Book Piracy BAD

[Mad Swede]

I guess if that's how you view respect and readership, I can see how you came to the rest of your conclusions. I think we maybe just have fundamentally different world views? I can't imagine a less valuable metric than sales in terms of how good a writer is, personally. No hate, you're free to feel how you feel of course.

All said and done, piracy and used book stores have the same effect on sales for the writer, but relatively few people are against used bookstores. I think it's this difference in values that says 'paying for something = respecting/valuing it more' that is drawing this line? (Correct me if I'm wrong vis a vis how you view used bookstores, though!) It's hard to imagine looking at the world that way, but diverse viewpoints are what make the world go round, so it's fascinating to learn about them.


Of course, but you can also give away copies through itch in a way that Amazon's (or bookstores') don't allow and I think that appeals to writers with an ethos similar to mine. Community copies sustain the itch community in a lot of ways, and I think it fosters that different perspective.

Wait one. When you give your book away (or set the price to zero) on a site like itch or Bandcamp or Amazon you are still in control of who gets a copy (or reads it in terms of a community copy), and so you can see how many wanted to read a copy and therefore how much interest there is in your work. The same is true if you (or your publisher) set the price to $15 and track the number of sales through book stores and/or on Amazon - you can see how many people wanted a copy to read. You can even track how many times your book was borrowed from a library, because you get a small fee each time the book is lent. In all these cases it's the same metric (the number of people who want to read the book), you're just not counting money when you give the book away.

This is also true when someone buys a book second hand, the level of interest in the book can be judged by how fast a second hand copy sells (and sometimes for how much) and indirectly by how hard it is to find a second hand copy for sale. Popular books either never make it into a second hand book shop (because people keep hold of their copies) or sell as soon as they turn up.

Piracy is different, because it is theft of someone elses property. Even when it applies to books.

 

[casval]

Wait one. When you give your book away (or set the price to zero) on a site like itch or Bandcamp or Amazon you are still in control of who gets a copy (or reads it in terms of a community copy), and so you can see how many wanted to read a copy and therefore how much interest there is in your work. The same is true if you (or your publisher) set the price to $15 and track the number of sales through book stores and/or on Amazon - you can see how many people wanted a copy to read. You can even track how many times your book was borrowed from a library, because you get a small fee each time the book is lent. In all these cases it's the same metric (the number of people who want to read the book), you're just not counting money when you give the book away.

This is also true when someone buys a book second hand, the level of interest in the book can be judged by how fast a second hand copy sells (and sometimes for how much) and indirectly by how hard it is to find a second hand copy for sale. Popular books either never make it into a second hand book shop (because people keep hold of their copies) or sell as soon as they turn up.

Piracy is different, because it is theft of someone elses property. Even when it applies to books.

Sure, yeah, I don't think I ever said I was against having any metrics - hence why my original post to this thread said if I self-publish, I plan to offer community copies or a free ebook through my website. It is a means of reducing piracy by offering free copies in a legitimate way, so to speak. I just don't see the monetary element as necessary; I don't really begrudge people for not paying for books, most people I know can barely afford groceries.

I don't know if there's a way to really track sales through used book stores, though, if they don't have a website or some other means of self-reporting to publishers about interest... but I guess in a certain timeframe the 'popular books won't be in used stores' metric is true, at least for the first couple of years after it was published.

I prefer physical books so I don't have much reason to pirate them myself, but I'll admit I have pirated comics in the past and many of those websites have download numbers and more popular series have more seeders - and 'sort by popularity/most downloaded' is a feature of most websites, legitimate or otherwise. So it might not be impossible to track potential readers through those means, if you still wanted the metrics.

 

[pmmg]

Sure, yeah, I don't think I ever said I was against having any metrics

But you also have not said piracy was bad. If you are defending piracy all the rest of this is a smokescreen. You may wish to give your books away for free, but that is not the same as deciding for others that they should do so as well. If I am not on that path, and you pirate my book, or put it somewhere to be pirated, it is theft. I don't need to go any further.

Piracy is theft.

I am not sure what I can do about it, but it is still theft.

 

[casval]

But you also have not said piracy was bad. If you are defending piracy all the rest of this is a smokescreen. You may wish to give your books away for free, but that is not the same as deciding for others that they should do so as well. If I am not on that path, and you pirate my book, or put it somewhere to be pirated, it is theft. I don't need to go any further.

Piracy is theft.

I am not sure what I can do about it, but it is still theft.

Well, I haven't said piracy is bad because I don't think piracy is bad, obviously. It's the natural result of bad service and, perhaps, a bad economy. I think offering your book for free via a website, community copies, or any other means is a good way to combat piracy because it offers a legitimate means to acquire the book for free - but if all you want is for people to pay for your book, then yeah, I guess there's not really much you can do about it at the end of the day.

 

[Mad Swede]

Well, I haven't said piracy is bad because I don't think piracy is bad, obviously. It's the natural result of bad service and, perhaps, a bad economy. I think offering your book for free via a website, community copies, or any other means is a good way to combat piracy because it offers a legitimate means to acquire the book for free - but if all you want is for people to pay for your book, then yeah, I guess there's not really much you can do about it at the end of the day.

To put this much more harshly, what you are saying is that it is OK to steal. You may think that you're only talking about books, but the reality is that you have accepted the principle that it is OK to steal provided you feel that you can justify it to yourself. It's like taking bribes. Once someone has taken a backhander to do something the only question to be discussed next time is how much more they have to be paid to do something even worse, simply because they've shown they can be bought.

That's the start of a very slippery slope, one I've seen far too many times on the various UN peacekeeping and peace enforcement oerations I served on. The argument that "it's OK to do this because..." rapidly escalates and what results is all too often an unpleasant and bitter conflict.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I wamt to point out there's two fundamental differences between used book stores and piracy.

The first is that a used book store is a one to one transaction. I buy a book new, I sell it to the second hand store, who can then sell it to someone else. Once I sell it, I don't have it anymore, and the used bookstore can only sell it once, so only one person can read it again then. Someone has paid for that first book, which the author receives in royalties.

The second difference is that physical books deteriorate in quality. Not everyone cares about it of course, but if you buy a secondhand copy, it's obvious someone has read it before you. a page may be folded. Maybe a scribble in the margin. The spine deteriorates and so on. There's only so many times you can resell a book, and it will go down in price each time. A digital book on the other hand has nothing of this. If I buy a second hand digital one, or pirate one, then it will be as new. There is no decrease in quality between the first and the second or the thousanth copy that gets resold. Which is why the sale of second hand digital books is actually not allowed in the Netherlands (without the author's consent).

This makes both situations very different.

It's the natural result of bad service and, perhaps, a bad economy.

I don't buy this. Not for books. There are easy to access digital storefronts that are available everywhere. There are very few (english language) books that are not available globally. And there are more books available for free, 99ct, or $2,99 than a person can read in a lifetime.

Say what you want about Amazon, but they overall have great customer service. Same for Kobo and all the other online stores. It's easier to find a digital book in a store that pays the author than to pirate one. So bad service is not a good reason.

And if you don't want to pay $15 for an ebook, that's fine. Just read one that only costs 99ct. There are plenty. That's again not a reason to pirate one in the same way that going into a grocery store and just taking an expensive $15 steak without paying just because of the economy is still theft. You might not get the exact book you want, but there is plenty of stuff out there to read that is within any budget you can think of.

Now an author can use many different pricing models. Some (often traditionally published) authors go with $15 ebooks, priced equal to or slightly below paperback. It makes sense if you consider that most of the cost is in actually getting the book ready for publishing. The printing cost on larger, traditional print runs isn't all that high. And it also helps keep bookshops happy and in business.

Other authors do free give aways of ebooks to draw readers in. Or have a cheap part 1 in a series and make money on the back end. Others use patreon or whatever to make there money. It's all different, and it can all work, and I can give you very succesful examples of each.

All of these however have in common that it's the author's and publisher's choice. They decide how they sell the book they created. It's for the customer to accept or reject that. But rejecting it means you don't get to read that book.

 

[casval]

To put this much more harshly, what you are saying is that it is OK to steal. You may think that you're only talking about books, but the reality is that you have accepted the principle that it is OK to steal provided you feel that you can justify it to yourself. It's like taking bribes. Once someone has taken a backhander to do something the only question to be discussed next time is how much more they have to be paid to do something even worse, simply because they've shown they can be bought.

That's the start of a very slippery slope, one I've seen far too many times on the various UN peacekeeping and peace enforcement oerations I served on. The argument that "it's OK to do this because..." rapidly escalates and what results is all too often an unpleasant and bitter conflict.

We live in a world of theft - primarily wage theft - so I can't say I consider theft done by poorer people to be some great sin in the grand scheme of things. I have terrible news for you about my views on the UN as a 'peacekeeping' institution as well, but that's neither here nor there.

Say what you want about Amazon, but they overall have great customer service. Same for Kobo and all the other online stores. It's easier to find a digital book in a store that pays the author than to pirate one. So bad service is not a good reason.

Amazon's ebooks are genuinely awful to work with if you don't use their Kindle app or device, but other online storefronts are definitely better, no doubt. But I don't think there's been the breakthrough in ebooks needed to push out piracy, especially for how hard it is to find readable books with images - we're still doing PDFs for half of the textbooks out there (one of the largest piracy markets for books afaik). Music piracy went down when Spotify was introduced; movie piracy went down when Netflix launched. I don't think books have had this 'leap' and it's not surprising piracy would be up when people are used to that sort of service.

(Of course, movie piracy has gone up again since there are now 30 Netflix competitors and they all charge $14/month with ads, so these things do ebb and flow. And I know audible was a great boon for several years before Amazon messed that up, too, so I think a similar service could once again help reduce piracy rates.)

Honestly, though, I think the biggest problem is probably just that libraries are radically underfunded outside major cities in the United States. People try to come up with alternatives like the Internet Archive and writers like Chuck Wendig whined about that all the way to court. I hope something that kills book piracy dead comes along, because it would mean there is a wonderful, accessible, affordable way to read all of the books your heart desires available to all of the people who want and need it.

All of these however have in common that it's the author's and publisher's choice. They decide how they sell the book they created. It's for the customer to accept or reject that. But rejecting it means you don't get to read that book.

At the end of the day, the philosophical disagreement I think we're having here is I just think people should have a human right to experience art. People have always found a way to do so and will continue to regardless of the wishes of a publishing company. Pirate radio, sitting on the hill watching a concert from a distance, or sitting in the alley next to the opera house. When I was a kid, a guy came around to my Dad's pub selling $5 Chinese bootleg DVDs of movies still in theatres. My high school English teacher printed out 2000 pages of double-sided scans of all of Ender's Game because the school let him photocopy anything he wanted but wouldn't buy 20 copies of a book for his science fiction course. Internet piracy is the new form of it, it is what it is.

 

[Zombified Spider]

As someone who does piracy because: 1. I'm broke. 2. Corporations. And 3. Theft is sometimes fun/jk. I can say that the majority of the Piracy community does have morals. I don't pirate anything indie. I have pirated JK Rowling's books, so I wouldn't support her. Sometimes I don't agree with the publisher's politics. Sometimes I simply don't have the money to drop 30 dollars for another JJBA manga volume, and the library doesn't have it. Books are expensive; I don't like Amazon.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

As someone who does piracy because: 1. I'm broke. 2. Corporations. And 3. Theft is sometimes fun/jk. I can say that the majority of the Piracy community does have morals. I don't pirate anything indie. I have pirated JK Rowling's books, so I wouldn't support her. Sometimes I don't agree with the publisher's politics. Sometimes I simply don't have the money to drop 30 dollars for another JJBA manga volume, and the library doesn't have it. Books are expensive; I don't like Amazon.

Who qualifies as 'indie?'

And for that matter, do you have the foggiest idea how we get paid in this industry? Let's go down the row.

You steal books because, "I'm broke." So are the rest of us. Only now, you've stolen my work - and if you think for an instant that writing a book is easy, next thing I'd love to know is why are you here? Bragging about the reasons you are stealing from me.

"Corporations." And your point would be? Do you fancy yourself some sort of lone avenger? That evil corporation puts food on my table. Do you know how much authors make when their work is stolen in the name of "Corporations are bad?"

You think the majority of the "Piracy community" have morals... because you don't pirate anything indie. How do you know one is indie and one is traditionally published? Do little blue and red boxes appear above book titles to save your conscious from your clicks? And what about hybrid authors? Do you have a little list somewhere telling you which books are fair game and which are above such things?

"Books are expensive." You don't say? Oh, that $3.99 must just be so harsh... Do you have any idea what it takes to get a book to market? Depending on our needs at any given time, it costs us anywhere between $500 and $900 per book. That we just spent roughly a year - let's say it for the folks in the back - A YEAR of work and thought and planning and exploring and editing and rewriting. All so you can click my book title and steal my royalties and the money from my family.

There's a name in the industry for thieves and "I'm waiting to binge the series..." types. You're career killers. Steal enough and entire series get cancelled. Steal enough and there is no way to justify the expense of getting books covered and to market. Steal enough and another author just melts away.

"I don't like Amazon." You do that. I don't give two figs where you prefer to shop. I care that you actually pay for it. How many careers do you think your "moral" thieves have ended just this year alone? They all worked. They're all still broke. If you're concerned about being broke, fix it. But you don't get to fix it on the fruits of my labor.

 

[pmmg]

Amen to that.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I'm also with A. E. Lowan on this one.

None of the reasons hold up to any kind of scrutiny.

Being broke is no excuse. There are more free and 99ct books out there than anyone can read in a lifetime. And for books priced up to $4,99 there are literally millions of them. This realy is one of the cases of drink one less beverage at a cafe and you can afford it. Also, libraries are (still) a thing. You know, a way of legally getting books for free while the author still gets paid.

Also, chances are the author you're stealing from is more broke than you. I think numbers from a few years back indicated that the average published author earned $500 per year from their writing or less. And that includes bestselling authors. So you're basically stealing from someone who worked for 200+ hours to get a book out there and has earned a whole $500 for his trouble. Or about $2.50 an hour. Note that it's probably even worse for indie authors, where I'm still in the red (by a fairly long way) for getting my books out there. It's an expensive hobby.

"Corporations" is probably the worst excuse you can come up with. It doesn't mean anything. It's also just not true. You don't have to shop at Amazon. You can still go to the local bookstore down the road or the second hand shop. And again, that publisher might be a big corporation, but it's the author you're stealing from. That broke person earning $2.50 or worse an hour. The publisher cares for his bottom line, meaning that any book you steal is just an author getting less money.

And theft isn't fun. I know you wrote it as a joke, but you still thought it. And no it really isn't. Getting a sale is hard. Any book stole is one I (or someone else) didn't sell. How do you think an author feels when he sees no sales show up for yet another month? Writing a novel is hard. Writing a second one while the first one isn't selling is even harder. It's one of the biggest reasons why authors quit. Seeing 0 sales day after day is depressing. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think the universe owes me sales. I need to get them on my own. But any book stolen is one I'm not selling.

To me all the reasons listed so far are just people making excuses to make themselves feel better about stealing other peoples work. It's trying to claim a moral high ground that doesn't exist. If you really want to steal, just be honest about it and call yourself a thief. Don't come here with crappy excuses why you believe you're entitled to steal from someone making $2.50 an hour or less.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Let's have a little fun. New game, called "Traditional or Indie." What do we think, and why do we think it?

 

[pmmg]

Looks professional, but Pittsburg Missouri? Everyone knows the Steelers are a Pennsylvania team.

I call it sus.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Looks professional, but Pittsburg Missouri? Everyone knows the Steelers are a Pennsylvania team.

I call it sus.

There's a Baptist church here who can't spell 'brimstone' correctly. Their sign gives me pain and giggles.

 

[Mad Swede]

There's a Baptist church here who can't spell 'brimstone' correctly. Their sign gives me pain and giggles.

Pittsburg, Missouri. Hickory County, right?

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Pittsburg, Missouri. Hickory County, right?

Oh yes. It's a special place.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

I once saw a kid on a rusty bike go tearing down a gravel road, chased by a 3-legged dog on a mission.

 

[casval]

It must be said that the vast, vast majority of indie books do not make it onto the largest book piracy repository anyway - and few to none of the ones that do have more than 3 downloads in total. Up to interpretation if that is because pirates respect independent authors enough not to pirate their work, or because they - like most audiences, unfortunately - simply do not read any independently published works.

 

[Mad Swede]

And I agree with A. E. Lowan and Prince of Spires. The fact that you haven't seen many indie books in the largest book piracy repositories does not make theft any more acceptable casval.

The reason many books cost $15 is because the publishers have to cover their costs. Most books, especially debut books by new authors, don't sell more than 1000 copies and many not even that. (You may not like J K Rowling, but the first print run of her first Harry Potter book was only 500 copies.) When it costs somewhere north of $100 000 to get a book edited, formatted and set, printed and then distributed you begin to understand why books cost so much. Someone (ie the reader) has to pay those costs, most of which are staff salaries. And if the publishers don't make money they can't take on new authors.

Even indie books cost that much to publish, it's just that most indie authors don't work out how much time they spend doing these things and never think about what their time costs.

And the time I spend writing my books is not included in those publishing costs either. The only way I get to start covering the costs of my time are if I begin to earn royalties on my books, and that only happens if someone buys the books. I don't make enough to live on from my writing, nowhere close. I'm also lucky, I have a job so I can spend my spare time writing and so produce new art for others to enjoy. But without that job (or without a sizeable income from my writing) there would be no new books from me. And the same applies to the vast majority of authors.

The argument that everyone has a right to enjoy art doesn't wash either. Sure, everyone should be able to enjoy art - but someone has to pay for art: paint, canvases, instruments, music, books, rehersal time for orchestras and singers, galleries and concert halls etc. Everyone involved has to eat and live somewhere. None of it comes for free. Not even in a communist system.

If you think society should be changed so that more people can afford to enjoy art (or building a more peaceful world) then you should say so and explain how things need to change. That means getting off your ass and working for it. Leading, explaining, persuading, building support. And if you can't or won't do this, don't f*****g complain about the system, and don't f*****g use it as an excuse to steal from the rest of us.

 

[casval]

If you think society should be changed so that more people can afford to enjoy art (or building a more peaceful world) then you should say so and explain how things need to change. That means getting off your ass and working for it. Leading, explaining, persuading, building support.

I agree! This, in fact, what takes up the majority of my time. Hell, half the money I do spend on 'books' - in a sense - is spent on printing Marxist texts to hand out at protests and other gatherings for community organizing in the lower mainland, to get other people to read and think about the possibilities of a kinder future. I write zines, I advocate, I volunteer. Building a better world is not something one person can do alone, that's sort of at the heart of the communist ideology, but I do make the effort.

I have nothing against any of you being opposed to piracy, the wide tapestry of human thought is what makes the world such an interesting place. Nonetheless, I'm afraid I laughed out loud reading some of the posts in this thread (I'll politely refrain from pointing out which) -- the moral high ground does unfortunately just come across as absurdly silly to me when talking about what often amounts to a hypothetical +/- 10 book sales, assuming someone who pirated a work would have spent the money on it if the option to pirate were not available.

I've looked up my own books on these sites, and only one ever made it to the repository and it has... 2 downloads across multiple platforms. I hope both those people had a nice time with it! Creating an antagonistic relationship with any reader, even a 'thief', just feels like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

But as I've said earlier in the thread, I hope a public institute offers a truly accessible, affordable internet library one day that wipes book piracy out of existence. I would love for a more open library to exist, where authors and readers can both benefit. A repository where sheer algorithmic popularity does not dictate recommendations, too, because I think most current platforms (including the piracy sites!) favor the bestsellers and most popular books of all time.

As-is, most of my activism in this particular space is spent advocating and donating to protect the Internet Archive and joining the fight against AI absorbing the work of every artist in human history... instead of working to move forward, the fight is mostly to preserve what little we have. Even if someone here could offer a compelling argument that internet piracy is truly detrimental, I think it would still end up pretty low on my list of concerns.