Sarah, will making the changes I’ve listed above (and good on you for having done so) eliminate piracy? No. I don’t think that’ll ever happen. But it can reduce it. I personally know readers who stopped pirating when the books they wanted became available in legal e-editions.

It’s naive to believe that catering to the rationalizations listed in the article will reduce piracy. Many of us do, and it doesn’t make a difference.

I still have a shiny new reader, but I still buy paper or listen to the audio books.

I just don’t get the weird fatalism that surfaces with paper books.

Why can’t they be legitimate needs to be met? Do they justify piracy? Definitely not. But if my customers consistently ask for something, and I refuse to give it to them, I’m certainly taking the risk that they will take their business elsewhere. As a self-published author, I kind of like that the big publishers are ignoring their customers. More room for me. As a reader, though, they irk me, which is why I wrote the articles.

As to price by geography? Do I think it’s a perfect solution? Nope. But I couldn’t completely disagree with Paul’s idea for managing piracy in other countries. I thought it was a reasonable suggestion that added to the discussion, so I included it.

In my opinion, the whole DRM thing is a figleaf, not a real issue. Yes, DRM can be inconvenient for those of us who change devices (as a longtime eBookWise customer, I’m in this category). As a publisher, I’ve migrated away from DRM because I want my customers to have convenient and permanent access to the books they purchase. That said, I don’t think many pirates really pirate because of a religious objection to DRM.

I’m amused by Juli’s objections to price discrimination based on time but support for it based on geography. If publishers followed her suggestions, there would be huge lines of people complaining that they were being exploited (because if they went to Africa they could get the book cheaper…). Considering there are current lawsuits over textbooks being re-imported to the US from overseas (where publishers offered discounted prices to students in countries with low incomes), I think this is a non-starter. Similarly, I don’t see the problem with offering books at a premium price when they’re newly released (just as Toyota discounts their cars as a model year comes to an end). A problem is that the major publishers haven’t been very good about actually lowering the prices over time… which is bad business for them.

I guess, though, my biggest objection is Juli’s taking the pirate excuses as legitimate objections that can be met. In my experience (admittedly limited), no prices are low enough that people won’t object (and remember, I founded my company to deliver affordable electronic fiction… I get the idea that prices should be low). In my experience, complaints about DRM are more an excuse than a reason for pirating. As for availability, I think all publishers agree we’d like to get our backlists published and widely available. For the old publishers, there are rights issues that need to be dealt with and for smaller publishers, there are simple logistical matters (I’ve been migrating my backlist to Smashwords but it takes time).

Ultimately, doesn’t it come down to whether we, as customers and a society, support the concept of intellectual property? If I create something, do I have a right to limit access to it, or must I give it away for free (or at a price set by others). People who wouldn’t even think about grabbing a pair of jeans off the shelf at Wal-Mart don’t seem to mind grabbing an eBook from a pirate site. Considering that the world is moving toward an environment where essentially the only property that matters is intellectual property, it really is important that we get social agreement on this.

Anyway, an always-interesting discussion.

Rob Preece

Summed up, the author’s viewpoint and “advice” is clueless in some ways, flatly dishonest in others.

Oh, and just to be clear, I think $7.99 is “reasonably priced,” especially for a backlist book. I’ve willingly paid $14.99 for a book I wanted. I’m not cheap, but I don’t want to be taken advantage of either.

Marilynn, you’re right. Publishers can’t please everyone, and they shouldn’t try. But I don’t agree with your statement that every time major publishers come down in price that people complain. I’ve seen very little criticism of Baen and their pricing over the years. They treated readers fairly, and readers responded. When the first Kindles came out, readers thought $9.99 was a pretty fair price, and they paid it. I don’t think the real issue is price. It’s the perception of how readers have been treated over the entire e-book thing. Lack of ownership, horrible proofing and formatting, windowing of titles and artificially high prices that appear to be intended to prop up hardback sales. That’s where the hate comes from. Not the prices. I’ve seen these items discussed, in some fashion, for the 15 years I’ve been reading e-books. Readers keep saying the same things. You start to wonder why publishers don’t listen.

I’ve seen this over the last dozen years. The complainers then take one example of a book that is more expensive than the hardcover or paperback and use that to pound away at the prices of all ebooks.

Some will never be satisfied with the prices of ebooks, and the minute all the publishers try to satisfy these people is the day that publishing becomes a dead business.

We’d do better to remind people what a bargain most ebooks are in comparison to a movie or any other long form of entertainment. I could buy two or three ebooks from major publishers for the cost of what I paid to see THE HOBBIT, and each book would take as long or longer than the movie to keep me entertained.

If you don’t like the price of an ebook, buy another ebook that’s priced more reasonably and, eventually, market forces will make the books go down in price.

Publishing isn’t a charity so stop expect it to act as one with minimal profit, and neither is distribution. Amazon is subsidizing some ebooks right now, but you can be dang sure they won’t try to stay in the red forever.

If I were a publisher, the statement, “Artificially high prices … lead … to a reader not buying the book because by the time the price was lowered, he forgot it even existed,” would terrify me. You’re losing sales, not because you haven’t bothered to make something to sell (see 3 above), but because you’re artificially pricing yourself out of the market, and when you do price into the market, no one remembers you exist. You could have profitably sold a copy of the book; you just weren’t clever enough to manage it. Publisher, meet Dodo.

I can’t tell you how many books I haven’t bought because I forgot they looked interesting by the time they were available as ebooks. Literally, because it’s impossible to account for a counterfactual.

Regards,
Jack Tingle

One click payments is an excellent idea. I wish someone else would come along and recreate the Fictionwise payment system. I liked basically filling my Micropay account and then buying until I depleted it. I do something similar at Amazon using gift cards. Although I have my credit card on file, I only use gift cards for e-books, and Amazon’s gift card system is great. Unlike B&N’s, but don’t get me started on that!

Does Kobo have a gift card system, or is it just pay as you go on your credit card. I think I’ve only ever bought one book from Kobo.

They key, though, is that books need to stay available and be available. I’d pay for the right to read any book in a library, as opposed to sitting on a waitlist for a free version from the local public library. They key is not limiting the number of books I can carry (or having such a large limit that it doesn’t matter). Amazon’s Kindle lending program presumes we only read one book at a time. Researchers are often using 20-30 at the same time.

I don’t pirate ebooks – if they’re priced like this I just skip them and read something else – but this is an argument I can understand. Piracy is illegal, yes, but so is artificial price-fixing.