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Ebooks are immune to audit says Michael A. Stackpole
August 17, 2011 | 9:08 am
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By Paul Biba
From Stackpole’s Stormwolf blog. Stackpole talks about how publishing contracts have audit clauses allowing the author to get an accounting of what has been sold and that this can always be verified by the paper trail that print books leave, but:
This is not true with ebooks. While you might think that a single book which is a one megabite file which burns a full gigabyte of bandwidth in a month of downloads would account for 1,000 downloads, that’s simply not true. It could be one guy trying unsuccessfully to download that file, and it takes him 2,000 tries to do so. Granted, delivery rate failure is not usually that extreme. As nearly as I can tell from my own website, it runs maybe 2%, and that usually involves firewalls, wonky wifi or a cat playing with the keyboard.
Another scenario is a bit more sinister. Imagine a programmer or hacker who manages to intercept orders coming from customers and going to consumers. He diverts the pay to his own account, vanishes the order itself, and still sends a confirmation on to the delivery computer so the customer gets his file. Let’s say he does this with one in 10,000 orders on a random basis. The chances of locating that problem would be tiny. While I don’t think this is what is happening anywhere, I use it as an illustration of how simple it would be for orders to be diverted.
For authors, the only way to get a handle on the validity of sales numbers is to compare sales across platforms. In my case I have information from my website store, I have Barnes & Noble numbers, Kindle numbers and iBookstore numbers. When I compare them I get a picture of sales that conforms, more or less, to the market statistics which are commonly held as valid: Kindle is roughly 70% of the market, B&N is 15%, and everything else covers the last 15%—not including independent website sales since the market statistics don’t factor them in. My own website numbers, however, have sales patterns that match the others, so I’m reasonably confident in the data I’m getting.
An increasing number of authors are doing what I’m doing; and this is causing us to wonder very seriously about the ebook sales figures coming out of traditional publishing. The numbers being reported are seriously out of whack with what we’re experiencing in selling our own work.
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Comments:
Am I missing something here? You’d do your count at the point of sale (when user pays their money, or receives an authorized weblink to download a free book). You don’t try to guess based on bits and bytes flying about, any more than you’d manage physical books based on weight, or the amount of ink that the printers used, or the amount of gas used to ship the books. Sales == sales. Downloads != sales, because of download failures, downloading to multiple devices, downloading for an updated edition, etc. I have a hard time believing that the only counts publishing houses are giving authors is a raw count of bytes downloaded. Or that anyone would think that number is meaningful.
It could be done using a technique much like Ingram does with their Expresso machines. Retailers such as Amazon wouldn’t store copies for download. They’d pass the purchase request along to servers that represent the interest of authors and publishers. The file would come from there, one copy at a time, and the retailer would just be a conduit. I worry less about wholesale downloading than insider backdoors that’d let employees get ebooks for free. When I asked about one of my ebooks, a B&N employee downloaded it to the store’s demo Nook, claiming no one would be charged. I didn’t care in that particular circumstance, since it gave me a chance to see what the ebook looked like on a Nook. But wholesale grabbing by the thousands of employees at Amazon, Apple, B&N could add up to real money. I might add that given how secretive companies such as Amazon and Apple are about there sales figures, it’d be hard to get them to agree to the sort of audit that might turn up irregularities.