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Potter pirate interview—and the best way for publishers to fight back
July 31, 2007 | 9:25 am
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By David Rothman
In just 48 hours, pirates released e-books based on illegally photographed images of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. So how did they do it?
Alex at MobileRead found out that the DSB pirate group drew more than 100-150 volunteers for the Potter project, with perhaps 10-15 actually helping.
The photos weren’t good enough for OCRing, but that was hardly a problem—not when the volunteers could simply type out the material.
Worked 8-9 hours a day
“We started Monday morning and by Tuesday night we had our first 10 chapters done,” a DSB leader said. “We only worked for about 8-9 hours a day. After that, we received much more help and got the remaining 26 chapters plus epilogue done by Thursday morning and finally released it on Thursday afternoon…
“We decided that if each one of us takes a chapter from 1-10, we could all read the book in a nice format and only put in a little work. From there on we decided it wasn’t right to keep this to ourselves. We wanted to keep the release within the group but realized we wouldn’t be able to finish in time if we only had our 7 people.”
And guess what? The DSBers seemed less worried about the law than about competition from rival pirate groups. Together, the various pirate efforts made it a snap to catch up with illegal copies in popular formats such as eReader.
Give up, J.K.
So what does this little initiative say about J.K. Rowling’s odd belief that she can help discourage piracy by not doing an e-book edition? Furthermore, even had there been an e-book, DRM would have hardly have gotten in the pirates’ way.
I know. E-book are just a speck of the book market, but that will change—notice how the Sony Reader sold out in a blink from TigerDirect at $99? So publishers would do well to look ahead. In the future the best ways to counter piracy would be to:
1. Offer e-book at the same time the p-books come out. In fact, as I’ve suggested before, the e-books might even be released ahead of the p-books, with discounts offered toward purchase of paper editions.
2. Give the e-books wide distribution—to reduce opportunities for the pirated editions to find users in remote locations.
3. Keep prices reasonable, relying on volume to make up for this.
4. Also—and, yes, I know this is heresy—consider including some politely placed advertising for people who would like best-sellers at the very lowest price. This would simply be an option.
5. Use no DRM or social DRM. The harder it is for people to use legal copies, the more they’ll gravitate toward pirated editions.
6. Recognize that what counts isn’t the elimination of piracy but revenue for publishers and writers. Piracy, alas, is inevitable. But get the legal copies out there first, and they’ll mostly preempt the illegal variety.
Related: Downloading more than ever, Brits care less about getting caught, via Digg. The experiences of the music industry, discussed in a TorrentFreak article citing a music industry report, should serve as a warning to book-publishers. If the music industry hadn’t been so customer-hostile, then the piracy wouldn’t be as acceptable to typical users as it is today.
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Comments:
Has the publishing industry starting suing individual downloaders like the RIAA and MPAA has? I haven’t heard about if they have and I don’t think it would wise to do that as you noted in your post. The market was clearly there for downloading MP3′s as the success of I-tunes clearly demonstrates. I will note that I used to download music off of different sites, but once I-Tunes came out, I got all music through them, legally, happily paying .99 a song without the worry of viruses. I think most people who download ebooks off of newsgroups, etc. would happily pay a reasonable price to get a perfectly formatted book the easy way. I think the publishing industry knows that. I also think the rumors of Amazon with its Kindle and Mobipocket ebooks are going to be the new I-Tunes. At least, I hope so.
David,
I had to laugh when I read your list of things publishers could do to fight piracy, because, and I’m sure you’ve already heard it before, Baen already does a lot of that and has for several years with success as a part of their WebScriptions site.
1. Offer e-book with or ahead of p-book. Check. In fact, you can even get electronic Advanced Reader Copies (ARC) of books. Who else does that?
3. Keep prices reasonable. I dunno about anyone else, but I’d say check. For the stuff that you have to pay for, ie. not yet in the Free Library, typically ranges between $4 and $6 for individual books that have already been released, or $15 for the ARC. Or you can pay $15 to get a bundle of e-books for all of the p-books released in a particular month, both hardback and paperback. And going back to point 1, you can subscribe for forthcoming months, and for the stuff thats still in the works you’ll start getting access to part of the books about 3 months before the publication date. And they guarantee a minimum of 4 books per month on the bundle buy. If they don’t have that many new books being released the difference is made up from their backlist. And frankly, I doubt they have to do that very often, because they usually have 5 to 7 books released each month with at least 2 of those being new hardbacks. Sounds darned reasonable to me.
5. Use No or Social DRM. Check. Baen doesn’t do DRM. Especially considering that one of the (many) formats they release all of their e-books in is HTML.
6. Recognize the real bottom line. Check and Double-Check. Considering their whole e-book thing started as an experiment in 1995 with what became their Free Library, and discovering that they could release a book electronically for free, and cause not just other books in its series to get increased p-sales, but that book too. And then it grew from there into what they have now. And honestly, when was the last time you saw a Baen book being pirated? Need I say more?
Not sure what point 2 actually means to evaluate it for Baen, and for them point 4 would be silly. If you know about Baen and Webscriptions, you don’t need ads, you’re probably already sold on it.
All in all, I am firmly convinced that if the publishing industry as a whole bothered to pay attention to what Baen’s been doing for years, we’d fairly quickly see piracy of most new books wither on the vine. And if they’ld bother to do the same for their backlist, piracy for fiction would probably just plain go away.
Jeanne and Luke:
J. Yep. I wish publishers would worry more about revenue and less about protecting their paper infrastructure, regardless of the value of paper books and bookstores. Here in the States, at least, people spend just a speck of their incomes on paper books, far, far less than on other forms of recreation, etc. The present system is already a failure by those standards. Enticing, affordable multimedia books at fair prices and without silly DRM restrictions could change the picture. Let’s hope that both technology and publishers’ business sense will improve over time.
L: Believe it or not, I hadn’t Baen in mind, but, yes, I’m pleased to give ‘em credit and in the past have cited Baen as a great example. By wide distribution, I mean timely distribution in many languages, at least of Potter-style best-sellers, before the pirates have a chance to find downloaders. I say downloaders rather than customers, since many pirates offer free e-books simply for the challenge, and because high prices of E or lack of e-books, period, make them look like social benefactors. As for Point #4, I meant the use of ads in books to make them free or keep prices down—while also offering, as an option, adless editions.
Thanks, both of you. As usual, commenters are adding value to the TeleBlog—thereby strengthening the case we keep making for interactive books.
David