More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
The impact of piracy and “free” on book sales
May 28, 2009 | 11:04 am
|
By Paul Biba
Finally found an open ethernet port!
The show floor is not open today, that starts tomorrow, but there are a series of lectures, panels and presentations going on all day. I’m attending a few and will report on what I’ve heard.
This lecture is an update on the O’Reilly piracy project, presented by Brian O’Leary of Magellan Media who was hired by O’Relly to undertake the study.
They want to quantify the impact of piracy on book sales. Random House joined the study. The project is still continuing. Looking for more publishers to get a bigger database. For the piracy part of the study only O’Reilly books were looked at.
The primary findings are that the piracy threat might be overstated for the books they looked at. Not that many titles got pirated. 21 out of 65 O’Reilly titles were pirated. There is a signifact lag between the time when a book is published and the time when it shows up on peer to peer sites. The average time is 19 weeks.
If you give ebooks away what is the impact on sales? Found initially that sales were higher during promotional period and up a bit for the period after the promotional one.
Surprises: low volume of peer to peer incidence, long lag time on peer to peer seeding after the book came out, higher incidence of “free” in publishing in the industry then they thought.
Overall view so far is that the data set is so limited that it is very hard to draw any valid statistical assumptions. Seeds and leeches peak very quickly after issuance and then drop off quickly as well to a much lower steady state. Piracy research was conducted with only O’Reilly titles.
For the data they studied, pirated content show an increase after about 25 weeks and this seemed to cause a renewed interest in O’Reilly content and thus caused an increase in sales of about 20%.
Doing additional testing, continuing to monitor and trying to get more participants.
My own view of the presentation: piracy data is from O’Reilly so it is limited to technical books and a small market segment – a segment where you would expect to find piracy because of the technical expertise of the readers, thus it is unclear to me how this data translates to a mainstream publisher, if at all. It is an excellent effort and more participants are needed to make the limited data set meaningful.
|
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
Thanks for the coverage, Paul!
As you noted, it’s important for more data / more publishers to contribute to this research. The initial results are interesting, but there’s much more to test.
The data sample is too small to make conclusions but if the 19 week window before books show up on peer to peer sites holds up, and the number of books pirated as a percentage of “major” works also holds true, then publishers just need to understand that a pirated book does not equal lost sales in a one to one relationship and/or does not equal lost paper sales either. Then we will be making real progress toward their understanding that the key to making money on ebooks is to get them out prior to the 19 week window in a place and a format accessible to as many reading devices as possible, not to tye up access with DRM, which kills sales and actually fosters piracy. No access and high prices create pirated versions. High timely access and a fair (as percieved by the buyer) price fosters sales. Personally I no longer buy paper hardcover books because I’m no longer willing to lug around that weight, so if it’s not an ebook, I pass. If it’s not in a format my Sony 700 can read, I pass. I got a David Moody book for free on his website. Now I’m a fan. I’ll buy anything he writes now as long as I can get it as an ebook, other authors take note. I buy about 300 books per year.