Piracy - Astatalk site post re. my book

I think there may be some misunderstanding of what happened with Lieber [on the Tech Dirt page, not here, to clarify].

The things to consider are scale, and genre. 4chan is for better or for worse one of the biggest communities online of a certain demographic, and if your art is graphic novels or twisted video games or indie horror films, getting them interested in you will make a huge difference. You only need a few of them to want to support you before you make money.

But most of them will not shell out money. Call of Duty does not make more money because a crack appears on 4chan. Stephen King will not see a bump in sales because someone posts a copy of his latest book. In fact, to see a big difference, you'd have to be niche - and pre-"sell out" by the definition of the 4chan people.

This artist was moving such a tiny number of copies that a fraction of the 4chan people shelling out made a major spike in sales for him. And he was unknown enough that the exposure on such a massive community consisting of his target audience was also ultimately productive. But this only works once.

Now that they know of him, they'll almost certainly pirate his next title. Not buy. The number of 4chan buyers next time will stay the same (so his overall sales will be up), and the sharp spike in his graph when the bootlegs go up won't be as dramatic. The better known he becomes, the smaller the spike until eventually there is no bump at all.

Also, the spike corresponds with the bootlegs appearing, not his engagement of the readers. He probably made a couple fans for life by posting, but most people forgot about it within minutes.

In other words, his action was irrelevant to the outcome, his profile was low enough that getting the word out helped, and there was an unusually good fit between the interests of the community doing the pirating and the art he produced.

TLDR: I'm not going to get a similar bump by engaging the assholes at the various pirate sites stealing my stuff, and neither will most people.

Sorry, this happens to overlap with my day job and I had to climb the soapbox. /blush

AlexPiper said:

My approach was that I wrote a little tool for myself called Compendium. When I plug my Kindle into my Mac, Compendium finds all the new books on the Kindle that it hasn't seen before. It pulls the books off the Kindle, strips the DRM off and turns the books into standard Mobipocket, then stuffs them into an archive directory (filed by author).

If for whatever reason, Amazon goes kerblooie or the Kindle gets shut down, I'm not out the hundreds of dollars I've spent on Kindle books over the past two and a half years. I still have mobipocket versions I can read on basically anything out there, in my own archive. But I'm still supporting authors by buying the eBooks.

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That's completly different since you want back ups of the file. As long as you aren't sharing with other people than its fine.

AlexPiper said:

My approach was that I wrote a little tool for myself called Compendium. When I plug my Kindle into my Mac, Compendium finds all the new books on the Kindle that it hasn't seen before. It pulls the books off the Kindle, strips the DRM off and turns the books into standard Mobipocket, then stuffs them into an archive directory (filed by author).

If for whatever reason, Amazon goes kerblooie or the Kindle gets shut down, I'm not out the hundreds of dollars I've spent on Kindle books over the past two and a half years. I still have mobipocket versions I can read on basically anything out there, in my own archive. But I'm still supporting authors by buying the eBooks.

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That's a very neat system you created. The DRM is the reason I bought a Sony reader instead of a Kindle. The problem I face is that I've so far only found legit non-DRM books (that I want) on sites selling PDFs, which is a pretty bloated (ie bad) format for an e-reader.

I'd love a similar system for LRF's, (the format the Sony is specifically built for). Then I'd be brave enough to buy .lrf formatted books. Until I can, there's no way I'm buying books with DRM.

GradyHendrix said:

That is the most elegant thing I've heard for dealing with Kindle DRM (which I hate for no real reason except I hate DRM in the abstract).

Is Compendium for Macs as well? And is there a way to sweet talk you into sharing?

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So here we are debating whether pirating books is wrong (most here seem to agree that it is), and now you ask someone to "share" software with you (ie, send you a pirated copy)? Interesting...

cameron_chapman said:

So here we are debating whether pirating books is wrong (most here seem to agree that it is), and now you ask someone to "share" software with you (ie, send you a pirated copy)? Interesting...

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Perhaps you missed the part where the OP, AlexPiper, mentioned that he WROTE the software himself?

So asking him to share it is asking him to give a gift of his own work -- not to pirate and giveaway someone else's work.

Alainna

GradyHendrix said:

Is Compendium for Macs as well? And is there a way to sweet talk you into sharing?

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I'm not inclined to share Compendium on moral grounds (or legal ones, come to that), simply because it could so easily be used for piracy purposes. Since it automates backing up DRM-free archival copies of any book on your Kindle, anyone could just plug their Kindle in and let it run, then send the resulting .mobipocket files to friends without effort.

I could justify posting it publicly all I wanted as being solely for backups, but as a software developer I know all too well that if I put Compendium out there, it would be downloaded primarily for piracy purposes. And as a software developer for my day job and a writer in my spare time, that's just not something I want to facilitate. Stripping DRM off of Kindle .azw files is trivial for anyone with a modicum of DRM knowledge -- or, really, just access to Python -- I don't need to make it plug-and-play for the general public.

(Also, Compendium's UI is more of a sad joke than anything polished, since it's personal use stuff. Any other issues aside, I'd sooner spork my own eyes out than release something publicly with as many usability quirks as Compendium has.)

Sorry. :/

I agree the issue with DRM is, as mentioned earlier in the thread, that it punishes the honest customers; the pirates get a copy that can't be revoked and which they can read on any device they have, while legitimate customers have a copy the store can retract or disable and which they're only allowed to use on certain specific devices. My mention of Compendium was intended less as a "this is neat, I should share it" note and more a way of illustrating, "it's possible to find workarounds such that you can still get the books legitimately and support the authors, without worrying about DRM coming back to bite you in the ass down the road."

In my case, that workaround is a small background service that runs a mess of Python scripts to automate DRM-free backups any time I plug my Kindle in to my Mac, and stores records of what it's already dealt with into a SQLite database; I'm a programmer and engineer, so 'write a tool' is my usual solution to any problem or inconvenience. (I may be the only person I know who's drawn up schematics to add wireless networking capabilities /to her mailbox/, so that I don't have to go out in the rain and wind and across the yard to check if any mail has come that day. Instead, the mailbox design has a sensor and a transmitter, and can tell when there's mail waiting to be picked up.)

For others the workaround might be only buying their eBooks from Baen's 'Webscriptions' bookstore, where everything is sold without DRM and so works on pretty much everything. Or one friend of mine who is adamantly opposed to DRM will pirate the books he wants to have DRM-free archival copies of... but only after he's bought a DRM-encumbered edition (or even the print book) first to at least know he's supporting the author. Etc.

Alainna said:

Perhaps you missed the part where the OP, AlexPiper, mentioned that he WROTE the software himself?

So asking him to share it is asking him to give a gift of his own work -- not to pirate and giveaway someone else's work.

Alainna

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You're right. I missed that part in the original message. Sorry for jumping to conclusions. I gotta be more careful when I'm just skimming posts...

I realize I'm sort of performing thread necromancy here ("Arise from the dead! ARISE! Muahahahahah!"), but Saundra Mitchell has a great blog post on why eBook piracy does hurt.

http://saundramitchell.com/blog/?p=4258

Thanks for considering sharing Compendium. I appreciate you taking the time to give me an answer! Seriously.

Also, Cameron, no problem. I skim threads all the time and then respond - I'm glad it's you and not me this time!

Although I do like what you say about "debating whether pirating books is wrong." I think that, in a nutshell, is where so many conversations about piracy go off the rails. There is no debate. It's clearly wrong. But it exists. So what do you do about it?

Flag 'em all and let god sort 'em out hasn't done anyone any favors. Piracy is still going strong and folks like Saundra Mitchell are still out of luck (thanks for that link, Alex).

So what's an author to do? I think that's where a fruitful conversation can be had. Unfortunately, those conversations always devolve into "right vs. wrong" conversations rather than, "How do we deal with the world we're actually living in now?" conversations.

AlexPiper said:

I realize I'm sort of performing thread necromancy here ("Arise from the dead! ARISE! Muahahahahah!"), but Saundra Mitchell has a great blog post on why eBook piracy does hurt.

http://saundramitchell.com/blog/?p=4258

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She makes the old music, film and game industry fallacy of equating an illegal download with a lost sale. In fact, we have no way of calculating how many of those illegal down-loaders ever would have bought the book. Because the threshold of downloading illegally is so low, it's safe to assume that many acquire many more books than they'd ever read. Some illegal downloads could just as well be equated with somebody going to a book store and flipping through a number of books to see which ones catch their fancy before deciding on what to buy.

I think we'll see a revolution in book distribution and sales that mirror that of the other media industries. Since the music industry is leading this revolution, and we're along way away from seeing how that will end, it's still very hard as an author to know how to act or what to think. Which sucks for us. Ce la vie.

The Internet, (not just piracy) has changed how we inform ourselves about books and how we buy books. This makes it doubly difficult to calculate what damage piracy does. The only reason I got initially published at all was because of reputation on Internet forums.

DrZoidberg said:

I'd love a similar system for LRF's, (the format the Sony is specifically built for). Then I'd be brave enough to buy .lrf formatted books. Until I can, there's no way I'm buying books with DRM.

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I've got a Sony too and agree PDF sucks to read on it. If I enlarge the print at all the formatting gets all messed up. I actually buy 95% of my books from Fictionwise which offers LRF not to mention I find it easier to browse.
Eve

Some illegal downloads could just as well be equated with somebody going to a book store and flipping through a number of books to see which ones catch their fancy before deciding on what to buy.

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And I'm sure any grocer in the country will understand when a customer takes home a load of different products without paying for them just to see if any of them catches his fancy.

It's one thing when a dealer offers free samples, it's quite another when a potential customer just walks off with goods stolen by a third party.

I know we can't equate illegal downloads with lost sales, but a) they are still illegal and b) they are still illegal.

I play whack a mole with some of these sites to get my works removed, but I shouldn't have to jump through their hoops in the first place. They know perfectly well what they do is illegal, and I look forward to the day that my publishers get their thumbs out of their collective arses and go after them.

There is one small crumb of comfort for me with some of them. The pirates are uploading anything they can grab to porn sites so they can download more porn. I'm reasonably sure my books are languishing unread in various files there!

I play whack a mole with some of these sites to get my works removed, but I shouldn't have to jump through their hoops in the first place. They know perfectly well what they do is illegal, and I look forward to the day that my publishers get their thumbs out of their collective arses and go after them.

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I think that's the problem, though. The whack a mole approach doesn't work, the RIAA is far richer than most publishing houses, and better organized, they got their thumbs out their asses and went after music pirates, and I can still download any album I want any time I want. It's as easy as its ever been.

I think Dr. Zoidberg makes a good point: this is the world we live in, so how are we going to adapt. What strategies are working?

GradyHendrix said:

I think that's the problem, though. The whack a mole approach doesn't work, the RIAA is far richer than most publishing houses, and better organized, they got their thumbs out their asses and went after music pirates, and I can still download any album I want any time I want. It's as easy as its ever been.

I think Dr. Zoidberg makes a good point: this is the world we live in, so how are we going to adapt. What strategies are working?

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^^
This.

It's even harder with books than it is with music. Publishers - and I speak as someone who sat in a room yesterday while members of our board outlined the anti-piracy strategy - publishers don't have a prayer of being able to do anything about this from an enforcement point of view. It will require the carrot instead of the stick.

DrZoidberg said:

She makes the old music, film and game industry fallacy of equating an illegal download with a lost sale. In fact, we have no way of calculating how many of those illegal down-loaders ever would have bought the book.

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I do actually agree with this. I used to be a video game programmer, and saw a ton of piracy from that side of things. Not every pirated copy of our game was a lost sale.

However, I think a lot of why it gets so emotionally charged is that pirates also tend to get really defensive about their practice. Someone pirates your game or book, and gets called on it. They'll not only try to make arguments as to why they're /not wrong/, but in many cases they'll also try to come up with reasons why what they're doing is somehow /morally better than buying it would be/. I'm sure we can all think of those twisted arguments we've seen on forums or comment threads.

And that's sort of like rubbing salt on a wound, then washing it in lemon juice. And possibly setting the injured limb on fire.

I think one of the worst ways to engage with piracy is the MPAA approach. They're the industry leaders, even before the RIAA, in a fallacies like "a pirated movie = a lost sale" and "pirates are destroying the movie industry and putting good people out of work." In the meantime, the movie industry is seeing bigger profits than ever before and some of the most pirated movies of all time like WOLVERINE and AVATAR are also doing huge business at the box office. It sends a mixed message, at best.

This kind of behavior gives people who want to pirate the impression that the people against piracy are crying wolf and over-stating their case. Turning an anti-piracy campaign into a well-funded corporate endeavor may serve to delegitimize other anti-piracy efforts.

Just off the top of my head, some anti-piracy strategies that might work. Some are impractical, some may be silly, but I'm just trying to kick some things around that might actually be a way of engaging with piracy rather than rehashing the same old arguments and practices that don't seem to be very effective:

1) 1000 True Fans - rather than worrying about losing money to illegal downloaders, try to shore up your base. Engage actively and enthusiastically with your fans in the hope of creating that magical 1000 true fans who will buy what you produce because they want to support you. That way, you're assured of making a living and you can let the rest of it take care of itself.

2) Fetishize the Physical - make sure you have gorgeous, beautifully crafted and highly desirable physical collateral for sale. For example, everyone can pirate your new book, but only a few hundred can buy the $50 signed, hand bound, illustrated version with additional notations that you have produced. In an age when digital piracy is rampant, the limited edition physical artifact that cannot be copied may become more valuable.

3) Watermarks - is there a way to watermark all of your digital editions so that the buyer's name is on every page? That won't stop piracy, but it may be embarrassing to the pirate to see their own name permanently attached to every digital copy of your book that's out there.

4) Engagement - this is a tough one for authors who feel wronged or angry that their works have been pirated, but appearing on message boards where your works have been pirated and catering to the piratical self-image and then asking for a tip may be something that works. Saying something flattering, such as, "You have the ability to pirate my books and, frankly, I'm happy to see that people want to read them so congratulations on your good taste!" and then going to, "I depend on sales to make a living but I don't think a pirated book should cost anywhere close to what a legit edition should. If you kind folks could see your way towards paying what you think my book was worth once you've read it that would make me, and my kids and cats, really happy. Here's a link to my virtual tip jar." I'm sure some authors would rather chew off their own faces than make obsequious gestures like this, but they've already stolen your car. It might be nice to make $100 off it rather than $0. And what could it hurt?

5) Get more out of what you already have - if you have 100 people already buying legit copies of your book, then maybe it's a good idea to give them more opportunities to spend money on your products? Really actively doing a hard sell on t-shirts, short stories expanding your world, novellas based on your characters and other merchandised items might be a way of monetizing your already existing fanbase and off-setting losses from piracy.

Anyways, just some thoughts on how to productively cope with piracy rather than more hair-pulling about how horrible/not horrible it all is and how did the world come to this and what are these kids doing on my lawn.

I'd be curious to see other suggestions from folks.

GradyHendrix said:

"I depend on sales to make a living but I don't think a pirated book should cost anywhere close to what a legit edition should. If you kind folks could see your way towards paying what you think my book was worth once you've read it that would make me, and my kids and cats, really happy. Here's a link to my virtual tip jar." I'm sure some authors would rather chew off their own faces than make obsequious gestures like this, but they've already stolen your car. It might be nice to make $100 off it rather than $0.

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In fairness, this has worked out relatively well for Jonathan Coulton. See the "Already Stole It?" section of JoCo's webstore.

EveLanglais said:

I've got a Sony too and agree PDF sucks to read on it. If I enlarge the print at all the formatting gets all messed up. I actually buy 95% of my books from Fictionwise which offers LRF not to mention I find it easier to browse.
Eve

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The problem is the very limited hardware. There's nothing wrong with the .pdf format, which is very useful and very nearly universal. However, opening and scaling a .pdf takes more resources than viewing a simple .txt file.

Personally, I'm not fond of any e-ink based reader.

Torgo said:

^^
This.

It's even harder with books than it is with music. Publishers - and I speak as someone who sat in a room yesterday while members of our board outlined the anti-piracy strategy - publishers don't have a prayer of being able to do anything about this from an enforcement point of view. It will require the carrot instead of the stick.

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Fortunately, you're dealing with a largely non-existent problem, and looking at the demographics of the e-ink based ebook reader market, it never will be a major concern. From what I've seen, the sort of people who own Kindles and Nooks are also in the market for Zimmer frames. I've never seen a grayer group of early adopters.

Uhm, I own a Kindle. So do many of my friends, all of whom are voracious readers. Several others own Nooks, or read eBooks on their iPad or iPhone. Mind you, we're all folks who basically grew up in the digital age, but the concept of not having to find yet more shelf space for books -- and the ability to pick up a new book on a whim at 2am if you can't sleep and finished the book you /were/ reading -- are major benefits to eBooks. Also, an eReader is a lot easier to read casually -- or stuff in your bag to have with you on the bus or train -- than a hardback book. (Especially certain hardback books which are large and heavy enough that they probably could qualify as building materials. Patrick Rothfuss, George R.R. Martin, I'm looking at you both!)

Now, I know a lot of older folks who /also/ have picked up Kindles, including my father. He picked up a Kindle after seeing me use mine when we traveled through Greece and Italy together. He had several books in his luggage to read on trains and planes and suchnot, while I just brought my Kindle. By the end of our trip, he was really eager to get one; he particularly loves the ability to adjust the print size.

So plenty of older folks have eReaders, yes. But so do plenty of younger folks.

Moreover, if you look at a number of references earlier in this thread, authors -- including some on this board! -- /are/ finding their books being pirated on these sites. So it's not a non-existent problem.

If are disturbed by a few download websites, don't ever go on irc. You'll find channels dedicated to ebooks with hundreds of thousands of books listed, and that for a long time. Ever since scanners and text recognition programs became available.
There are also websites where people exchange their dead tree versions, which, while not copying, is also a bunch of readers who don't pay anything for the books.
There is nothing that can be done to stop it with force, so it's best not to worry about it.
Think about it this way, the music industry has decried their own demise because of piracy ever since the tape recorder, let alone napster. As of today, they're still making record amounts of money.

AmericaMadeMe said:

Fortunately, you're dealing with a largely non-existent problem, and looking at the demographics of the e-ink based ebook reader market, it never will be a major concern. From what I've seen, the sort of people who own Kindles and Nooks are also in the market for Zimmer frames. I've never seen a grayer group of early adopters.

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I bought my Sony reader when I was 33 and I'm quite capable of walking without assistance, thank you very much.

And if you mention my grey hair again, I will cut you.

scarletpeaches said:

I bought my Sony reader when I was 33 and I'm quite capable of walking without assistance, thank you very much.

And if you mention my grey hair again, I will cut you.

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Hey, you bought a Sony reader, that means you're hip, young and tech-savvy. AmericaMadeMe was only talking about Kindle and Nook owners, right? RIGHT?

Lhun said:

Hey, you bought a Sony reader, that means you're hip, young and tech-savvy. AmericaMadeMe was only talking about Kindle and Nook owners, right? RIGHT?

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You forgot gorgeous. COMPLETELY GORGEOUS! Right? RIGHT??