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Piracy
Apr 7, 2014 22:25:09 GMT
Post by Amber Skye Forbes on Apr 7, 2014 22:25:09 GMT
Needless to say, my book is on a piracy website now. I am not happy about this at all. I demanded the website take it down and alerted my publisher already. I get the whole, 'Well, someone who steals your book and doesn't buy it probably isn't interested to begin with.' But, I dunno. I feel like rhetoric like that only works for music or video games or movies or television shows. I don't think it works quite the same for books. After all, Shannon Thompson's Minutes Before Sunset receive reviews because of this piracy, but it's not like those people bumped up her sales.
What's your take on it?
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Piracy
Apr 7, 2014 22:54:18 GMT
Post by Mariah E. on Apr 7, 2014 22:54:18 GMT
Stealing is wrong and ebook pirates should be drug out into the street and shot.
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Piracy
Apr 7, 2014 22:55:34 GMT
Post by Mariah E. on Apr 7, 2014 22:55:34 GMT
Fact is, MOST indie authors are starving artists...and I've seen LOADS of them say something similar to the following;
"Please do not steal my book. If you really want to read it and can't afford a copy, ASK ME and I will send one to you...just please don't steal my work."
Most authors are decent like that.
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Piracy
Apr 7, 2014 23:28:05 GMT
Post by Amber Skye Forbes on Apr 7, 2014 23:28:05 GMT
It's just so different from the theft of any other property. With music, you can listen to songs on Youtube, and you are likely to buy that album. I listened to Nightwish's newest album on Youtube and bought it. Same with Emilie Autumn's. I also want to buy Silversun Pickups. Not to mention that even when music is pirated, people who love it will buy the CD or download it on iTunes. They're willing to support their favorite musicians, but no one is willing to support authors, even if they love our books. Songs are listened to over and over again. Books most often are not read over and over again.
Fact is, many readers are unaware of just how little we writers make on our books. Musicians make a great deal of their money off tours. We authors don't have that. And stealing movies? At least those movies were in theaters, making millions of dollars or whatever. And the actors and everyone who made that movie are still making some good money from it all. Not us.
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Post by Kristoffer Hansen on Apr 7, 2014 23:47:36 GMT
So, full disclosure, I have a bit of a sordid past when it comes to piracy of all kinds. My dad used to steal movies using a two-VHS tape recorder dealio. He'd play the movie on one video machine, and record it on another while it was playing. We had HUNDREDS of tapes, because why buy a movie for full price when you can rent it for a couple of dollars and own it anyway? I got into anime piracy as a young man, and that was actually something I got paid to do for a while. And I am an accomplished thief of books.
I'm not going to defend piracy, but I will try and explain why it's something to be dealt with instead of fought.
We live in what is effectively an age where information is post-scarcity, and there are a lot of industries that are having difficulty adjusting to that. Information can be copied infinitely and distributed infinitely for free. That includes movies, video games, executable programs, television shows, music, books, comics, audio books, and pictures of what you had for lunch. If I gave you a zero dollar budget and told you to "Find me porn on the internet," how much porn could you find me? The answer is "All of it." Companies and industries that base their business model on scarcity of information are having a really hard time dealing with this, because their business model doesn't reflect the reality of the world we live in anymore. That world is one where, if you have the tools and the knowledge, you never have to pay for entertainment again.
And, (creators aside, we'll get to that in a minute) why would you? Why would you pay for a thing you can get for free? If a grocery store offered you free groceries for the rest of your life, I think it's fair to say you'd take it in an instant. You'd take it without thought to the farmers who grew the food, the local organizations that collect and sell it, the distributors that make sure grocery stores get it, the grocery store employees themselves... None of that would really enter into it. You get free groceries for life while all of these other people are paying for food like chumps.
Sadly, this means we don't know how to pay creators for the stuff they make. Back when a chunk of dead tree was the only way to get a book, paying people per unit sold made a lot of sense. You sell a book, you get a dollar. The more books you sell, the more money you make. That totally makes sense, right up until we invent a book-cloning machine. Then, seven thousand people read your book, and you make a dollar for the one book you actually sold. And that sucks, because it means you're not making as much money as you could/should, and it means you're not making your publisher as much money as you could/should, but I'm not sure that it's entirely the fault of the book-cloners. I think a fairly huge chunk of the problem lies with an outdated and outmoded industry that hasn't caught up to how the world really works.
There are a couple of ways people are innovating that make for interesting publishing options. One of the people I'm thinking of is Matt Fraction, who put his graphic novel P.I. up on the internet on a pay-what-you-can model. Instead of paying a set price, you pay what you want to pay. Some people paid zero dollars. Other people paid twenty dollars for the same book. That's a neat way of doing it, I'm not sure how feasible it is, long-term.
Another is Greg Stolze, a fellow who writes role-playing games for a living. His model involves holding his books hostage. It would be the novel equivalent of writing the first book in a series, and then putting a fundraising bar on your website. When the fundraising bar hits its goal, you release the second book, fund-raising bar goes to zero, and you start again for the third book. If the fund-raising bar doesn't reach its target, the book never gets released. This would probably be easier with short stories. Anyway, the thing works for him. He releases expansions for his game when they're funded, and not a minute before. If the funding never comes in, he scraps that expansion. The first time that happened, people weren't convinced he'd chuck it, but he did, and it's never been back, and people understand that they need to pay this man if they want the content he creates.
In both of these models, you create work that some people are going to see for free and other people are going to pay for. Which is also problematic, I think. But they're at least attempting to address the problem of how to pay a creator fairly for the work they produce, leaving behind the royalties model for something that piracy can't effect.
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Post by Mariah E. on Apr 8, 2014 0:01:13 GMT
Greg Stolze is brilliant. Hold content hostage. Never would have thought of that.
And if George Martin adopted his "If you really want it you'll pay me first" strategy, we'd have books 6 and 7 by nightfall. LOL
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Piracy
Apr 8, 2014 0:31:57 GMT
Post by Amber Skye Forbes on Apr 8, 2014 0:31:57 GMT
I've heard of Matt Fraction from another Tumblr user. I actually used him when I, ironically, wrote a post about e-book piracy this morning before even discovering my book had been pirated.
I've sent the site a message and have alerted my publisher to it. For now, all we can do is deal with it when we hear about it. I think having a publisher behind me helps because AEC is a legal entity, and I have zero power in that area. All I can do is send a message, but as to whether or not it will be taken down by my message alone remains to be seen.
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Piracy
Apr 8, 2014 0:33:34 GMT
Post by Amber Skye Forbes on Apr 8, 2014 0:33:34 GMT
Recent research has shown that publishers are trying to deal with the theft of e-books. Video games are doing it by annoying you with character dialogue that will remind you that you stole the game. Some are even creating crash copies. These games play normally at first, but then a pop-up appears later on, consistently reminding you that you pirated the game.
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Piracy
Apr 8, 2014 0:34:00 GMT
Post by Kristoffer Hansen on Apr 8, 2014 0:34:00 GMT
That tumblr user was me if it was SlurpeeMoney.
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Piracy
Apr 8, 2014 0:53:07 GMT
Post by Amber Skye Forbes on Apr 8, 2014 0:53:07 GMT
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Piracy
Apr 8, 2014 2:27:02 GMT
Post by Kristoffer Hansen on Apr 8, 2014 2:27:02 GMT
I'm familiar with the article.
I think the big difference between Mr. Green's position and mine is that I believe in the inevitability of shrinkage. Before I became a stay-at-home-dad/writer, I worked in a lot of different fields, everything from time share sales to managing a game store. Every single industry I've worked with has shrinkage, loss from theft or damage. It's part of the cost of doing business. Sometimes people will steal from you. Sometimes people will break your stuff. There's nothing you can do to prevent that completely.
People are going to steal from me. If I run my business in a way that makes that theft both easy and incredibly damaging to me, I won't be in business long. Book publishers are currently paying writers in a way that is deeply damaging to those writers when shrinkage happens. If fewer books get sold, writers get paid less. If people steal books that they would have otherwise had to acquire legally, the writer suffers for that, and I feel that that is a problem that needs looking into, and it's a problem that can be solved through some creative and side-ways thinking.
I don't think piracy is going to be solved in our generation, especially with the direction anti-piracy movements are going. It may never get solved. It is still legal in Canada to download something from a shared folder (meaning that DOWNLOADING something isn't technically piracy, but UPLOADING is). There are some countries that aren't beholden to modern copyright at all. It's a really difficult, complicated problem that also involves things like corporate personhood, overreaching copyright laws, net neutrality, and a host of other, equally difficult topics. If that gets sorted in my lifetime, it will be because I've transferred my consciousness into a wicked-awesome computer brain and I'm going to live forever.
I think we can find a way to pay our authors fairly for what they've done regardless of piracy, though. That's something we should really be looking at, and fixing as soon as possible.
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Piracy
Apr 8, 2014 18:15:03 GMT
Post by Amber Skye Forbes on Apr 8, 2014 18:15:03 GMT
I think the problem, too, is that some books are unfairly priced. John Green's kindle version was originally more than the hardback version. I didn't buy his book for the longest time because of that, yet I wasn't going to steal it. That's nuts. But $3.89 for my book? If you can afford to buy that, then you have no right to steal from me. Video games and the entertainment industry are solving this problem. Netflix has been one such route. And Steam has been another. By requiring simple subscriptions, people can access as many movies and what not as they want.
So I think affordability is the key.
But 50,000 people stealing Looking for Alaska? You cannot tell me that at least several thousand of those people couldn't have been potential customers. My publisher argues pirates aren't customers anyway, but that doesn't mean we can't make them customers. After all, before e-books, people had to pay for those books, so those same people who are stealing ARE potential customers, and we need to make them legal consumers.
Another argument is exposure, but many piraters download a crap ton of books and may never even read them. My fiancé did, and I was not happy tht he did that. He barely picks up his Kindle. Where is the exposure in that? Not only am I not getting money, I'm not getting a review or at least word-of-mouth.
As for paying authors fairly, we should. Authors at bigger houses need a bigger cut on e-books than what they're getting. After all, you don't have to do much for an e-book other than format it for epub and Mobi and that's it. Print books still make up the lion's share of the market, so with that being the case, why do authors get mere pennies for their e-books?
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Piracy
Apr 8, 2014 20:50:00 GMT
Post by Kristoffer Hansen on Apr 8, 2014 20:50:00 GMT
Well, formatting for epub and mobi is harder than it sounds, to be fair. You can't just take the file you used for the print book and tag a new file extension on it. There's a lot of graphic design work that goes into making books pretty in various formats that's invisible to readers for the most part. And it's subtle stuff, like changing the margins closer to the middle of the book so that words don't disappear in the curvature of the pages. You don't even realize that the pages get narrower in the middle of a book than at the front and back of the book, unless you're paying attention to it. That's sort of beside the point, though.
No one has the right to steal anything from anyone, no matter the price you're asking. If I made a thing and I thought that thing was worth ten thousand dollars, and you thought it was only worth five dollars, that doesn't give you the right to take the thing from me for free. It's not about rights. They don't care whether or not they have the right to do it, they have the ability to do it, and so they do. They aren't thinking about you at all. Piracy, and any sort of theft, is an entirely selfish act. The thought process is very much: "I want a thing. I'm going to take that thing. It's going to take me three hours to download that thing. I'm going to make a sandwich." In the case of someone doing it for profit, it's more "This is a thing people want. I'm going to make that thing available to them for free. It's a really popular thing, so I'm going to put my best-paying ads on the download site."
That's it. There's no consideration for you at all. There's no consideration for your publisher. There is no consideration even of if it is right or wrong. They have the ability to take that thing for free, or to make money from that thing, and it's easier than buying the thing legitimately, so they do it.
The only way to really combat piracy is to assume it's going to happen. Some people are just assmasks, and they're going to take your thing for free. Then you have to find a way to make it either easier to procure legitimately than it is to steal it, or make it completely impossible to steal it. Greg Stolze took the second route, where he crowdfunds his stuff before it's ever published. It sets a living-wage for him, he gets paid fairly for is work, but he probably isn't making as much as he would if he were getting paid based on readership. He's set his price for the whole thing, and that's all the money he'll get for that thing (not including the bundles he gets printed of all the work he's done for the year, which is sort of like getting paid twice). Fraction et al figured they'd just give their stuff away and let people set their own price. You can't pirate a book if you can get that book for free. It is much, much easier to get the book through legitimate channels than it would be to steal it.
The current model of book sales is strictly more difficult than stealing books is. In a thirty-second search, without leaving my chair, I found twelve different sources for "Looking for Alaska," that are free. One of them includes every book Mr. Green has ever written. Choosing just the first option, it took me thirty seconds to download the book. In less than a minute, without leaving my chair, without sacrificing on my part, with a near-zero sum of effort, I just downloaded three years of John Green's life. And I can do that with probably 90%* of the books I want to read.**
There are three approaches to dealing with piracy: Make piracy harder than buying stuff, or make buying stuff easier than piracy, or profit off of the people who pirate.
The record and movie industries have taken the third approach: they threaten pirates with litigation, settle out of court, and make a pile of money from someone who downloaded Britney Spears' latest album because they weren't going to profit off of the album itself. It's been a very successful model for them.
Video games are going with the first approach: They're making it harder for pirates to find their games by seeding "busted" copies of their games. If it's impossible to find a copy of the game that isn't busted, then it's easier to just go out and buy the thing. It's been moderately successful, but people are finding ways around it now, mostly through comment sections and value-based aggregation. If people "downvote" a pirated game because it's a busted copy, it makes it easier to find the non-busted copies.
I advocate for the third option, because I think it's the only one that is 100% effective. If you make getting your stuff so easy that people have no reason to steal it, if you make it possible for people to get it for free if they want it for free, if you make it so that people can't get your content without paying you up front, essentially if you make it so that giving you money is easier than theft, people will give you money. The other two approaches have some good stuff going for them, but they come at it from the position that piracy is something you can fix if you just crack down on it hard enough. I just don't think that's true.
* I couldn't find your book, Amber. I'm assuming that's a matter of penetration more than anything, though. Small press, new writer and all that. If I do come across it, though, I'll let you know where I found it. ** I also own Looking for Alaska. It's on one of my bookshelves, either behind me, in my bedroom, or in my son's room. I like owning books. I like buying books and I like book stores. I feel like I'm worth more as a person when I own a lot of books. That makes me very, very weird for a person with my skillset, though. I place a different value on books than I do other things. I don't own a lot of DVD's, for instance.
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