The Millions interviewed a book pirate reporter C. Max Magee found on a bit torrent site. The interview is way too long to reprint here but there are a couple of quotes that are very interesting. These are from the answers the pirate gave. He has admittedly downloaded thousands of books:
… Most of what I have seen is scanned physical books. Stephen King’s Under the Dome was the first DRM-broken book I downloaded knowingly….
… I do not buy DRM’d ebooks that are priced at more than a few dollars, but would pay up to $10 for a clean file if it was a new release…
… I guess if every book was available in electronic format with no DRM for reasonable prices ($10 max for new/bestseller/omnibus, scaling downwards for popularity and value) it just wouldn’t be worth the time, effort, and risk to find, download, convert and load the book when the same thing could be accomplished with a single click on your Kindle.
Comments that caught my eye:
“Perhaps if readers were more confident that the majority of the money went to the author, people would feel more guilty about depriving the author of payment.”
“In the end, I think that regular people will never feel very guilty “stealing” from a faceless corporation, or to a lesser extent, a multi-millionaire like King.”
“One thing that will definitely not change anyone’s mind or inspire them to stop are polemics from people like Mark Helprin and Harlan Ellison – attitudes like that ensure that all of their works are available online all of the time.”
I would add big publishing house executives and the self-serving DRM purveyers (like the quoted outfit) to the list of “people who aren’t helpful” when it comes to the developing consumer ethos of the emerging ebook industry. Trying to suppress an emerging industry to protect a declining one is the surest way to annoy early adopters and grass-roots “influencers”. These folks are the ones that will set the tone for what is expected to be acceptable practice once the technology really hits the mainstream.
Humans are, as a rule, very good at rationalizing what they would be inclined to do anyway; harping on the negatives of new tech instead of trying to leverage it to good advantage simply leads to the mainstreaming of the very activity they are trying to marginalize.
Well-known example: In the music arena, people wanted to use the internet and compressed digital music technology to find new music that fit their tastes. The labels not only failed to recognize an emerging market and offer an acceptable product, they actively worked to suppress legal alternatives (Internet radio, online subscription services, personalized radio, digital lockers, etc) and while they worked to suppress those new business models, they opened the door for the mainstreaming of the previously-limited unlicensed downloads that ubiquitous broadband enabled. Napster was inevitable; its ubiquity wasn’t.
Book scan-and-ocr “piracy” has been around for decades. The enabling technology for its mainstreaming are the optimized dedicated readers that are becoming increasingly affordable.
So, far, it is still mostly limited to techies and “hobbyists” like the “Real Caterpillar” because most people who can benefit from a $300 ebook reader are more likely to walk the straight and narrow and more likely to voice displeasure with the BPHs with one-star reviews than by rev’ing the scanners.
But dedicated ebook readers are only going to get cheaper.
The $100 price point looms.
At that point, high school and college readers will get into the market. They’ll be wanting quality content no matter what. If they wade into a noisy debate over how $9.99 is “ridiculously low” pricing for ebooks, they’ll just shrug and head for the darker realms. Count on it; the clock *is* ticking.
The napsterization of ebooks is still some time away.
It may be imposible to stop (the allure of free is easy to rationalize) but the easiest way to *accelerate* it is to try to squelch the legal alternatives to protect a business model that is simply unsustainable.
Publishing has two enemies these days: The “real Caterpiller” and his friends are the lesser one; the bigger one are the oh-so-visible BPH corporate execs and their fumbling policies that may end up driving their customers to the darknet. This should be avoided; a war between readers and publishers is not inevitable.
Unlike Stephen King, Harlan Ellison’s works are available as DRM-free ebooks prices between $4-9, although I can’t tell if they are DRM-free everywhere or just at Fictionwise and Webscriptions. This appears to be in the book pirate’s price range, but he’s willing to pirate them out of spite because Harlan Ellison goes out of his way to do DMCA takedowns of people deliberately infringing his reasonably priced works. I guess that bit about being concerned for author remuneration is just hypocrisy (I’m shocked).
In fact, we are experts at it. We are also expert at holding up someone else’s rationalizations as justification of our own actions.
As for real caterpillar’s suggestion that he would buy e-books at this price or in that state, they bring to mind a certain road paved with good intentions…
I buy legitimate ebooks. I have bitten the ebook bullet. Now Sony’s messed around with their format since December, and if I redownload the files, they are broken (ragged right justification).
I find poorly-formatted text unreadable. Sony has not addressed this issue in any way, so I am screwed.
Defective by design, indeed. Haven’t bought anything from Sony since. Won’t.
Still buy ereader (.pdb), can’t wait to see how *that’s* going to end up screwing me.