Book Piracy: The New Scourge?
The New York Times is running an article on book piracy – people scanning and sharing books, or simply sharing PDFs obtained, in one way or another, from publishers. While most of the media discuss the piracy of music, movies and and TV shows, book piracy is alive and well among a vibrant sub-culture of voracious readers. (Audiobook piracy is also rampant.) One the one hand, we should, perhaps, be grateful that so many people are reading, but those who write books – not to mention publishers – are anxious about the potential sales they may lose.
Downloading books can be easier than downloading music or movies: their files are much smaller, meaning that you can download a book in minutes, compared to possibly hours for an album or movie. One popular BitTorrent tracker (a site that links to files that will allow you to download a variety of content, both legal and illegal), lists more than 40,000 torrents in its “Ebooks” category. Most books without illustrations are only a couple of megabytes. For example, Stephen King’s The Stand (the “unabridged” version, which is some 1100 pages in mass-market paperback) is 2.38 MB, and I was able to download the book in less than one minute. (Note that this book is not available in a Kindle edition from Amazon, so readers don’t have the option of buying an ebook version of it legally.) Granted, the version of the book I found is set in Courier font, which makes it look more like a typescript than a book, so it is less readable than a “real” ebook, such as those purchased for the Kindle. But the availability of this book certainly makes it easy for anyone to avoid spending the $8 on a paperback.
For now, the majority of ebooks found on such sites is technical books: especially computer books. It is true that ebooks make much more sense for such topics, because they are searchable. There are plenty of educational books, including books people may need for college courses. As far as fiction is concerned, most of the ebooks available in pirated versions are science fiction, fantasy and horror. It seems that the ebook-reading public is a very limited sub-set of readers; very few mysteries, which make best-seller lists around the world, show up on these sites, let alone literary fiction.
Searching for some of my favorite authors turned up little. When looking for John Irving, I found two books, but several audiobooks; Tom Wolfe turned up nothing; for Richard Russo, I only found an essay about his book Empire Falls, clearly not an illegal item. Turning to the current New York Times best-seller list, I search for James Patterson (lots of audiobooks; no ebooks), David Baldacci (ditto), and Harlan Coben (ditto again). Even the current cult books by Stephanie Meyer (the Twilight Saga) turned up no ebook editions, only audiobooks, though they can be found on other sites.
So, why are these authors complaining? Yes, Stephen King’s books are pirated a lot; it’s a bad thing, but I’m not sure it hurts him financially. (A comment from one person who downloaded The Stand: “have about 15 stephen king books buy they take up space and then I decided to do ebooks”.) What about other authors? The New York Times article lists the Dummies books as being pirated a lot; it’s true that hundreds of those books are easily available, but the age-old question applies. Would the people who download these books have bought them anyway? Do these books serve as loss-leaders; will downloaders eventually buy Dummies books for other subjects? Piracy is piracy – and I feel strongly about this, having written a dozen computer books myself (none of which I found on pirate sites) – but is it really having an effect on the book market? The Times article says, “Book sales are down significantly, and publishers say it is difficult to determine whether electronic piracy is denting sales.” I say, “Balderdash!” Only a handful of genres are affected, and the books – aside from technical books – that appear on these sites is limited to the über-best-sellers, those selling millions of copies, or limited genres. We’re still not in a world where there’s an iPod for books to make reading easy. (Though Amazon’s Kindle, which I have written about here, here andhere, is trying to become just that.)
Most people don’t want to read books on a computer screen. (To be fair, however, there are programs that allow you to read PDFs on such devices as PDAs or an iPod touch.)
The Times article blows this issue out of proportion, yet it is a harbinger of things to come. Someone will eventually crack the Kindle’s DRM scheme, allowing Kindle books to be easily circulated, and as more and more books end up in PDF format for one reason or another, during production, they will be leaked. Book piracy will become common, once enough people have a device they can use to read ebooks comfortably.
What to do? I have no answer to that question, regarding books, music, movies or any other content. It’s the proverbial toothpaste out of the tube, and no solutions have been found yet, neither those that involve penalties or those that posit blanket payments for downloads. It’s time to seriously think about what to do for books, though, because their time will come very soon.
I think the reason that this is not that bad now compared to music and video (beside the fact that not as many people read as listen to music or watch movies) is that people who want to share the ebooks have to manually scan in all of the pages of a book. As books become more available in electronic form, this will grow.
But even still, there will always be a significant portion of the population that wants real paper. With pirated music, you get the same thing that you would get with a CD minus the physical CD, but with an ebook (pirated or not), you get something much different from the real thing.
Hence my point about the Kindle. If it takes off, and books become available, the pirated files will be the exact same thing as, say, music purchased from iTunes. There actually are more people than you think who read ebooks on PDAs, for whom this is a pretty common thing.