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Interview with Gabriella Coleman on book piracy
December 2, 2009 | 8:20 pm
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By Paul Biba
I haven’t had time to listen to this yet, but Resource Shelf recommends it so it probably is good. Spark has interviewed Gabriella Coleman, pictured above,, about online book piracy. She is an assistant professor in the department of Media, Culture & Communication at New York University. They talked about why online book piracy is poised to shake up the book business and what publishers can do to stop it.
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Comments:
The following is a slightly reformatted version of a comment I posted to the discussion thread for that interview.
Gabriella, I’ve listened to your interview, and there are a couple of points about which I disgree.
First: at 3:40, you have been talking about how the landscape has changed because of the sudden advent of these e-book readers that read PDFs. The Kindle, the Nook, etc.
I wonder if you’re aware that people have been reading e-books on hand-held devices (even leaving aside computers) for over ten years now, starting with the Palm Pilot? And that there have been a number of text- and HTML-based formats (Palm/AportisDoc, Mobipocket, iSilo, and now ePub) that are significantly better for e-book reading on these devices than PDFs?
People have been scanning and illicitly transmitting popular books for quite some time. For example, here’s an article I blogged in 2005 about how quickly the Harry Potter books got around after their initial release.
And these books were more frequently not in PDF form, because PDFs just aren’t readable on the kinds of devices people have been using to e-read. Even now, anything smaller than the Kindle DX is just too small to display 8.5"x11"-sized PDFs visibly.
Illicit e-book trading sites have been around at least since people were able to start scanning books. First they were web or FTP sites, like their sibling "w4r3z" sites. Then they moved to peer-to-peer once file-sharing formats like Gnutella and KaZaa hit the scene. Now they’re on BitTorrent and Rapidshare. The only reason people are making more of a fuss now is that display technology has finally arrived that make stand-alone e-book readers look feasible in the mass market, so suddenly "e-book" is a word in everybody’s vocabulary. For all most of these people know, it’s as if the e-book had only just been invented.
But the number of stand-alone readers that has been sold ever since the word "e-book" was coined is utterly dwarfed by the number of multi-purpose devices—Palm Pilots and WinCE PDAs and Blackberries and iPhones/iPod Touches. There have been over fifty million Apple iDevices sold alone—and I would be surprised if there were had been more than two million sales of all models of stand-alone e-book reader put together. (And I wouldn’t be surprised if that number were less than one million.)
Second: at 4:20, you say there’s an incentive for people to break Kindle DRM "to convert the book into PDF, which people can then read on their computer." Again, this is wrong. I’ve never heard of anyone wanting to break Kindle DRM to convert the book into PDF, because PDF is actually the most awkward, LEAST readable e-book format from a screen. It’s made for printing, not for reading on a screen.
If I wanted to break Kindle DRM it would be to convert the book into regular Mobipocket or ePub, which I could then read on other devices that do not support Kindle DRM—a lot of Kindle owners were doing this to put the books on their iPhones before Amazon came out with an iPhone Kindle reader—or, more importantly, to archive the book against the possibility of Amazon making it unreadable or otherwise revoking DRM privileges in the future (as infamously happened with the Orwell 1984 debacle, or the man whose Kindle account was revoked because Amazon thought he had returned too many items).
And this is hardly unique to the Kindle. Amazon bought the Mobipocket e-book format a few years ago, as grist for their Kindle. They then proceeded to break compatibility with the DRM’d Mobipocket format used by e-booksellers such as Fictionwise: if you buy a DRM’d book from Fictionwise, Amazon won’t let you read it on your Kindle.
For a while there was a loophole you could use to get around that, using your Kindle’s serial number to re-encrypt the Mobi book so the Kindle would read it—but Amazon quite intentionally shut down the loophole. So if you’ve bought a whole bunch of DRM’d Mobipocket books from Fictionwise but would like to read them on your Kindle, what are you going to do?
And that’s not all, either. Mobipocket was going to release a Mobipocket Reader application for the iPhone. An industry-insider source I talked to told me that it was ready to go as of August, 2008, but that Amazon refused to allow Mobipocket to release it. Apparently they didn’t want the competition with their Kindle (or their iPhone Kindle app, which they released a short time later).
There are a number of apps that can read unencrypted Mobipocket books on the iPhone, but not any that are compatible with Mobipocket’s DRM. So if you’ve bought a whole bunch of DRM’d Mobipocket books from Fictionwise but would like to read them on your iPhone, what are you going to do?
In fact, there are a number of platforms that people would like to be able to read DRM’d Mobipocket books on—iPhone, Macintosh, Linux, Nokia Maemo—but it seems Mobipocket has closed its shutters on all future software development. Which means that people who’ve invested in big libraries of DRM’d Mobi books are going to have to break the DRM if they want to read their books on ANY new platforms from now on.
And in a wider sense, this is the case for any form of DRM. If you don’t break it, you don’t know that you’ll be able to access the content you paid for in the future. Ask the customers of the defunct Microsoft and Yahoo Music divisions, or of the defunct Embiid e-book company, how portable their DRM-locked media are now. Any DRM vendor, even Amazon, could go out of business or just decide not to support its past DRM format in the future. (As they’re doing with Mobipocket.)
Breaking DRM to convert into a PDF. Snort. Really.
I listened to the interview as well. It was clear to me that Ms. Coleman’s comments reflect her connections to the academic lit world, not the entertainment lit world. Most of her comments make sense in that perspective, that is, the “fairly recent” interest in e-books and sharing sites, the high costs, and overriding concern with PDFs.
The academic world has remained the most insular segment of the e-book market (and with good reason: Their business model will be the most severely altered by an e-book market). It’s no wonder, then, that her suggestions for dealing with DRM are old news to most of us who have been with this industry for awhile.
I have to admit that I didn’t listen to the interview, but I did read the comments, and it strikes me that people who are hostile to copyright seem to equate it with Disney and other large corporations. But there are many struggling authors who are trying to eke out a living, and we’re covered by the same laws. To say that you refuse to honor copyright because it’s convoluted and protects large corporation does the rest of us who create artistic and intellectual products a disservice. Is it so hard to see the difference between your average struggling writer and Disney? If you rip us off, you really are taking bread out of our mouths.
Sorry, Paula, I am not quite sure what you are talking about, because no one has mentioned anything about ripping off any authors in these comments. If you reread Chris’s intelligent comment above, the issue many readers have with copyright is fair use. If I purchase a novel, I should be able to read it on any device I want to for a reasonable length of time (ie years). DRM screws the honest, makes the pirates laugh, and costs the authors royalty income.