me, Theft is theft.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

But the key here is that the publisher reaches an agreement with the libraries, there is bargaining and choice being exercised on both sides.

A key argument. Thousands of people you've never known and will never know downloading your book for free... one reason it happens is that there's no relationship. If you can build up relationships with your fans they're less likely to steal your stuff.

 

[Anne Lyle]

Quite. Friends don't steal from friends

(Except in novels, where they also lie, cheat, betray and generally behave like people we would gnaw our own foot off to avoid. And yet we love them. People are strange.)

 

[Coragem]

First, a question for those who know more about this subject than I:

With the rise of ebook readers (the kindle, etc.) could it be that authors will have to find ways to earn income other than through sales?

E.g., sponsorship?


Second, if book sales stopped might it be that no one would know which books were popular or particularly good, and no one would know what to download ...? I.e., if downloading were to kill publishing would it be committing suicide?


Third, a confession (please, don't tear me to pieces):

A few weeks ago I was looking for a book that's out of print, and since I couldn't find it for less than £65, I downloaded it for free -- a process that required two clicks of my mouse and all of one minute.

It is alarming how everything (really everything!) is so easy to download!!!

Of course, at the moment I just want to become a famous author, and I'll worry about the droves of people downloading my work after that.


Coragem.

 

[Interference]

That is a large assumption, and an inaccurate one.

But then, he did say he only thought it

And then he also said....

And I'm sorry, I think Etxebarria is part of the fluff: a writer with almost a million in prizes for writing, now claiming she'll give it up for a day job? I don't think so.

....which echoes something I was thinking, too.

She's making a point dramatically and publicly. How else would a writer respond to what she feels a threat to her rights?

Personally, I'm not all that amazed:

....that we here, with so many artists and writers, even think there is a debate to be had....

... as I can see that at least some of us here have a personal perspective which is unique to their position and can be overlooked at times. Writers are rarely as well paid as rock stars or film stars or other moaning minnies, even the relatively "successful" ones, so percentage-wise perhaps they have more to lose from piracy.

It's important to draw attention to the shortcomings of the law and how it can be, should be or is enforced. Perhaps the "artist" is in the best position to do this, as it is the artist who is most affected. But let's also recognise what Springs says:

....if I was advising a market where their core market has changed, where there are threats to their business is that trading as you always have, staying static is a very risky option..

 

[Lilmizflashythang]

Tell me something Interface, and you too Brian. If someone broke into your day job's computer and stole your paychecks for the next year, would you be so patient? Or would you be pitching a fit? Me personally, I would be pitching a fit.

 

[Interference]

I'd forgive, of course.

Boy, that anger management course is finally paying dividends

 

[Jo Zebedee]

The thing is, LIlmiz, it's not about saying if the practice is right or wrong; because morality is ultimately an individual's choice. It's not something I'd do, and not something I agree with , but I do accept other's feel differently, otherwise why would they do it?

There is a valid argument that exposure is what an author needs to be successful and free downloads allow for this. I'd need to explore the details more, particularly how that translates as an economic model, but I recognise it has validity, as do Interference's points. As does the current model, but only if it moulds itself to the changes in demographic readership.

If you realised your paychecks were coming to you in a way which couldn't be sustained in the long term would you insist on receiving them with nonetheless? You would know that at some point it was going to stop happening, that the money wouldn't be there one day, and it's always better to be proactive than reactive at these times.

I think the industry's getting towards the point where proactivity is getting hard, which pushes them to reaction and decisions made under those circumstances are never as well thought out, balanced or holistic.

 

[mosaix]

But I see a change and the best practice is to accept the change, move your model to fit and do it early, not reactively. i'm not sure the book industry and publishers are doing that yet; but Amazon and Kindle are.

There was a time when door locks were simple, burglars found it easy to pick them. They made the locks more complex, burglars found it harder but worked harder to pick locks. People fitted burglar alarms, burglars looked for easier targets, etc., etc.

What didn't happen was that people said "Okay we give up. I'm not going to bother having possessions and I won't bother locking the door any more." As a consequence burglary is still illegal, people still are allowed to buy valuable possessions as a result of income from hard work, and so it should be.

Maybe we do need change - change to make it harder for people pinch other people's stuff.