From a CNET Article by David Carnoy:
Several months ago I set up a Google alert for my book, “Knife Music,” to keep abreast of anything anybody was saying–good or bad–about the thing. Over the months I’ve received news of the occasional blog post and tweets, but more recently I popped open an alert to learn that my book was being pirated–both as a separate file and part of two larger torrents called “2,500 Retail Quality Ebooks (iPod, iPad, Nook, Sony Reader)” and “2,500 Retail Quality Ebooks for Kindle (MOBI).”
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A lot of people think that’s a good thing. And maybe it is. But what should also be alarming to publishers is that the number of people pirating books is growing along with the number of titles that are available for download. As I’ve written in the past, the rise of the iPad has spurred some of the pirating, but now the huge success of the Kindle is also leading to increased pirating. Yes, some companies, such as Attributor, have done some studies about the issue and have seen increases. But for my evidence one only need glance at Pirate Bay and see what people are downloading and how many of them are doing it.
The most popular e-book download on Pirate Bay is the Kindle Books Collection, which has something like 650 e-books in it (it’s just less than 1GB), and is ahead of a 224-page PDF e-book called “Advanced Sex: Explicit Positions for Explosive Lovemaking.” At the time of this writing, 668 people were “seeding” the Kindle collection while 153 people were downloading it. A few month ago, the numbers of people downloading e-book collections like this at given moment were in the 50 to 60 range with fewer seeders.
See Also: Others have different views, today The Globe and Mail published an article titled, “The Rise of the E-Book Lending Library (and the Death of e-Book Pirating”)
A couple of years ago I came across a torrent that had over 80,000 titles in it. That’s more than some libraries have paper books! The example mentioned in this article is peanuts in comparison. I think what’s happened is that people are becoming more aware of piracy, and it’s also becoming more visible.
I also think that the people who download these large torrents are doing it simply to have an offline equivalent of an ebook library. Instead of going to Amazon or other sites in an attempt find a book that’s purchasable (region) at a reasonable price, they simply grab a big torrent and then browse the files at their leisure. Sometimes that’s easier than jumping through all the DRM hoops.
I’ve noticed some trends while reading the Kindle forum. First, most people with a Kindle are not very technically savvy and would never be able to find or access most pirated books. Some of them have been taken in by scam sites offering unlimited ebooks for a $50 membership, but most would rather just get their books legitimately, it’s easier. They have enough trouble figuring out how to download an ebook from Smashwords and using the USB to move it to the Kindle. They just want their OneClick.
On the other hand, publishers are bringing this on themselves because of the chaotic mish-mash of publishing rights. I’ve read hundreds of posts by people who can’t get the book they want in their country at any price. They are incredibly frustrated and the more technical of them WILL resort to piracy. They just don’t see any sense in an ebook being available in the US but not Canada or France or Italy. Amazon would love to be able to offer these books for sale anywhere but the publishers stand in the way.
The other part of that are authors that prevent the legitimate sale of an ebook version, like JK Rowling and Harper Lee. Do they really think that people who REALLY want their books in this format can’t get them? They are foolishly cutting off their noses to spite their faces.
Last, I doubt many people who pirate “2,500 Retail Quality Ebooks” are actually reading them. Many articles such as this mistake a pirated copy for a lost sale, it just isn’t true. People who pirate in this fashion would not have purchased the book anyway. Most Kindle users already have a problem reading everything they download legitimately, there are just too many free and low-cost books. I myself have around 1200 of them, more than I can read in a lifetime considering I add more every week.
eBooks aren’t like music tracks, they require an investment in time to read while music is just the background to our lives. I download my music legally from Amazon, DRM-free.
As Common Sense points out; most of the downloaders of those massive collections are just hoarders that’ll never get around to reading even a miniscule fraction of that flood. No real sales lost.
Plus, Kindle (and Nook) owners looking for cheap reads are likely to find more than enough in the 20-50 free promo titles available any given week. And those usually result in followup sales.
It takes a special mix of tech savvy, free time, and inclination to actually exploit those venues. (I.e., College Students. 😉 )
The thing is, people are focusing their attention in the wrong direction.
The current model of book pricing is indeed headed for collapse but it isn’t piracy that will cause it.
The real threat to publishers and authors is the “resurrection” of “orphan works” and backlist titles in ebook form, whether legally or through unauthorized scanned editions (or Google books, which may be either, depending on who you ask) as they’ll ensure that new releases have to compete not just with recent releases but with the entire catalog of available quality product from decades past. Note the ballooning online catalogs at the Kindle, Nook, and Google ebookstores and look at the pricing distribution. It will be easy to find a lifetime’s worth of quality *legal* reading at modest prices. Never mind the mirage of $14 Agency Pricing; the “offensively cheap” $9.99 pricepoint it is meant to counter is itself unsustainable.
Books are being unavoidably commoditized by the mainstreaming of ebooks and publishers/authors who seek to prop up the old-style Premium Pricing model of content are facing a losing battle.
The industry’s paniced focus on piracy is just another way of zig-ing while the market zags. Wasted attention, wasted effort, wasted time; all of which should be better spent preparing for the tipping point headed our way.
Following up on the previous comment about pricing, what I really don’t get is that while ebook sellers are offering a 5-15% discount which one could argue covers the cost of physical distribution and storage, they are ignoring a glaring hole in their logic. That hole being the complete elimination of the secondary sales market. You can’t sell a used ebook, that’s not how the system works. (Maybe this will change some day, there were some startups with similar ideas — but I highly doubt it!)
This means you lose out on two fronts, you cannot sell your old books, so you lose the ability to recoup any costs (not that everyone plans on reselling books once they have finished reading — nor does selling get you back a large amount of money) but further you also lose the access to the vast and cheap used book market. And it’s not just that they are eliminating this secondary sales market, they are forcibly pushing it into the primary sales market. This means they get a piece of action that they never really dipped into before (perhaps this more aptly applies to publishers in general rather than Amazon as I’m sure Amazon gets a cut of used books and all merchandise going through their marketplace), because people are no longer able to buy used books (assuming that we are talking strictly ebook here, obviously you can still buy used print books 🙂 ).
So when I look on Amazon and see a new (read: directly sold by Amazon) paperback being sold for $8.00 and the Kindle edition going for $7.50, I can’t help but scoff. That hardly covers the discount for physical distribution and storage, let alone what I feel would be fair discount point settling somewhere around the 30-40% mark. I’m not a rabid ebook price dissenter, I don’t think all ebooks should cost $1-2, I simply feel that in light of the above mentioned points that DRM-wrapped, non-resale-able electronic book should have a sensible discount compared to a print book to make it a reasonable compromise.
Amazon have opened a can of worms here which could eventually have a catastrophic effect on bookselling – and I’m afraid in turn on our cultural landscape. This is a disaster brought about by Amazon itself in cohorts with various short-sighted publishers. The root of it is greed, plain and simple – an attempt to destroy the discount and secondhand book trade. To publish less physical books, to limit the supply of cheap books to independent sellers, etc. But the end result could well be the total devaluation of books.
Take a look at eBay UK – currently 900 listings of illegal copied ebooks. One seller is selling nearly £5000 worth a month! If you work for Amazon or one of the big publishers, I suggest you sit up and take this on board. It’s a disaster.