

On downloading books: “Free” Books Aren’t Free   - bensummers
http://anywherebeyond.livejournal.com/342581.html

======
petercooper
_Because that’s what it boils down to is convenience. People who illegally
download books are more interested in their convenience than in supporting the
authors they want to read. It’s not hard to go to the library, it just takes
time.._

Since you're treating your writing as a business (which is fine) why not
actually give _your customers_ what they want? If your customers want to be
able to buy your e-book in their location, why can't they? Blame your
publisher (I do, but I'm also OK with people pirating that book).

J A Konrath is an author who's highly realistic about this. His post about
piracy nails it: <http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/piracy-again.html> \-
He's selling his books for merely a few dollars each _and_ on a DRM-ed
platform (the Kindle) and is still making more.

One of the comments on the post struck me, too:

 _I have a professional musician on my friends list and he makes posts like
this all the time. He said the amount of time he spends cracking down on his
albums being distributed illegally (he's a fairly popular, but completely
independent artist) is ridiculous. And that he'll be at a show and someone
will come up and just cheerily tell him that, "Hey, I illegally downloaded
your songs, man. LOVE THEM!" It's insane how entitled people are._

Someone AT his show? You mean, someone pirated his almost zero marginal cost
material and then paid up good money to attend his show and that's a _bad_
thing? Thankfully, many sane independent musicians have realized this is a
great way to go and are profiting from it.

~~~
bugsy
That's a very good point. The download was a very effective marketing tool
whether the musician wanted it to be or not.

Really, the hardest thing in these creative industries is marketing, promoting
your personal or band brand identity and developing a following.

Smart communities wait to see where paths form and then put in walkways.

Smart marketing is seeing what actually works to promote your product and then
encouraging more of it. Clearly for the described musician downloads were
building a fan base from which he was able to then make a living.

------
wccrawford
They aren't talking about free, they're talking about theft. -yawn- Yet
another content creator upset that they can't make money on piracy.

"If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it,
I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list."

Yeah, that's a BIG hint that piracy and sales aren't linked in any useful way.
Stop wishing you could turn any portion of that into real sales. Download
numbers aren't related to sales numbers at all.

Just face reality: Your book isn't actually popular at all.

~~~
p_nathan
She's popular to the tune of 800 free downloads per week and 10 sales per
week.

Anecdotally, one of the ISVs over on Programmers.stackexchange had a piracy
problem; when he started detecting pirated software and reminding the user to
buy, not steal, his sales numbers directly went up.

I think this idea that downloading IP for free is ok is really wrong. If you
want something, you should pay the price for it, whether the price be fixed or
negotiated. IP piracy is theft.

~~~
beoba
Where do libraries fit in your world?

~~~
p_nathan
They have paid the price already. You pay the libraries cost either directly
or through your taxes.

~~~
olalonde
So if I call up my local library and make sure the book is available, it is
ethical to download the pirated copy... right?

~~~
notquite
No, you should check out the book so they know people are interested in it and
perhaps then will order more copies. Maybe it would then be ok to download it
and use it for the period you have it checked out, but even that is debatable
because then you might be supporting the continuation of the illegal
distribution, causing more people to download it illegally.

------
jgilliam
This story makes me so sad, not because people are stealing her work, but
because the author doesn't look at those 800 people a week as potential fans
who would fund her next book.

Forget about selling the book itself, use the book as a way to find new fans.
If half those 800 people each week signed up for her email list or followed
her on Twitter, she would have a huge fan base which should could tap to FUND
HER NEXT BOOK on Kickstarter.

Sell the making of the content, not the consumption of the content.

The hardcore fans will want her to write the next book, so they will fund it.
Some percentage of the random people who download her book will turn into
hardcore fans. It's a scalable, repeatable cycle.

400 people a week = 20k in a year. 5% of that giving $15 is $15,000, her
entire advance.

EDIT: I did basically this model for documentaries and built an audience of a
million members.

~~~
docgnome
Out of curiosity, do you know of anyone who has actually done this? I'm not
entirely convinced this model is as repeatable as you think. I'd be interested
to see more data on the subject.

~~~
davezatch
Techdirt often does case studies of people in various creative industries that
have made this kind of thing work. See for example:
[http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20101026/0...](http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20101026/00183011584/interview-
with-the-guy-who-embraced-the-pirates-of-4chan.shtml)

Musicians, authors, filmmakers, artists, whatever. Lots of creative people are
able to leverage a dedicated fan base into a livable, if not insanely
lucrative, salary.

The key is to provide something scarce. Since books, music, etc. are digital,
they no longer are scare, but you can offer things like a day in the studio
with the band, or for an author it could be advanced drafts, a $1000 dollar
option to get your name as a character in a new book, signed special editions,
you name it.

It may not get you to the top of the NYT Bestseller List, but if done with an
eye toward your core fans, you can absolutely make a living on your art.

There is a whole list of them at: <http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/>

~~~
tzs
So the model is to be that people good at making art should not make money for
making art. They should make money from ancillary things? That doesn't seem
like a very good way to things.

If programmers were paid that we we would get no pay for writing good working
code. To get paid we'd have to man the support lines and would be paid based
on the feedback we get from the people calling for help. Anyone here willing
to ask their employer to switch to that model?

~~~
kragen
That's more or less the way IBM, HP, EDS, Infosys, Wipro, SAP, Keane, Red Hat,
and Pivotal work. As I understand it, they all get paid some for selling
software, but they get paid a lot more for performing professional services —
a lot of which are pretty closely analogous to manning the support lines.

The old statistic was that about 95% of programmers were working on company-
internal projects, which means they don't get paid royalties for their code,
because there are none. Instead they get paid, at least in theory, for
satisfying their company-internal clients — whether that involves writing good
working code, writing nonworking code, or answering support calls.

------
imperator
I am an author and have a book distributed over Kindle. People who bought my
book wanted to buy it, and people who pirated it wanted to get it for free.
That's okay with me. The two are not linked.

I would never get angry if someone loaned one of my books to another person,
so why would I get angry about someone pirating it. And if people had not
loaned me many books, I would never have grown to love writing. It's just the
case that the internet can loan many books to people easily (or so I see it).

The market is very fickle about what it likes. Effort spent fighting piracy
should be spent on writing more books and promoting them. In the meantime, I
would endorse piracy of a commercially failed book as a way of spreading my
name.

It's obvious this person's book didn't fail in touching people, it just failed
in inspiring them to buy. The solution to any writer's problem is to write
more.

------
ThomPete
No progress without consequences.

What did you imagine? That you could just by magic reach potentially 6Billion
people without any cost of distribution and be the only one allowed to take
advantage of it?

Here is the thing. If you want to make it hard for people to copy your books,
don't distribute them digitally.

Or charge 1 USD pr. book.

Or learn to do the design, marketing and printing yourself

Add something to your book that makes it worth buying.

There are so many ways to approach this and you have no option but to embrace
it and accept it and learn to sell in that environment cause thousands and
thousands today can write books.

------
moultano
If she's getting 800 downloads a week, next time, screw the publisher. Put up
a link to an epub and mobi with a paypall button for $1.99.

~~~
norswap
Agreed. She also invokes the fact that she cannot publish everywhere. There
are some self-publishing services out there that can do the trick. Seems like
an awful lot of whining to me.

~~~
JimmyL
If she's already gone with a publisher (which she has), it's no longer up to
her - she (likely, but it depends on her contract) can't submit that work to a
separate publisher even if she wanted.

I'm also not sure I buy the people saying that she should go at it alone next
time, and solely self-publish. Doing so means that, among other things, she'd
have no advance to live on while writing it, no editors to work with her on
making the copy better, no typesetters to make the text flow well on whatever
platforms it gets distributed on, no artists for cover design, no translation
support to release international editions, and - this is the important one -
no advertising and distribution support to get the book places into bricks-
and-mortar stores (as most stores look down hard on self-published books).

It's not just a matter of saying "OK, I'll self-publish"; there are all sorts
of other costs that are a part of publishing a book that a publisher normally
covers, which you have to pay for yourself should you self-publish.

~~~
chc
If she really believes she can get 800 downloads a week with no promotion,
most of your objections there kind of disappear. (The typesetters, editors and
translators are the only ones that continue to matter, and those can be hired
for fairly cheap — take a look at <http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/> for a real
ebook author's take on the matter.)

------
bugsy
I own thousands of printed books. A few I have actually read.

I don't own an ereader and don't plan to get one. I also hate reading pdfs on
the computer since the text is straining and I prefer to read for fun lying
down or outside and not at a desk.

I think the author of the article is delusional. She thinks of herself as a
NYT best selling author because of some number she estimated of downloads of
her work, all of which she assumes are by people who want to not only read her
work, but buy it as well.

First there is no evidence of the number that read it electronically. So 10 a
week bought it, fine those are the fans. But the others may be hoarders, may
be downloading bots, who knows.

Second, if comparing to best selling authors by multiplying sales figures by a
factor of 80 to account for "piracy", one should also multiply the big name
authors' sales figures by 80 as well since they should be accorded the same
privilege. And then, not a best selling author anymore since the relative
ranking is the same as before.

What is very normal is most authors never make back their advance. This has
been happening for 100 years. An advance of $15,000 says that the publisher
knew the book would not sell a lot of copies, and they were right.

It's nice to have a printed book, gives you some credibility. It's not typical
to make a living selling printed copies of your work, that's something that
only happens for a small number of authors.

To make more money, improve your skills, write more, and even develop a fan
base by giving away free short stories, or selling them to magazines for the
(very low) magazine rate. Few read magazines anymore so you can instead
develop fans with free samples.

It's very unlikely that the pirated copies are changing the bottom line in any
meaningful way. It's just as likely they are bringing in more fans and sales
as it is that sales are being lost. It's entirely possible that without the
free advertising of the piracy she only sells 5 hard copies a week instead of
10.

~~~
davidw
> I also hate reading pdfs on the computer since the text is straining and I
> prefer to read for fun lying down or outside and not at a desk.

Ignoring the rest of your post, the Kindle basically solves the above
problems. I can read for hours with it, whereas I get fidgety reading a PDF on
the computer in a few minutes, and my eyes feel tired as well.

~~~
bugsy
In case it was not clear, the part of my post following the word "also" only
refers to reading pdfs on a desktop/laptop/pad computer screen.

The reasons why, before the "also", I stated "I don't own an ereader and don't
plan to get one." are not stated. They are:

I tried a Kindle and found the user interface difficult, the speed slow, and
did not like the markup options. The battery stuff is also an issue, as is the
cost. I can't read 100 books at once so there is no point to being able to
carry 100 books with me.

Hard copies are so much better for me there's no comparison.

Didn't mean to get into a discussion of preferences or technology, nor is this
expanded comment meant to reflect in any way on what works for other people
who obviously have different values and interests.

I was starting my previous comment with the preamble to briefly give some
background to my claim that I own many printed books but no ebooks. This was
because I wanted to establish I have no personal motivation or interest in
whether ebooks are available of her work or not. The motivation of the comment
was a criticism of elements of her article, such as comparing herself to a
potentially best-selling author.

------
juiceandjuice
"Even if half the people that borrowed my book in the library bought it, I
would make more money"

------
kragen
Possibly the 800 people per week who download the book aren't reading it? In
[http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2010-October...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2010-October/000928.html) I did some numbers, and reading an ebook costs
around 240 times as much as simply downloading it. So a purely self-interested
person would download it if there's more than about a ½% chance that they'd
actually read it. If most people downloading it are just over that threshold,
then 800 downloads per week might represent only 5 new readers per week.

(There is some discussion at [http://www.mail-
archive.com/silklist@lists.hserus.net/msg197...](http://www.mail-
archive.com/silklist@lists.hserus.net/msg19701.html.))

If you download a torrent containing many different ebooks, the ratio goes
even higher. I have a Project Gutenberg torrent containing several thousand
public-domain books. By the time I finish downloading it, it might turn out to
have cost me ten minutes of my time, about a thousand times less than it would
take me to navigate a web site to download a single book.

------
impendia
The article suggests that some readers had problems obtaining a copy of the
book.

If you can get a copy of the book legally, you should, but it seems like some
customers weren't able to, and had to choose between obtaining it illegally,
or waiting indefinitely on the whim of the publisher. I find it difficult to
fault them for the former.

~~~
docgnome
While I agree, the publisher should be providing books in every region they
can, it's not as simple matter of the publisher saying "I hate China, let's
make them wait for the new book cause I'm a jerk." It's a matter of if they
print an edition there do they believe they can recoup the losses of printing
it. Publishers are out to make money.

Saying that there is nothing wrong with illegally downloading a book or
whatever just because it isn't legally available in your area is rubbish. It's
like saying having your friend in the US steal an Xbox from a store and ship
it to you is ok because you can't legally buy one where you are. It's
obviously not as simple as that, but it's just lame to rationalize breaking
the law because you want to.

~~~
hellrich
The stolen Xbox is gone, nobody can buy it. The Ebook can be downloaded no
matter how many times someone does so without paying. I'm not sure about
books, but at least for US movies/tv-series it can take quite an amount of
time to be legally available in Europe. Even if they are available via Hulu
inside the US! I understand the reason (earning money by selling licenses to
foreign TV channels), but it surely encourages "stealing" the content by using
nonofficial media-portals.

~~~
docgnome
Even if it "encourages" it hardly justifies it. It is breaking the law, plain
and simple. I'm rather tired of people shifting the blame to the content
producers or publishers. If you're going to break the law, at least own up to
it and don't try to shift the blame.

~~~
hellrich
I didn't want to talk about law, it's surely illegal. We could talk abbout
ethics, I don't believe the current rules for IP are fair. But let's simply
talk about business opportunities - as others have pointed out, you can make
money with free downloads and a donation button. Or bundling some advertisment
with your product. Static content (e.g. music, books, most games,...) can and
will be pirated, whining won't stopp anyone.

------
Tichy
To be honest, this is almost bordering on the ridiculous. Why should people go
to extreme lengths to find a hardcopy of the book? There is this feeling of
entitlement, "I am an artist, so I am not supposed to have to worry about all
this commercial stuff". Meanwhile, other people have discovered that
convenience actually makes people buy stuff rather than pirate it.

------
nerdyworm
The problem is you can get the book faster and easier by typing "Name of Book
torrent" than "Name of Book buy".

Perhaps this is a problem that someone from this community should address.
Easier Than Stealing dot com sounds nice.

~~~
oscardelben
Actually you can get it faster by downloading it from your kindle.

~~~
liedra
This is exactly what I do, which is why it frustrates me so much when some
authors/publishers/wives of dead authors (like with the Wheel of Time series)
won't allow the release of the ebook until well after the hardcover. Instead I
resort to piracy because the whole reason I got a kindle was to avoid buying
physical novels and particularly hardcovers, since I travel/move countries so
much.

Publishers and authors and whatnot who do this are just insane. You should tap
into the fact that many fans of popular fantasy/science fiction are also
gadget freaks, and allow them to buy your books when they come out instead of
losing sales due to piracy.

------
elvirs
it is wrong to estimate that all those who downloaded the book illegally would
go and buy paperback if there was no way to download it for free. i bet a good
share of those who downloaded free copy downloaded it to maybe read sometime
in the future but never read it. only 20%-30% of those who downloaded a free
copy are potential buyers of paperback book. the author should take a look at
freemium models and come up with a creative way of making money from the books
while adapting world WILD web

------
yason
I bet some money that without the folks downloading free copies of the book
the author wouldn't have sold as much in the first place.

