Essentially they *made* napster viable.
(And then, so afraid were they of napster, that they turned control of their industry over to Apple.)

The publishing business is now approaching the same crossroads the music industry reached ten years ago; they must choose to serve their customers (authors *and* readers) or go to war against them.
No middle ground here.
Just bear in mind that the computer industry is strongly infested by “might is right” thinking that believes that anything that is technically feasible is allowed and that anything non-tangible is essentially worthless.
Ebooks as a technology is something that is not going away and ebook buyers/readers are by definition literate and educated folks that understand fair value. And they understand they are in control now; if not treated with respect they just might decide that the techies and open sourcerors are in fact right.
In which case we *all* lose, not just the publishers.
If in doubt, just look to Detroit and the bankrupt auto companies that for so long ignored their customers’ needs and the changing marketplace.

“…borrow collections from friends, or grab ‘free’ tunes from the ‘pirates’ at Napster or other file-sharing sites.”

The latter is most definitely piracy–not “piracy” in scare quotes, as the article would have it. Even “borrowing” collections from friends, in the digital age, usually means obtaining a free, permanent, duplicate version–not at all like “borrowing” a lawn mower and certainly another way of taking an end run around the market.

For the record, as aspiring authors ourselves, we’re at least as concerned here for authors as for publishers. It’s easy enough to rationalize piracy by shaking your fist at evil, faceless media companies–publishers, record labels, etc. But if in the Internet age all the middlemen were to disappear and artists could sell their work directly to buyers on a large scale, ten bucks says you’d see pirates turning their convenient anger on those greedy, obtuse artists.

Austin
The Abbeville Manual of Style

Let me get this straight: this writer for the Abbeville Manual of Style thinks that ripping CDs I bought fair and square to mp3s so I can carry them conveniently is piracy?

Well, so much for the Abbeville Manual of Style.

Next!

1- Some readers will only buy books on their terms and pass on the others–we are *drowning* in content. If an author doesn’t want to sell his book on reasonable terms, some other author will. Publishing is a marketplace and competition will rule.

2- Some readers will take what they’re offered like mana from the heavens and be grateful to have it at all, regardless of the pricing.

3- Some readers will pirate anything, regardless of the price and quality

4- Some readers will only pirate out of spite and disrespect for the publishers that think they belong in the second category.

Openly *bragging* about their intent to force higher prices, as some publishers are doing today, is going to produce a lot more “pirates as rebels” and cost the entire industry a lot more than a rational pricing model ever would. In fact, a rational business model built on the understanding that 21st century publishing is about content and value and not print would likely result in higher margins *and* higher volumes as well as less piracy than the current assumption that readers are a fixed resource to be mined solely for a maximum per capita profit.

Publishers need to understand they they are not in control. The market is in control. The more they fight the market the worse it will be for everybody.

Publishers need to understand that ebooks are *not* just massless print books or a stand-in for print.

Publishers need to understand that if they want to charge premium pricing for an ebook they need to deliver a premium product. Instead of holding back the electronic edition of a book until they’ve milked the market for all those willing to pay a premium for the smell of ink on dead tree pulp, how about offering up a deluxe ebook edition on an advanced timetable? There’s at least one publisher who gets this and manages to charge triple for early-access ebook versions of upcoming releases. Its all about the added value. Instead of looking for ways to maximize their take off the unwary, they should be looking to increase the quality of the product they distribute; looking for new talent through increase slush-pile mining, not abolishing it; improving the inhouse editing capabilities, not cutting back; improving marketing and direct sales, not relying on retailers to do all the heavy lifting.They might start by learning some economic basics about frictionless transactions, disintermediation, and demand elasticity. If they can’t get the basics right they can’t properly serve their authors *or* their customers and they *will* be deposed.

Authors are indispensable.
Readers are indispensable.
Publishers are not; given enough incentive, they can be and will be replaced. Publishers are nothing more and nothing less than middlemen; lately it seems they’ve forgotten this.
They don’t create books.
They don’t consume them.
They only help distribute them.
Once upon a time, that made them gatekeepers of an industry.
No more.
Those days are gone.

Publishers need to start making themselves actually useful to authors and useful to buyers. Or else they will be bypassed by authors or by retailers or by the customers (through piracy).
There are few things more pathetic than deposed dictators and a lot of the big publishing houses are headed exactly that way…
Make war on your customers–through obnoxious, intrusive DRM and absurd pricing schemes; and brag about it–and they will make war on you.

And young people won’t even think twice about it. The younger generation already believes that information content should be freely available. They won’t think twice about sharing the ebook files of their textbooks with their friends. DRM schemes won’t stop them; there will never be a DRM scheme made that won’t be cracked within a week of its release. Most professors will look the other way because they, for the most part, sympathize with the students.

It’s inevitable.

Of course, if publishers continue using language like piracy, stealing and theft they are guaranteed to antagonise more and more people into doing so. Want to take the righteous position? Then call a spade a spade, not a loaded gun.

If we are getting into name-calling, and speaking of criminal actions, how about some recent copyright extension grabs?

When 3-D printing and other technological innovations are available and affordable usable, we will hear similar complaining about shop scenarios such as you suggest. Maybe we won’t live to see them all, of course.

Those commercial book printing in shop machines – if they prove successful, guess what could happen with those? Not to mention the commercial grade scanning equipment getting cheaper.

People copied music, and even recorded the radio before there even were CD players, so that argument is silly. Portable CD players were extremely expensive at that time, too, as were CDs.

We care about publishing in general abstractly large terms surviving about as much as publishing cares about any other industry. That is, not very much. As Michael Stackpole pointed out the other day, when it comes down to it, it is the authors that matter.

The implication that it all might suddenly disappear is absolute rubbish. As far as books go, that is. If every single publisher on the whole planet vanished tonight, there would be authors selling work directly the next day. Not as many, but there would still be some, and a new scenario would shake out. So that sort of ‘apocalyptic’ scenario fearmongering is just silly. Most of the publishers that I remember being around when I was a kid are gone. Amazingly enough, stuff is being shovelled out in the millions.

People, being people, not robots or sheep will do what they do. As Cory Doctorow keeps saying, stuff will not get harder to copy, barring some sort of technological collapse (and publishing is toast then, anyway). You don’t produce in a timely and sensible manner, whatever the media, whether books, tv, music, whatever, then guess what?

I don’t know about you, but I do not know one single person who has never copied anything. That even goes for my long departed great-grandparents, and law-enforcement officials.

So, a fair chunk of the publishing people making these arguments are of course hypocritical, given they will have done this themselves, and will certainly be engaging in such activities with other media, or software, even if not books. So ‘thieves’ telling other ‘thieves’ what to do is hardly credible, speaking of righteousness.

Keeping that in mind :

Publisher : “Don’t copy”

Reader : “Ok, sell me a copy.”

Publisher : “No. Never going make one. We refuse.”

Reader : “Thefore, I make a copy as I don’t want a paper version, and will never, ever buy such a thing. You aren’t losing any money.”

Publisher : “Don’t care. Don’t want you to. Wah.”

Reader : “You are kidding, right?”

–

Publisher : “Don’t copy”

Reader : “Ok, sell me a copy.”

Publisher : “No. Never going to, you live in the wrong place.”

Reader : “You are kidding, right?”

–

Publisher : “Don’t copy”

Reader : “Ok, sell me a copy”

Publisher : “Only if you use Equipment X”

Reader : “You are kidding, right?”

–

Publisher : “Don’t copy”

Reader : “Ok, sell me a copy”

Publisher : “Sure, that’ll be $26.95″

Reader : “You do know we know simple arithmetic? That is, you are kidding, right?”

–

“an exceptionally convenient legal alternative”

This will be the only thing that really curbs piracy. Piracy exists because of many factors including but not limited to:
-price
-availability
-content quality (may be better than legal ebook)
-content format/DRM issues
-ease of use

You can never completely stamp out piracy, but if you address the above issues, then you can minimize the piracy and those that still pirate would never be customers anyways so try not to loose sleep over them and just accept that they exist.

i would not read it at all.

ok? i won’t go all drooling and begging for the content. there are more free classics out there than i can hope to read in the rest of my time here on earth. and a heap of content i paid for in print, sitting on my bookcases — some of which i really *might* re-buy in electronic form. and i’m a long-time library user, as well. so it’s not like i will ever be high & dry w/r/t reading matter.

even so. if you compete for my eyes, you could win. but only if the price is right.

Austin
The Abbeville Manual of Style