Leto said:
Well, they could print in series the PDF format, and resale it cheaper than your books or even selling it as an ebook.
They could, but anyone dumb enough to have a point of sale is going to be pretty easy to track down and shut down.
Leto said:
But the main damage would be as for the music industry
The music industry is a bunch of whining tossers. They claim all their losses are entirely due to pirated and P2P distribution, which they use as a justification for targeting pensioners, children, and
even dead people, with court actions and sizable fines.
However, what the IFPI, RIAA, MPI, etc, all completely fail to do is address the changing markets and overall changes to the sales environment over the last few years.
Firstly, these organisations (representing the music industry internationally, the USA, and UK, etc) never attribute any loss of revenue to rival product formats, not least DVD sales, despite the explosive growth of the DVD market - and also the fact that a lot of DVD releases are targeting the same marketing group with the same limited budget, pressured to buy more from a wider range of products.
So if a teens are more likely to buy a DVD instead of a CD, the RIAA marks the loss of sale as due to piracy.
Also, it's worth pointing out that the music publishing companies have always left their entire sales direction as coming via third party vendors, and have generally shirked from providing music direct from their libraries, despite the increased mark-up on direct sales they could benefit from.
Another important fact to note is that music companies are actually
selling more.
So the point there is that music companies have been suffering a complete lack of vision as to how to apply sales and proper profit models to new marketplaces and technology, and then whine about how they're losing money.
This is precisely what is also slowly killing publishing companies - the commercial internet is now over a decade old, but book publishing companies are still often shy of delivering their products direct in a new global marketplace.
The problem is this instance is that traditional companies are refusing to adapt to new methods and technology, and online giants such as Amazon, which now effectively control the sale of books online, are demanding lower cost of goods from publishers, thus squeezing on publisher profits - but because the publishers have repeatedly failed to engage the markets directly, they are crippling their own profit models.
It's also worth pointing out that propagandist accounts, such as small artists and independents as gaining from action against P2P is BS - these people are not primary targets of P2P. Inf act, some at least have the intelligence to recognise that P2P offers a good opportuntity for brand marketing and increased consumer awareness of an individual product.
Leto said:
many readers would get the book for free and you wouldn't get paid for your work. Some could see as an incentive to test new writers before buying their books, some would just get as many books as they can for free.
Absolutely - like as kids we may have recorded onto tape a band we weren't sure of, but bought later; or else borrowed a book from a friend, only to later buy the series. To some companies, it's loss of sale. To others, it's brand marketing and increasing consumer awareness.
Leto said:
However the main restriction to it, is that it's quite tiring to read long text on a computer or PDA screen.
Absolutely right - this is what will always restrict book distributions online, and although the work can be printed off, it means using a lot of paper. A lot of people can't be bothered with either, which is why eBooks have never become the success they were trumpeted up to become.
As a marketing tip, sample chapters online (in a printer friendly format) should be able to help - but where it is offered, worth encouraging free distribution. It's only a fragment, but can potentially work wonders for marketing.
Leto said:
But as more and more people become accustomed to screen reading, you can imagine it'll be less and less tiring for them. And the old nightmare of the end of books could come soon.
As above, any such "end of books" comes from the publishing industry's insipid rejection of new technologies, and a general failure of direct sales marketing due to enslavement of themselves to traditional sales model mindsets based on third-party distributors as the gateway to sales and profits. As the sales models changes, so do expectations of profits need to change.
Anyway, for more information on P2P, it's worth looking at somewhere like CNet for the tech stories on the issue - been quite a lot on P2P legal cases of late:
http://news.search.com/search?q=P2P&search.x=14&search.y=7
Oh - and sorry for the rant.
I used to distribute my own music compositions on mp3.com - a great place for independent musicians to earn a small income and distribute their music a few years back.
The RIAA was able to destroy the place on a technicality, and with it, the aspirations of a generation of small musicians.
My music was even distributed on Kazaa. I thought it was cool that someone thought it worth fileswapping with. Brand marketing and consumer awareness is something small artists in any medium are always in desperately short supply of.
