The Real Effects Of Book Piracy

I don't find the popularity of FSOG to be the most depressing. High sales of books we don't think are necessarily worthy of it still enabled publishers to take a risk on other authors and other books.

I believe Stiefvater, and I don't see any stretching. To me, it's pretty obvious based on what she observed that her sales took a direct hit from piracy. That it caused the cancellation of her box set must be super heartbreaking and disappointing to real fans.

Piracy has been around for a long time; it has never been okay and it has never been harmless.

Thanks for posting the link, rugcat. I've read The Raven Boys series*, so it was worrying to see what went on behind the scenes with regards to books three and four.

I haven't seen an e-ARC - do they have copyright/whatever warnings in them? Maybe something along the lines of the anti-piracy warnings put on DVDs/Blu-rays could be added to e-ARCs and ebooks (including the bit about how many jobs are supported, etc). It probably won't make any difference to most pirates, but it might make halfway-decent people think twice about the effects it has on their favourite authors if they continue to pirate books.


*I borrowed two books from the library, then ended up buying all the books in the end because I wanted the pretty covers on my shelf.

Oh, I can totally understand pirates. Stuff is expensive and there is the internet right there in front of them - the source of life.

Consumers tend to value ease of access and affordability.

Not going to lie - I was a pirate in my youth. 30 years ago I got an Amiga 500 and never bought a single game. Couldn't afford them. Me and my friends swapped pirated disks between us and that carried over to PC-gaming and MP3.

What put an end to it was not morality or punishment, but smart distrubution.

Steam killed all interest in piracy on the PC. There it was - a vast library of games, often on sale and delivered with a click. Why bother with the hassle of cracked games, when the real deal was now cheap and accessable.

Spotify killed any notion of downloading MP3's. Easy access to all (it seems) music in the world for a very low price and the artist still get paid.

Amazon have the "instant buy" button and I buy a LOT of books I never get to read.

To end book piracy we need to have extremely easy of access and affordability. I'm a huge proponent of volume over high pricing. I see a funny title on Amazon for 99 cent, down it goes. If I laugh once, it's worth it.

In Denmark we have Mofibo, which is a bit like Kindle unlimited.

It's working, but it's not there yet.

I see a future where readers have a membership and pay some amount against free acces to content. Works for Netflix and HBO.

WormHeart

Sage said:

It's possible I'm wrong on this, but I've also heard that if a book is checked out of a library a certain number of times, the library will buy another copy (to replace or just supplement it, I'm not sure). If true, reading the book at a library still contributes to a sale.

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The only reason they would do this is if the book has become too shopworn. It's actually more common for libraries to have book sales in which they offer books which actually haven't been checked out very often, perhaps never. That's a win-win for the library, generating some income useful for purchasing other books, while clearing out some of the space on their shelves.

caw

What Sage says is true for some ebooks. Some publishers specify that licenses to the books expire after a certain number of checkouts, and libraries are required to buy replacement copies. See, e.g., https://librarianbyday.net/2011/02/...rary-ebook-vendors-to-take-a-giant-step-back/

Anna Iguana said:

What Sage says is true for some ebooks. Some publishers specify that licenses to the books expire after a certain number of checkouts, and libraries are required to buy replacement copies. See, e.g., https://librarianbyday.net/2011/02/...rary-ebook-vendors-to-take-a-giant-step-back/

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That's a license; you license ebooks, like other software; you don't own them.

And Sage is correct; the methodology and numbers used to decide what books to replace rather than simply decommission, rebind, or move to off site storage facilities varies from library to library, but books that are popular in terms of circulation will be replaced with new copies, and/or additional copies. Many public libraries will let you see how many copies and in what formats a new book has in terms or pre-publication orders; sometimes you can see those numbers rise.

I've seen all over my dash on Tumblr. It's horrible and piracy effects publishing 100%. Even with such a huge and popular book series like The Raven cycle(it's all over GR, Tumblr, BookTube), you still won't make that much money. Piracy takes away from the authors and while the publishers might not care, the authors and huge fans of the author will. People will probably look up "x Book free" and it will be there. They will read the book, maybe rate it on GR, and call it a day. They will not go buy the work because it's there, for free. Some may, but let's be honest, they probably won't. Piracy affects publishing, whether we want to admit or not. It will still take away from the author, its fans, and its publishers at the end of the day, week, month, year, whatever! Piracy is illegal and horrible, but unless it's enforced a bit more and free online sites are shut down, it will still happen.

That being said, going to the library is a great resource.The more people who request it, the more the library will buy more copies which means more money for the authors. I'm a huge fan of libraries and while they seem like they can't help writers, they do!

Its telling when you google for your author name and book and get pirate sites linked on the second page of results. I've even seen people in forums sharing PDF collections of my entire series + other books from my publisher in large batches. No one is pirating one book and then buying the rest of the series, they're pirating everything they can get their hands on. And for teeny small-press authors in niche genres, its REALLY hurting us. Every sale matters.

Hmm, interesting experiment. I'm skeptical it proves what she thinks it does, in the sense that a single data point is never that informative and also in the sense that my estimation has generally been that whether piracy helps or hurts a book's sales tends to be nuanced. With some books, it may help; with others, it may hurt; and I think it depends on a large variety of variables such as genre, relative obscurity, series vs. standalone, and more.

There's another very similar experiment that was done by an author -- unfortunately I forget who or I would link. Sales of his most recent book were not great. So his experiment was to start seeding pirated copies of the book himself, and sales soared. I think you could equally use that to "prove" that piracy helps book sales... but really, all it proves is that there was a correlation between that book being pirated and sales of that book increasing.

Several people, like Cory Doctorow and Jonathan Coulton, have made a career out of making their work free to pirate. Many self-published authors have had huge career boosts by setting the first book in a series to free. I don't think these business models are necessarily going to be right for every author and every book, but it's certainly proof that allowing people to get a book for free isn't always the death sentence this author is implying it is... but then, as a math person I tend to be very skeptical of anyone who claims more than their data can support.

But my biases are also that I'm one of the rare authors who shrugs at piracy and thinks copyright terms should be MUCH shorter (my books have been legal to pirate since day 1), so take my opinion for what you think it's worth!