
Confessions of a Book Pirate - mhb
http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/confessions-of-a-book-pirate.html
======
acabal
Conversations about ebook piracy being the death of the industry should be
prefaced by the fact that many big players in the industry saw their best
years _ever_ this year. Random House gave _every single employee_ , from
editors to janitors, a $5,000 bonus this year because the company made so much
money. [http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/12/50-shades-
succe...](http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/12/50-shades-success-
yields-5000-bonuses-at-random-house/)

Just like the music and film industries, the publishing industry is gripped by
an irrational fear so great that thinking goes out the window. Indie authors
are railing that piracy is taking their sales, when the truth is that often
their books or marketing efforts are so bad that they wouldn't have had any
sales anyway. Believe me, I know--I run a web site for writers! "Piracy" is
the giant slobbering boogeyman that everyone can blame their problems on, but
that doesn't really exist.

Personally I never buy ebooks for three reasons:

1\. DRM. I've bought a handful of DRM'd ebooks in my life and I never will
again, not even for a penny. DRM is crime against freedom of information and
consumer rights.

2\. The quality of many ebooks is just atrocious. Any ebook version of a book
written before, say, 2000 is guaranteed to be riddled with typos and errors so
bad as to be unreadable. And publishers still ask north of $10 for such an
ebook. They OCR a dog-eared paperback from the CEO's personal library, don't
bother to proofread it, and slap it on Amazon for $10 and pray for the money
to roll in. Such practices are disgusting to a bibliophile like me and I
refuse to support that.

3\. Price. Paying $10 for a perfect ebook is really stretching it, considering
it's often cheaper to have a paper copy _shipped to your door_ by Amazon.
Throw in the shameful quality of many ebooks I mentioned above and it becomes
an outright scam.

If you want a good example of both #2 and #3, check out Amazon's Kindle
edition of Frank Herbert's _Dune_. Use the preview feature and try reading
through the first few pages. The ebook is unreadably bad--embarrasingly so for
the publisher--and the Kindle edition costs $14.99 (!!!), 3x the price of a
new paperback! How outrageous is that?

~~~
eof
Coincidentally I have a pirated version of the whole dune series and it is
nearly flawless.

------
nobleach
I'm going to need a source for the claim " As the music industry was ravaged
by file sharing" That seems to contradict the facts. As a person that feels
morally obligated to pay for the bits I consume (via Netflix and Hulu Plus) I
just read this morning that the movie industry has realized record profits...
once again. Is their math based on theoretical maximums? That's not sane. One
can not build a model on "if everyone whom has seen a movie were to pay up".
That negates group viewings and many other random displays. In my field (maybe
"our" field) I try to pay for EVERY book I read. Often the authors make
themselves available via email or right here in HN comments. Also, these guys
are typically writing about moving targets. I'd HATE to be writing a book
about something like Node.js or Scala right now. The landscape is moving just
rapidly enough as to make your book out of date in a year's time. But I'm just
not so sure piracy should be blamed. Sure, I could hit a torrent site and look
for a book. I could also get a membership to my public library. And in the
end, I WANT to support they gal/guy whom is going to write the next great book
on Dojo/Clojure/Backbon.js/Play Framework etc. My point being. Consider the
public library, the radio, and network television. Not everyone that is
willing to consume free materials, is a pirate. Not every industry that has a
price on a consumable resource is losing money if people find a free way to
consume said resource.

------
d23
I pay for most of the books I read, but occasionally I will pirate if I'm not
sure if the book is something I'll really enjoy.

Sometimes I feel like I'm being fleeced though, and I'll resort to pirating.
When I bought my Kindle, I figured I would at least save a little bit over the
cost of a physical book, since they cost next to nothing to produce and
distribute. But it's been just the opposite. Most kindle books are actually
more expensive, some by 40% or more. This combined with the fact that I still
don't even own my book makes for a painful purchasing experience.

They should be giving incentives to people for purchasing legitimate digital
copies, not punishing them. In my mind, $4 would feel like a slightly high
"premium" price to pay for a digital version of a $9.99 paperback, and I'd
feel a lot better about paying it.

I'll probably still keep paying the money, but I hope we see some radical
changes in the future to the pricing structure of digital books.

Edit: I will say that I've been pleasantly surprised by the return policy on
my Kindle books the last couple of times I've returned books. There was no
hassle and no questions. Couldn't have asked for a better experience.

------
ivan_ah
As an author, I believe that everyone who pirates my book is helping me spread
the word. PDFs are nice and all, but for a science textbook I find that
nothing beats the printed book: you can flip though pages quickly and find the
information you are looking for.

Obligatory product plug: [ High school math, mechanics and calculus for busy
adults ]: <http://minireference.com> [ eg. Calculus I fully explained in just
25 pages ]

------
demetris
Previous discussion, from the time the article was published:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078652>

------
eof
I have my second Kindle and the first thing I did after receiving it -- the
first one was stolen, amusingly-- was download several thousand books from
torrent sites.

Of those, I cherry picked several dozen, many of which I bought physical
copies of over the years but long since liquidated.

Many though I had never heard of and loaded anyway.

I have also bought quite a few ebooks out of convenience and feel 0 qualms. If
anything my actions have increased revenue as I have avidly recommended a
number of books I never would have discovered otherwise.

Of the 5k or so books I have downloaded, I have read .5% or so. Maybe two of
those books I would have bought. Sorry Tim Ferris.

------
heyitsnick
nb first published January 2010

~~~
VLM
I was surprised to see its only two years old. When it discussed the Baen Free
Library as if it were a new experiment, I had to check the article date as the
"new" Baen experiment is over a decade old now.

I like the Baen library, its resulted in my spending lots of money on Baen
products. This is not new, public libraries have been providing the same free
marketing service to print books for centuries now.

I thought the article claim that $10 would be a fair price to be ridiculous
because there needs to be a market between "I wouldn't read it at the public
library for free" and "$10 minimum". There's a lot of people making a dollar
here or there on the kindle marketplace by either cleanly and correctly
reformatting Project Gutenberg books into kindle format, or ripping people off
who think they're getting cleaned up kindle format PG files but its just a
junk file or poorly done. Maybe I'd buy 100 different $1 books on the off
chance I'll want to read them, or a half dozen for $10 if I feel its a sure
bet by a favored author, or $50 if I am obligated by school or work. It would
seem profits favor the $1 book.

