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A Book Author Wonders How to Fight Piracy – NY Times article today
May 14, 2009 | 1:35 pm
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By Paul Biba
Peter Wayner has written an interesting article on his experience, as an author, with pirates. Here’s a couple of quotes – fair use, Peter, I’m not pirating you 
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The specter of piracy of my books materialized for me several weeks ago when I typed the four words “wayner data compression textbook” into Google. Five of the top ten links pointed to sites distributing pirated copies. (And now, it’s six.)To add insult to injury, the top ten doesn’t include any page that actually sells my book …
The kind of book I write, thick with equations that play to computer lovers, is also the first to be pirated. It’s a canary. O’Reilly Publishers, one of the top technical presses, reported that in 2008, the computer book market was the only segment to lose sales. According to the company, the category sold 8% fewer titles in 2008 than 2007.
I’m not going to write more books if the revenues will be wiped out by pirates. While authors like Cory Doctorow like to argue that the author’s real enemy is obscurity, there was no real uptick in the sales of my book when these pirated versions appeared.
Peter Wayner is a freelance journalist and book author who contributes frequently to The Times, and you can find his blog here.
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Comments:
In the NYT, the author complains:
…”Google Books helped me find that [Langston Hughes] quote by taking me to a page from “The Collected Works of Langston Hughes.” There was no need for me to buy a copy on Amazon for $26.56…”
I suppose if it weren’t for Google [apparently] introducing him to the Hughes quote, he would never have known the book existed. Is there any chance he would have bought the book then?
Good point, Steve.
I don’t think he’s likely to find his income increase too much if piracy of his book was eliminated. People would more likely turn to other resources, many of which are free on the web.
His is also an Ask Slashdot question, so if you have answers you can post ‘em there for him to read.
I don’t think it’s true that the computer book market is the only one that’s down – everything I’ve read says that all segments are down except ebooks, which continues to grow, although not enough to make up for the decline across the board.