
Confessions of a Book Pirate - blasdel
http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/confessions-of-a-book-pirate.html
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__david__
One thing the book industry has against it is a few hundred years of
institutionalized free books in the form of libraries. I've often struggled
with the difference between going to the library and getting a book and
downloading the torrent and reading it. I rarely reread books and in neither
case do I end up with something physical sitting on my shelf...

They seems the same to me, ethically speaking. I'd love to hear a well thought
out counter opinion. And if is _isn't_ the same, then what is the digital
equivalent of my neighborhood library?

~~~
adamc
Scaling makes them different. A physical book can have but one reader at a
time, and it can only be lent a limited number of times before wearing out,
all of which limited the impact.

~~~
andrew1
That limited number of times is probably quite high though. In our college
library there were regularly used lend-able books from the 1920s/50s and older
which hadn't worn out. Authors probably shouldn't hold out too much hope of
repeat sales to a library due to their books wearing out!

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hdx
I may have a moral issue with downloading books for free, but I also have a
anger issue when I buy textbooks for $230 and at the end of the semester the
bookstore want's to buy it back for $50.

I once bought a Chemistry textbook for a summer class for $170, I went to sell
it back to the bookstore a month later they wanted to pay $10 because a new
edition was about to come out.

What makes me even more angry is that the new edition is 95% the same as the
old one, except for the fact that they change the order of the exercises.

The textbook industry is just a big scam IMO. And if they scam me it's not
that hard for me convince myself to scam them back too, specially when it's
that easy, even when going against my moral principles.

Talking about textbooks only.

~~~
mtoledo
Yeah, but you could always try and buy a used textbook from a student, and pay
$50 instead of the original $230, no?

Of course that would be hard. You'd have to find a student which is selling,
and then seeing if the book is well preserved.

That's one of the values of having a store. They pay you less because its easy
to sell for them. Just the same, you could try and find a student that wants
to buy your used book for more money. That's hard tho, and the store knows
that, and charges accordingly.

I agree it sucks tho, specially for students who are usually short on money,
but its an open market. It's a somewhat similar situation with used games in
Madrid.

~~~
andrew1
It's exacerbated by the fact that once a new edition comes out (which can
happen every few years) the old versions have much less worth for new
students. So you could buy a $50 copy of an old version from an old student,
but if it's different enough from the new version then it may be more hassle
than its worth (page numbers not matching up, exercises being different etc.).

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CalmQuiet
As a college instructor and a citizen concerned about the cost of financing
higher education, I share the outrage over textbook costs.

But I don't expect to be outraged for long about the dinosaus textbooks are.
The sale, bianuual revision of a text, and sale of its next edition is
breeding revolts and moves to alternative models. If I get tired of waiting
when I retire (soon) I will _help launch_ the revolt: turning to models of
publicly-held, easy-to-update, non-tree-cutting formats such as wikis.

I don't attempt to prophecy often, but: "Textbooks are the next...
newspapers."

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jakarta
I'm a big pirate of books.

I mostly do it for a few reasons:

1\. Price: I typically read a lot of business reference books that are
primarily sold to professionals and as a result are pricy. When I was a
college student, I usually just checked these books out from the library, but
now that I have moved cities and am away from such a well stocked library I
find downloading to be my best bet.

2\. Convenience: I really like to have ebook copies of all of my books. I
often like to work outside of my home and find it extremely convenient to have
all of my books in my laptop. They are also amazing for quick reference.
Having a searchable copy of a book is very useful for referencing key items.

3\. Preference for E-books: Lately, I have noticed that I am quickly coming to
prefer ebooks. Most of my work involves being at a computer, performing
research and being able to quickly switch to an ebook whenever I am there fits
in with my work flow.

I still buy books, on Sunday I picked up three at a used bookstore. But for
new books I use publishing contacts for review copies or wait or them to
become available online.

~~~
yread
I do it for the same reasons plus a big one:

4\. Indexing. I fulltext index all of the books that I have for situations
when search results from the internet aren't that useful and wikipedia article
is confusing.

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josh33
Cost != Price. Although I have no affiliation to publishers and do sometimes
think the prices are too high, downloading content made for individual sale is
stealing. Estimating the cost to the publisher or author is irrelevant. It's
amazing people can rationalize stealing by the impact that stealing has on the
original owner. That's not why we don't steal. The reason why we don't steal
is because we want to promote a society that consistently provides new and
improved products and services at prices the market determines as fair.
Stealing dis-incentivizes producers from producing because they know they
won't get rewarded for their work.

~~~
vitaminj
I think there are various levels of "badness" when it comes to theft:

1) When you steal your neighbour's car, that's the worst because you're
completely depriving your neighbour of the exclusive use and enjoyment of
their property.

2) When you copy a digital product that your neighbour has created, and then
sell it for profit without paying royalties, then that's pretty bad, but less
bad than 1). Your neighbour can still sell / use their works but you have
deprived him/her of exclusivity in selling their works.

3) When you copy your neighbour's digital product for your own enjoyment, then
you are depriving your neighbour of a potential sale. Still bad, but less bad
than 1) and 2). It's only when everyone does it and your neighbour loses all
their potential sales does it become as bad as 1), i.e. tragedy of the
commons.

I'm not at all suggesting that reproducible digital products are public goods,
but they share some similar characteristics in the context of piracy that I
think are interesting, namely non-rivalness and non-excludability. And as
mentioned before, a tragedy of the commons scenario occurs when everyone (or
lots of people) engage in piracy, just like what happens when all fishermen
over-fish a lake.

This obviously suggests that some kind of regulation is needed, which I
suppose is the point of copyright laws. But what I'd like to know are the
economic effects of piracy, for example:

What is the "piracy elasticity of demand"? In other words, how does demand for
a product change as piracy levels change? Obviously as piracy levels approach
100%, the demand would be near zero, but what are the changes between 0 to
100%. Of interest is if there are any "sweet spot" levels of piracy where
demand actually goes up.

I suspect there's a possibility that at low levels of piracy, the positive
effects from things such as word-of-mouth marketing, early adoption / user
familiarity (particularly in software) and try-before-buyers could offset the
negative effects of lost sales. (Has anyone done this research?)

Anyway my point is that I don't think all theft is created equal, and that
some kinds of theft do not dis-incentivize producers as the OP has asserted.

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sscheper
Excellent story. Thanks for the share, blasdel. The wall street journal had an
interesting article on this subject, as does Leo from Zenhabits.net

I recently decided to undergo a similar writing experiment on the concept of
focus (<http://howtogetfocused.com/>) in which I use a technique that's like a
freemium model...

This philosophy centers on the following characteristics:

Writing the book using a blogging platform (I’m using Wordpress) Listing one
main author, and listing many contributing authors (you, the reader, are a
contributing author if you comment) Releasing the book 100% for free online
(and selling the offline format) Sourcing the book’s editor to the readers
(Readers comment on each chapter suggesting spelling changes, organization
changes, ideas and illustrations Crowd-sourcing the book’s design

~~~
jamesbritt
Wow. QUite an interesting approach.

May I suggest that, since you're' using Wordpress, consider using digress.it?

<http://digress.it/>

It makes for very nice user commenting on book material.

~~~
blasdel
"Real World Haskell" was done this way:
<http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/>

~~~
jamesbritt
Different software though. Last time I looked it wasn't available.

I think I like that one better than digress.it though.

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sabat
As usual, those screaming "pirate!" are claiming losses equal to the number of
suspected acts of "piracy" -- a bogus conflation. If someone was to download
an ebook for free, it does not automatically follow that it's a lost sale.
Most of the time, I'd suspect that it's not a lost sale at all; it's more like
someone browsing books in a bookstore.

