Is book piracy a real issue?

Factual Questions
1

First off, I am NOT asking where to download pirated books.

I recently got a Nook. A friend and I were talking about it, and it turned to if book piracy will destroy the book industry. He argued it could, because look what happened with music and movies, and those industries are healthier than books.

I argued it wouldn’t. I don’t deny that the most popular books are easily obtainable online, but I don’t think the obscure stuff is. OTOH obscure movies and music are easily available. Plus, considering the size of text, if it was going to majorly impact the book industry then it would have even before Napster brought the issue to the music industry. After all, book sized text is usually no more than a couple meg.

A quick search at the bay where pirates hang out seems to show Harry Potter and other very popular books are easy to find. But a search for books I own printed decades ago by authors no one has ever heard of comes up with nothing. OTOH a search for a random obscure movie from the 80’s came up with a hit. Similar a search for an obscure music act from the early 90’s was positive.

So my question, is there a thriving community of book pirates that I’m not aware of? Ones with a large enough selection that it would harm the small press and authors that haven’t become literary superstars?

2

Here in Peru, book piracy is giantic, but not digitally. Books are printed at a fifth of the price.

3

Well, have the movie and music industries folded? They seem to be doing pretty well to me.

4

Your friend’s premise is wrong. The music business is thriving. CD sales have tanked, but that’s because people are buying music through digital downloads. Overall music sales are rising (up 2.1% in 2009 versus 2008 according to Billboard magazine). And while DVD sales are dropping (down 13.5%), rentals are up (8.3%) and digital sales/rentals are up too (21%).(cite). Add to that the fact that folks are spending more money going to the movies, and the net dollars spent are flat, at worst.

What has changed is the method of delivery, not the appetite for content. All evidence suggests the same will hold true in the book business. Amazon reported in July that they were selling more ebooks than hardcovers, and this at a time when sales of hardcovers are up 22%.

I leave it to others to debate the extent to which piracy is taking money out of the marketplace. I will say that piracy was an issue long before e-books existed, and the book industry (and others) have survived just fine.

5

Music and movies come out in CD/DVD or other easily copyable formats.
My copy of ‘The Anubis Gates’ would have to be scanned and character recognized before I could dump it off at the Pirate Bay. That’s far too much work for most people, so books written before the late nineties at least are probably pretty safe from piracy. Of course, most of the profit is in newer books, which are increasingly available in crackable digital form.

6

Book piracy has been around at least as long as music piracy. The major bottleneck is the difficulty in going from the printed page to an electronic file. That takes a good scanner, optical character reading software, and someone with enough time to scan all the pages and proofread the result. Now that ebooks are becoming more common, for at least some books that bottleneck will be bypassed (and replaced with the relatively (compared to above) simple task of removing DRM protection). Books are also, sadly, not as in demand as music, as far as I can tell.

7

There’s a sort of book piracy with dead tree books. Most bookstores order more books than they think will sell. Then, with paperback books at least, they tear off the front covers and send those covers back to the publisher for a credit. The stores are supposed to destroy the books that they’ve claimed as unsold, but some stores (or more likely, their employees) will sell the coverless books at a steep discount. This is why paperback books have that legalese on one of the first pages about how if you bought it without a cover, it was reported as unsold and destroyed and neither author nor publisher received payment for it.

8

I actually read something interesting on this topic the other day. I read Jerry Pournelle’s blog practically every day. He was actually doing that before they called it blogging.

In the past, he has said some very bitter things about book piracy sites like scribd. Lately, he has been trying to create clean electronic copies of his older work, so he can publish them in Kindle format. It turns out a lot of authors still have the e-book rights to their work, because in the old days there no e-books rights to sell.

In some cases the easiest way to get clean electronic copies was to download them from pirate sites!

http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/oa/2010/20100920_col.php

Personally I think writers and editors will always have a living, but I’m not so sure about publishers and agents.

9

When I lived in Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a famous bookstore called “Cave’s Bookstore”, which was probably the Pirated Book Capitol of the World. They had nearly every book imaginable in it, at steeply discounted prices, and typically printed on some of the worst paper they could find.

My parents bought me the World Book Encyclopedia (something like 24 volumes), at a price that was around $50 or less. The articles were the same as were found in the “real” version we had at my school library, but the pictures were too dark. The paper quality was a step up from newspaper, but was kind of slick.

As a side anecdote, my dad and another missionary used to play saxophones. One day, they went to Cave’s to look for some sheet music. The other missionary made the mistake of asking the bookseller, “Do you have any books on sax?” The man nodded eagerly and led him to the back of the store, through a curtain, into a room absolutely filled with magazines and books on something that sounds a whole lot like “sax” to the Chinese ear.

I think I may have heard that Cave’s went legit sometime in the 1980s.

10

Ah, the poor music industry. It has been mentioned above that music sales are actually doing quite well, just not in hardware form. Digital sales are very popular.
There is also an idea, shared even by many in the music industry, that when CD sales did take a hit, the music industry itself was more at fault than pirating. The music industry has changed over the last few decades in that artists are now manufactured based on things other than artistic talent. This has caused the quality of actual music to suffer. A CD may have 1 good song now, where back in the day the motto was “all killer no filler.” If a CD has one good song, I’ll go download that song and forget about the other 10 tracks.

For this reason, I do not think pirating will effect book sales. Again, the media may change. Hardback book sales will decrease while digital book sales will increase. We’re already seeing that with Barnes & Noble’s struggles. They were a bit slow to keep up with Amazon. Hopefully they turn it around, because I really enjoy walking around a big bookstore.

11

This is hardly a recent phenomenon.

12

All it takes is an easy way to break the DRM on the books that people buy.

For stuff that has no DRM, like PDFs, it’s fairly easy to find pirated versions. I’ve seen full copies of the Lonely Planet series and O’Reilly eBooks on torrent sites.

13

If file size isn’t a concern, then there’s not even a reason to go through the hassle of OCR. Just scan to a PDF. Oh, but you want searchable text? The ability to copy and paste? Apple’s Preview app (the default PDF handler) automatically OCR’s the text. You can select and copy words and paragraphs of scanned documents just fine (I think the full version of Acrobat does that, too, but hey, Preview opens instantly.).

14

E-book piracy has been going on for a long time. 12-15 years ago it was mostly on Usenet groups. Those might still exist, but much of it is now occurring at the same websites and torrent aggregators where music, movies, TV shows, and software are pirated. The very small size of an e-book file has always made this very easy. A compressed 500 page book might be .3-.5MB, while a typical MP3 is 3-5MB, and a full length movie is 800MB or more. As mentioned several times, the problem with pirating paper books to e-books is in the conversion, but once it’s converted, that copy spreads very easily.

The big thing that has changed recently is that viewers for e-books have gone mainstream. 10 years ago e-books could be viewed on a PDA (such as a Palm Pilot or Windows CE device), a general purpose computer, or printed. Today there are many devices to view e-books on, such as smart phones, “dumb” phones (anything that can run JavaME), MP3 players, tablets, and purpose built e-book readers.

My opinion is that mainstream use of e-books will both increase the amount of piracy that goes on, and increase the amount of money authors and publishers earn from e-books. Just like many people are happy to buy music from iTunes or Amazon, even though the same music is available “free.” A generally available method of cracking Kindle, etc. files for unencumbered distribution will probably also increase the amount of piracy.

This is probably entering GD territory, but it seems to me that publishers are attempting to make e-books the new hard covers. Things like the $10 price point, and how that $10 is divided between author, publisher, and distributor is more typical of hard back books than paperbacks. For now the attempt seems to be to sell “hardbacks” forever. E-books are $10, and they’ll always be $10. As opposed to real hardbacks, which might be $25, and then six months to a year later the paperback comes out for $8. Perhaps eventually publishers will start e-books at a high price, and then when the paperback comes out, drop the e-book price to $3 or so. For now they seem to want to get rid of that model completely.

Finally, an anecdote. At the publishing of one of the Harry Potter books (whichever came out in 2004 or so) JK Rowling made the comment that the Harry Potter books would never be available as e-books, because that made piracy too easy. First, that means anybody who wanted an e-book of Harry Potter only had the option of pirating, so they couldn’t give her money for it, even if they wanted to (of course they could buy the book despite pirating it). Second, the lack of an official e-book version did nothing to prevent the creation of pirate e-book versions. I went to the midnight release of one of the books, and a proofread pirate version was available by the time I got home from the release party. Of course I’m at GMT+7, so I probably could have had the pirate version before I went to the party. This version was not due to early leaks, but from many people who bought it, and each put up a few pages of proofread text, which was then assembled into the full book.

15

It’s a potential problem, depending on how it shakes out.

There are plenty of people who pirate books and put them online; so far, that hasn’t created a big problem in sales. But as eBook readers become more common, it will start to take a toll.

The main reason why music is still doing OK is because they’ve moved to artists who can do big tours – people like Lady Gaga, who is primarily a visual act. Record companies have little interest in small, talented acts, and those end up struggling for recognition. Ultimately, you’re having exactly what I predicted would happen when Napster came on the scene: fewer musicians able to make a living, more crap, and no good way to introduce a new act that doesn’t fit within some very specific parameters.

As for books, you don’t have any performers to promote, so new authors are going to be screwed. Actually, all authors are going to be screwed – they’ll be like poets are today, giving away their work for peanuts and being read only by other authors.

But the problem with pirated books is less an issue with the fact that people have other things to do with their time than read. And eBook readers have a clear path: first graphics; then, moving graphics; then video. Those to read books will become those who watch online films. Don’t believe me? How did personal reading take a hit when radio and later TV came along? Before them, people would read in the evening. Now, they watch TV. eBooks will inevitably follow the same path.

Further, it’s clear that people who have grown up on the Internet are reluctant to pay for any content for anything more than a nominal fee (and often, not that – how many of you pay to be on the SDMB, for instance?). It’s an ugly trend that has some very frightening implications.

The future of books is bleak and there’s a good chance that in 50 years, they’ll only be published – online or in hard copy – for a tiny group of specialists (except a few types of categories). In a century, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who has read a book.

16

cultural banality and legions of idiots who do not read anything except highlights magazine while they wait for their kids’ pediatrician are the bigger issues in the book industry, imho.

17

Hey, I used to read Highlights magazine while at the pediatrician all by myself waiting for my weekly allergy shots. There simply was no other reading matter!

I’m not certain that I agree with the logic here. With laptops, near-ubiquitous iPads, and televisions in the bedroom, people already have the choice to choose other media in lieu of reading. The fact that they’re choosing to read would appear to be evidence that they want to read instead of other activities.

I’ve only ever read a few eBooks, and that’s going back in time from my Palm V to my current iPhone (I’ve never tried a Kindle or iPad). For non-ephemeral works (say, McGee’s On Food and Cooking), an eBook – even “free” such as pirated – is absolutely no substitute. For ephemeral trash (even enjoyable trash, such as the latest King novel), eBooks can be okay, but even then I’d prefer the audio version just for the time involved.

But then this brings me to…

(Please do note the “Charter Member” status, and as soon as I can think of a cool, little title, I may add that, too.)

I’m too old to have grown up on the internet, but I did grow up on the C=64 scene and then later BBS’s. And I admit it fostered an attitude that stays with me today: Non-ephemeral things are worth paying for. Ephemeral things could be worth paying “rent” for, but there’s limited availability to rent. That Stephen King novel I want to listen to in my car one time? I have to purchase it through iTunes/Audible for $30, even though I have no intention of keeping it. Renting isn’t an option.

I think that my attitude isn’t unique, and as such there will continue to be a wide market for real, printed matter.

18

You’re half right, fewer artists are getting rich on album sales alone in this day and age. But more artists are getting rich off lucrative touring, music licensing opportunities and branded merchandise.

Social networking has become a powerful tool for bands and a lot of them are using it to build their own niche in cyberspace.

The decline in personal reading is largely a myth created by a poorly done survey becoming the standard.

http://www.sdkrashen.com/articles/decline_of_reading/all.html

In fact, reading by teens is way up in the last few years.

http://www.seattlepi.com/books/306531_teenlit08.html

Dude, really? Are we all going to drive to work in flying cars and jetpacks too? Because both of those predictions sound just as likely as yours. And at the very least, there are working jetpacks and flying cars today. Where are all these non-readers going to come from in a Harry Potter and Twilight world?

19

I was at a publishing convention in 1999 or 2000 and went to a seminar on digital publishing. The guy who was speaking started off by saying “I know the first concern that you all have about eBooks is piracy, and you’re afraid that distributing the books in an electronic format is going to make it too easy for people to make copies.” He pulled out a trade paperback, sliced the spine with a boxcutter, and put the pages into a sheet scanner on the table next to the podium. “Before this presentation is over,” he said, “I’ll have a PDF of this Clancy novel.”

Advances in software and hardware have only made that sort of thing easier, but of course, wholesale piracy of books was going on 100 years ago. Dickens and Twain complained about it bitterly in their day. It’s been going on since Gutenberg, including Gutenberg himself.

And all the folks who are talking doom and gloom about how people don’t read anymore… check some of the cites in posts above. Book sales are up.

20

This isn’t an answer but I just had to share a recent Dilbert.