doctorow_150x2241[1]Cory Doctorow’s latest column on The Guardian talks about ways to convince people to pay for “legitimate” products rather than downloading free versions off the Internet. He points out that many companies are trying to fight piracy using mostly sticks, when in fact that carrots would work better in some cases.

In the article, Doctorow examines the pros and cons of each method—some good, some bad—and how content creators are succeeding or failing at applying them. The methods include:

  • Buy this or you’ll get in trouble
  • Buy this because it’s the right thing to do
  • Buy this because you’re supporting something worthwhile
  • Buy this because paying money will deliver high quality
  • Buy this because it’s convenient
  • Buy this because your devices won’t play the unauthorized version
  • Buy this and you’ll get more features than you would with the unauthorized version

In a lot of these methods, even when publishers, labels, or studios try them, they tend to have a hard time getting them right. For instance, the “high quality” legitimate DVDs frequently include some pretty strong negatives such as unskippable trailers or commercials, and “high quality” legitimate computer games often include DRM that messes with your computer.

And “convenient” can be problematic too for media such as e-books that fall under regional licensing restrictions so are not available to large parts of the world—while illicit pirated versions are.

One thing Baen is doing right is the “supporting something worthwhile” aspect. Quite apart from the DRM-free, inexpensive nature of their e-books (which gets into the “high quality” aspect), they also host a community forum where many of their authors choose to participate in discussions with readers. This puts a human face on the authors, and makes readers that much more likely to want to buy their books—it’s one thing to stiff some faceless writer somewhere, but another to do it to someone you consider an acquaintance or friend. (Non-Baen authors who blog or social network do this, too.) Mike Masnick at Techdirt calls this the “CWF+R2B” formula: Connect With Fans, and give them a Reason 2 Buy.

You do catch more flies with honey. Content producers might do a lot better at fighting piracy if they focused on giving consumers a quality product that would not make it harder for people to enjoy something they’ve paid for than something they went and got for free.

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3 COMMENTS

  2. Steven, join the Yahoogroups, AuthorsAgainstE-BookTheft. They have excellent advice on how to fight rampant offenders as well as sharing info on the major pirate sites.

    A few comments. I really appreciate the irony of this article. Cory has created a career out of tossing ebook authors and their copyright under the pirate/free content bus to build his own paper career and his ego, and now he’s a champion against pirates. Yeah, right.

    All the let’s be friends with pirates methods don’t work in a majority of cases. Authors and publishers who do everything right from no-DRM to geographical rights are still being screwed just as badly as those who do things wrong.

    Sometimes, you simply have to use the stick.

  3. I won’t download a pirated ebook. I think that is wrong. But I have not been impressed with the quality and pricing of ebooks. Many backlist books which I can buy as a hardcover remainder for $5.99 are sold as ebooks for more than $12.

    I have also downloaded Kindle samples from several books (I use an iPad as my ereader) and found maps at the beginning of a travel memoir that are such poor quality images that they are only clear when at the original size of 1 x 2 inches. Unacceptable. I have paid top dollar for recently released ebooks that do not have an active table of contents, even when the book contains a glossary of foreign terms, maps, character lists and time lines at the beginning and/or end. I had to mark them all myself. These are all ebooks from the “Big 6” publishers.

    I don’t like to support poor business practices, and I have been considering what to do. Currently, I buy about 50% of my books as actual books and the other half as ebooks (more than 100 books a year). I plan to continue to buy actual books as I have been, but as for ebooks, if the ebook costs more than $10 (and is available as a ppbk) or the ebook sample is poor quality, then I shall buy a used copy of the actual book. I realize that I also need to inform the publisher and the author that they have lost out on a sale and why. I know that the author sometimes doesn’t have a lot of choice on the pricing of their ebooks, but I hope that if they realize they are losing sales, they and their agents may pressure the industry to at least produce a good quality ebook at a reasonable price.

    When I read that publishers are displeased that book retailers discount bestsellers and many other books, so that consumers think ebooks in the $12-15 dollar range are too expensive, I am perplexed at the stupidity of the publishers. Retailers generally sell merchandise for as high a price as they can that also insures an adequate number of sales. If selling hardcovers at more than $20 won’t get them adequate sales to stay afloat, then the publishers should realize that they are pricing books too high.

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