Received the following email from Bill Smith and thought it was worth repeating:
Publishers’ fixate on DRM to prevent unauthorized sharing — oh, sorry, piracy, arr — of their books. Because that’s the major problem the industry faces.
Yet, a story at Ars Technica notes that only 9% of Internet users are actually “pirates.”
So the 91% of the US Internet population that’s willing to play by the rules and get their products legally is stuck with DRM-crippled books, the hassle of authorizing devices, hoping the company selling those DRM-crippled books doesn’t go out of business because then they lose their books — and maybe even unauthorized spyware and rootkits — all because of a tiny minority?
“Only 9%,” you say. “Nine percent is a lot!”
Perhaps. But remember, the publishing industry is perfectly happy with the print business model…which often sees 40-50% of its product unsold, returned or destroyed. That’s after the publisher has already incurred the costs of printing, shipping and warehousing those unsold books, too.
Maybe the pirates aren’t the industry’s biggest problem.
— Bill Smith
www.BillSmithBooks.com
In a linked article, it says:
which is what a lot of us here have been saying.
But if we didn’t have DRM, 1000% of the U.S. Internet population would engage in piracy!!! 🙂
Why would any rational human being think publishers are “perfectly happy with the print business model…which often sees 40-50% of its product unsold, returned or destroyed.” That’s insane and intellectually dishonest. Just because it’s a reality they have to deal with doesn’t mean they are “perfectly happy with it.” But hey, at least Bill Smith got some press.
anon – the reason why it is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, is that if they were not happy they would have changed the model. Simple.
And that 9% would have never been paying customers anyway so there are no lost sales.
Perhaps “perfectly happy” was not literally accurate…but publishers find 40-50% return ratios acceptable…tolerable…bearable. A fact of life. They have accepted these policies for DECADES. They have not forced booksellers to change those policies, feeling that such return rates are merely the “cost of doing business” in order to get their product into bookstores.
Yet a 9% loss rate is unacceptable. 9% on a product that cost then NOTHING in printing, warehousing and shipping. While they incur those expenses on the returned/stripped/destroyed product.
I think my point is still quite valid.
Good point. I think it’s clear that piracy is the problem when you don’t know what to do about the real problem.
The big publishers could spend more of their time figuring out how to thrive in the new environment rather than worrying about one of the challenges we all face.
I’m currently scanning my three-hundred-odd paperbacks into PDF files so I can take them with me when the next bushfire comes through. It’s a slow, frustrating, laborious job, and I would much rather just buy electronic copies, but guess what? I can’t, because nobody in the publishing business has the initiative to take on the legal issues and set to work issuing ebooks for novels published between 1930 and 1970.
Is piracy the problem? No, reader FRUSTRATION is the problem.
It isn’t even a pricing problem. Even the whingeing cheapskates here at Teleread admit that they don’t price-shop for specific titles; price only matters when they don’t know what they want.
It’s an access problem. Everything I’ve pirated over the last however-long has been something that I could not get. Like Jon says, I’d be happy to buy the ebook, if there were one.