A pair of pieces on piracy and e-books caught my eye. One is a blog post by literary agent Nicholas Croce, on fighting piracy with e-book ads. Croce thinks that ads could work financially, in ways that were not possible before. They could be digitally updated to remain current, and be customized to reader demographics. And by being financially relevant, they could lower the cost of e-books to the point where piracy becomes less attractive.
According to copyright protection company Attributor, unauthorized downloads of books have cost American publishers $2.8 billion dollars to date in lost sales. As e-books gain market share, this number will only continue to rise. Ten years ago, advertising in books could have been seen as a gratuitous means to increase profits. Today, however, it may be a necessary tool to save our industry from the threats of shrinking margins and growing theft posed by our digital world.
I’m always a little skeptical of these “piracy has cost” sales figures, since they tend to assume that every downloaded copy represents money that would have been tendered and was lost, rather than sales that would probably never have happened to begin with.
On TechCrunch, Jon Evans writes “in praise of piracy,” calling DRM the “barbed wire of the media world.” But his post actually seems weirdly ambivalent. He spends a paragraph demolishing the arguments in favor of unlimited copying and piracy—pointing out that “all of these arguments sound like ‘I want the fruits of your years of hard work, but I don’t want to reward you in any meaningful way!’ wrapped in an extremely thin rationalization”—then he turns around and says:
Although it pains me to say this, it’s the pirates who are on the right side of history. Empires built on barbed wire inevitably collapse, and the sooner the better; while this one reigns, it perpetuates yesterday’s regimes, and squelches innovation and progress. Is piracy wrong? Yes, but that’s the wrong question. The right question is, which is worse: widespread piracy, or the endless and futile attempt to preserve DRM everywhere? So long live the pirates. Those jerks. Please don’t make me say it again.
And he says that Apple is actually a source of hope in this respect. Even though Apple currently refuses to sell e-books without DRM (at least for some publishers), it has managed to sell billions of songs when people could just as easily have downloaded them for free. (And though Evans does not bring this up, it was also responsible for removing DRM from its music sales.) He thinks that the key to fighting piracy lies in making e-books inexpensive and easy to buy and use—which includes getting rid of DRM and its attendant complications.
And the price point matter brings us back to what Nicholas Croce said about advertising being a way of doing that. I can see how publishers could think advertising might work this way in theory, but I think there’s a sort of fundamental disconnect going on between the minds of publishers and other content producers, and consumers with regard to this issue.
See, we consumers hate ads. On the web, we block them with ad-blockers, or skip over them entirely with services like Readability or Safari Reader. They’re annoying and distracting, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, they can transport malware into your computer. (I had a lot of experience dealing with this sort of malware in my time as a tech support agent in my day job. It’s nasty stuff.) When magazine publishers get ticked over this and rant at their readers for having the temerity to deprive them of revenue in this way, they’re missing the point that earning revenue by annoying your readers probably is not a recipe for long-term success.
Heck, one of the first big uses for VCRs (and one of the first feuds with network TV advertisers) was that people would tape shows and then fast forward through the commercials when they watched them later. Then when TiVo and other DVR manufacturers enabled commercial-skipping in real-time, advertisers all but went through the roof. In 2002, Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner claimed that skipping commercials on TV is “stealing” (though “there’s a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom”). That’s the sort of disconnect I’m talking about.
This is why a number of models that don’t rely on advertising have started coming to the fore. People have been leaving commercial radio for paid services like satellite radio and Pandora.com, or for their own music purchased through iTunes or ripped from CD. And Readability is experimenting with a subscription-based service to pay providers of the content that gets read with it.
If people have been willing to get rid of ads on the web and TV that annoy them, they may decide to forego ads in e-books as well. All the same, if it does reduce piracy and make e-books more affordable, it is at least worth a try.
Aren’t the vast majority of books though, not read by more than a few thousand people? Isn’t that going to translate into low advertising revenue? This might work for the very, very highest sellers.
And, even in that case, to meaningfully compete with piracy, won’t the price really have to drop, to something like $1-4 dollars? Can publishers really make up the revenue on ads for a price drop like that?
Some of the highest prices may trigger piracy, but I think the real cause is availability. Several very popular books aren’t available legally, like the Harry Potter books, so some people will get them where they can.
Many books aren’t available in different countries or regions because of archaic publishing rights. There are thousands of frustrated readers who want access to those books and some of them will pirate.
If books are a reasonable cost and available, people will take the easy road and buy them legitimately.
Most of the ebooks I buy are already in the $1 – $4 range, they are written and published by indie authors, many of whom are very successful.
I think ads in books are a means of publishers trying to hold onto their world and lower prices are just an excuse.
So people go to pirated forums to avoid DRM and get DRM free formats…if ads are annoying then won’t they also go to pirate forums to get ad free formats?!! This argument simply doesn’t work…
It’s true that ads in works of fiction are usually an intrusion.
But non-fiction is a little different. My own site http://www.scalemodelnews includes ads and links which are a positive benefit to visitors, pointing them to useful suppliers.
And the same will be true for ebooks that we plan to publish.
I’m not so sure that price alone determines a buy decision, or that relying on ads to make up the difference is a sensible strategy.
Low-priced books are pirated, too (my own books, at $3 and no restrictions, are in the torrents). Unless ebooks go to a TV-based model where the ads pay for it all, and the consumer basically gets the book for free, it won’t affect piracy.
In fact, it will probably only result in ebook ad-stripping and posting those on the torrent sites.
No, it’s not worth a try. Not now, not ever.
I buy my ebooks because it’s the right thing to do. I don’t pirate. However, I’ll not tolerate ads every 25 pages or so in ebooks in the same way I wouldn’t accept ads every 25 minutes in my Audible downloads, an ad between the 2nd and 4th movement of a purchased symphony, or ads breaking up scenes in a movie theater. If for some reason ads were to appear in the future, I’d stop buying ebooks and return to printed books, probably from the library; and if the printed books weren’t available, I might then be tempted to pirate the ad free versions. The publisher would lose a customer who buys five to seven ebooks from mainstream publishers per month to someone who’d buy nada. And as others have said, the people who pirate now will probably still pirate no matter what. So who’s the winner?
Also, depending on who starts pushing the ads, I might have to drive a nail through the center of my Kindle at the Amazon HQ just to hammer my complete detestation and intolerance for ads into the corporate minds dreaming of squeezing a few pennies more revenue from ebooks.
I have my doubts that affordability has all that much to do with piracy overall (maybe on higher priced $20+ stuff), as plenty of free to $5 books show up on various sources all the time. Geo restrictions have a higher effect IMO.
Of course no matter what is done it will never be eliminated, it only takes one person out of billions to post the material. The best that can be hoped for is to eliminate some of the roadblocks keeping folks from buying thus lessening the amount of people who go looking for downloads.
As Steve says, books with ads would just have their ads stripped and that “better” edition would be posted to the torrents, IRC, sharing sites, etc.
Greg wrote: “No, it’s not worth a try. Not now, not ever.”
I agree 500%. I will NEVER EVER buy a book with ads before or inside the story. NEVER.
This is just publishers trying to find a model to earn more income because they know that they are charging ridiculously high prices for eBooks right now. Hell I don’t blame them for exploring it. But I strongly believe that this is not a workable model. The public will react in horror and even worse … even if they try it and then stop it, the reaction will last long into the future because folk memory in the market is very hard to undo.
The publishers have to get it through their heads that the super profits they are making now will have to end. There is plenty of profit to be made from books in the $4-$7 rage which will be the sweet spot for sales. There may not be enough to support the inefficient, bloated, over paid structures of the big publishers, but there is plenty for modern efficient businesses and for the writers.
I see this as another in a line of death throes of the old business model. It won’t work. Advertising in books is just dumb.
I buy print books. I also buy eBooks. If publishers start putting ads into books, I will stop buying them. Plain and simple. There is nothing in the world that annoys me more than paying to be annoyed. I’m paying for the right to enjoy it in peace and quiet. Leave me the hell alone and let me read.
I wonder if such a move by publishers might drive more authors to indie publishing. If I had a book over which I no longer had any control, and my publisher decided to put ads in it, that would be the last book they’d ever get from me.
No, please no ads in my books.
I’m happy to pay for ad free books. And I don’t see how the ads will stop piracy. It’s not about the price of the book, it’s about your values – if you are willing to steal work, you’ll do it.
Publishing Company CEO #1: “Hmm…we’re engaging in price-fixing, charging twice as much for an e-book as for the paperback that came out ten years ago, not bothering to edit or correct our terrible OCR, and refusing to sell people books by artificially restricting what countries they can download them in, but people still insist on buying our books rather than downloading them from file-sharing services. How can we drive them away completely?”
Publishing Company CEO #2: “Let’s try putting in ads every ten pages, maybe that will do the trick.”
we’ve been doing this succesfully for quiet some time now @ http://www.bookboon.com
I just visited bookboon.com and downloaded two eBooks. I can see that this model can work in this specific genre. Short, free, superficial, free, frivolous, free publications in the non-fiction market. (apols Jan … no offence)
Reading through these eBooks only reinforced why I could never ever endure this kind of thing in either a serious non-fiction eBook or a fiction eBook. Never.
If Jamie Keller was right and not watching ads is stealing by copyright infringement, then so is not buying the products featured in most of those ads. Go blow it out your old wazoo, Jamie!