That’s an interesting one. Let us know what happens!

eBooks.com has an office in Perth, Western Australia and an ABN (Australian Business Number) but will not sell ebooks to me because I am in Australia. That’s right, an Australian(?) company located in Australia will not sell books to Australians because they are in Australia, but will still send emails inviting Australians to buy books from them which they cannot purchase.

As a result, I have raised a complaint with the Office of Fair Trading. Let’s see if anything happens …

My goal with the 505 was to replace most of my paper library, which means digitizing it, before I throw most of it in the trash. Amazon has less than a 1000 titles in the genre and doesn’t sell to Norway in the first place, so they’re out as an alternative. Sony’s worse. The legit alternatives were out in other words. Now I could scan and proofread all my books on my own, but the pirates have already done that for me – why bother?

I am in effect a hoarder, but it’s because there’s 1. no legit alternative that doesn’t involve an enormous amount of work on my part, 2. easy availability, and 3. not having to spend thousands of dollars to replace titles I’ve already paid for once.

As a side benefit of organizing these files, I’ve actually rediscovered some of my favorite authors – not only by re-reading them, but also because the batch torrents contain books I wasn’t aware of. It’s also made it far easier for me to discover new authors, since I can ask friends for recommendations and then immediately check out their suggestions (provided I have the book in my e-library). It’s made it far more likely that I’ll buy future titles from them, provided they can actually provide me that content. I’ve thus become an explorer as well.

A properly setup e-book store could also benefit from having a similar service – have friend recommendations or a scrobbler/pandora like system for figuring out what you like – and then provide sample chapters or even sample books from those recommendations, like Baen does with some of their Free Library titles. Downloading gave me that option – the publishers currently don’t and are in serious need of need of catching up.

What I don’t see them ever solving is people’s need to replace their existing libraries – there’s just too many books out there, a lot of them out of print and/or not having enough sales to justify the cost of digitizing them. Even when digitized the costs of replacing them would remain too high.

The publisher signs the contract, do they not? Ergo, they are responsible. If it is the author’s recalcitrance – then they are perfectly free to say so to the public – or refuse to publish.

Some publishers are able to manage worldwide non-exclusives, the hopelessness of others is completely on them.

US publishers – being the biggest market, will have the most power, too, and can take advantage. You want a US contract? Then worldwide non-exclusive ebook distribution or get lost.

Now for Stephen King you might do whatever he wants, but for the run of the mill author, why?

The authors refusing to do so would lose more than they do now.

Those splitting up ebook rights so only sold in one territory are of course all losing sales right now. This rate of losses will of course accelerate.

The torrent was broken into three pieces and the combined size was 7 GB (gigabytes). The description claimed that the three torrents together contained fifteen thousand works of science fiction and fantasy. The torrents included files that listed the titles available, and so I decided to download these descriptive files only. The genre coverage was wide and deep, but many of the items were short stories and not full novels.

I used the term “massive” above when describing the torrent, but it is not large compared to other pirate files. A double-layer DVD can contain 8.5 GB and DVD rips of movies are commonplace. Blu-Ray rips are even larger since the dual-layer format holds 50 GB. Storing 7GB is inexpensive nowadays. The data can be burned on two single-layer DVDs or one dual layer.

Hoarder, explorer, true believer, underserved, or cheapskate: What category fits? I think that the creator-aggregator of the triple-torrent is probably a “true believer”. The downloader might be a “hoarder” but as technology progresses I think that this category breaks down. With a fast high-bandwidth connection a pirate would be tempted to grab the whole torrent collection even if he or she only wants a few ebooks. Why not? It is no more exertion than the effort to grab a DVD-quality movie or two. Ebooks are small compared to many other file types, e.g., movies, games, or OS software.

Any full analysis of piracy should try to take into account the upcoming changes that can be extrapolated. The cost of communication keeps dropping, the cost of computer storage keeps plummeting, and the cost of hosting files on the internet keeps falling. The belief in rigid copyright is weakening in younger generations.

I know hoarders were a significant category in the early days of the net but I wonder if they really are today. Most of the web users I talk to think of the web as a source of information that will always be there. The hoarder mentality was common when the web was new and when we had the idea that all of these wonderful things might vanish.

I agree that regional rights are a holdover from earlier times, but suspect that today’s economic climate is not really ready to break out into a free-trade mood.

Rob Preece
Publisher

For instance, I can buy paper books and CDs just fine at Amazon.com, even if they are published with only North America rights, but I can’t buy mp3s on amazon.com, nor ebooks on Fictionwise.

Category Four

The underserved – where the publisher refuses to sell the book at all, or refuses to sell to people because of where they live. These people will easily become Category Two and Three. e.g. if you won’t sell me the book, I can’t give you money, why shouldn’t I download it, given it makes zero economic difference?

Yes, it frustrates readers when they cannot find a digital edition of the book they want- right now. Yes, people do things they wouldn’t normally do when the publisher holds back releasing the e-book, upon the publication date. Yes, consumers get angry if they believe that the price is unfair. Let’s treat the consumer as a valued, trusted, and important essential in our business model.

It is more important to serve the masses…not drive the business model based on the illegals. Who has the majority of the influence? Not those steeling content. Let’s keep our eye on the prize.

I would count those sales as lost to bureaucracy, not to piracy…