CNet’s David Carnoy has an article touching on Galleycat’s video interview with the new president of the Authors Guild, lawyer-turned-author Scott Turow. The five-minute interview segment is embedded below the jump, but Carnoy actually focuses on only a small part of it—Turow’s feelings about e-book piracy.
It should not come as a surprise that now that the Kindle followed by the iPad have suddenly catapulted e-books and e-book reading into the spotlight, suddenly a lot of light is being shined into that dark corner of the net where e-book pirates lurk.
Carnoy singles out the iPad as the main culprit in the increase in e-book piracy, comparing its greater sales over the Kindle to the original iPod’s greater sales (and great boost to music piracy) over the Rio and other MP3 players that came before it.
He suggests that the fragmentation of the e-book market originally slowed down piracy just as it slowed down sales, but that standardization on the EPUB format is giving pirates an easier goal to target.
It seems that most of the EPUB files available are converted from PDF files (scans of books), but what’s scary is how compact the files are (less than 1MB) and how easy they are to load into iBooks and other e-readers that support the EPUB format. Though the size of movies and games can easily exceed 1GB and take hours to download (just ask folks who own the PSP Go how they long they have to wait to download games they’ve legally purchased), e-books can be shared in a few seconds. It seems that it’s only a matter of time before file sharers move from exploiting the "analog hole" (scanning a hardcopy book) to the digital world of cracking copy-protection schemes and stripping legally bought e-books of their DRM.
Carnoy seems not to be aware that there are already DRM-cracking tools for MS LIT, eReader, MobiPocket, Kindle, and Adobe ADEPT—in fact, every major e-book encryption format except for Apple’s, and I don’t doubt that one will come out soon. All the same, it seems that for whatever most pirated e-books still turn out to be scans rather than cracks.
Apart from the ease of piracy, Carnoy also touches on the way consumers are rebelling against higher prices for e-books by leaving negative comments on Amazon, and suggests those higher prices may drive readers to pirate the books rather than pay for them just as $11-$12 CD prices drove consumers to do the same for music.
Over on TechDirt, Mike Masnick has his own opinions of Turow’s stance on piracy as mentioned in Carnoy’s article:
Rather than saying that unauthorized file sharing is such a big problem, perhaps Turow should take a look at the music industry more closely. He seems to only be superficially aware of what’s happening in that industry. Instead of recognizing that the industry wasted over a decade fighting what fans wanted, he seems to think that he can magically fight what every other industry has failed to fight. That doesn’t seem like a strategy that has a high likelihood of success.
E-book piracy is nothing new. It has been going on for at least as long as scanners have existed. I remember seeing e-books circulating on peer-to-peer networks as soon as there were peer-to-peer networks, and naturally the Harry Potter novels were all pirated literally within hours of their release—in blatant defiance of Rowling’s refusal to license e-book editions.
Only a very few writers have ever troubled themselves to take legal action over on-line piracy of their books. But now that a nontrivial amount of money is being made in the e-book trade, and estimates are that number will only increase, suddenly publishers and writers are finding piracy worth fretting over.
As Masnick says, the other industries have not had much luck fighting piracy with legal battles. The music industry by and large stopped trying after its attempts to coerce file sharers into paying up with nasty legal letters turned out to cost a lot more money than it took in (and not dent the continued sharing of music files). The movie industry does not seem to have learned this lesson yet, but Time-Warner Cable is starting to school them.
It is hard to imagine how Turow might succeed where they failed.
Update: Charlie Sorrell at Wired’s “Gadget Lab” blog has another great opinion piece on the matter. He points out that e-book piracy is still relatively small at the moment, and probably won’t become a major problem until everybody, not just early adopters, has an iPad—though it undoubtedly will happen.
Blaming the iPad is stupid, though. If it causes a rise in book piracy, it is only because it is driving demand. The book industry should embrace this and give us what we want: cheap books, published day-and-date with their paper equivalents, along with all back-catalog titles made available. And preferably DRM-free.
Related:
I think that the issue is that people want to pay for stuff, but the minute that it’s the slightest bit harder to pay than to pirate, they’ll pirate without a second thought.
I genuinely don’t believe that price is so much of an issue, because–for the general public–pirating is still harder than paying.
What has turned the music industry around is not that the songs were .79 or .99 or 1.29 or 1.99 or whatever; it’s that you could click “Download iTunes” and bam, there’s iTunes, and then you click “Buy Song” and bam, there’s the song and it’s on your iPod and you’re ready to go.
Agreed, but this is still a hassle for some of us. I am trying to get my daughter to do the right thing by buying music subscription vouchers from Telstra (the local telco company), but the hassle involved in signing up and entering 15-digit numbers, and the way that files keep appearing and disappearing on the system makes it very hard to convince her that this has any advantage over BitTorrent.
I can only speak for myself, but price is exactly what got me started pirating ebooks this spring. I think it is ridiculous to charge more for an ebook than a paperback – an ebook that I cannot return, share or resell. If the ebook costs more than a trade paperback (for me the cutoff is $10) I pirate it. Learning how to pirate was a pain, but worth it.