Book Pirates and the People Who've Never Heard of Them31 March 2003 "Piracy" is a hot word in electronic media of all stripes, but it's more sizzle than steak for ebooks. D'arr, Matey. I was accused of being a pirate recently. I committed the heinous crime of pointing out the names of Usenet newsgroups where I occasionally download home-scanned editions of books I already own in paper form. Personally, I didn't see this as a transgression. As I said, I only download the ebook versions of books I already own -- with an occassional exception I'll get to in a moment -- and format shifting is a legally protected activity, at least for now. I prefer to read ebooks over paper and there's no substantive difference between reading ebook versions of paper books I own that I downloaded off the net or scanning them in myself from my own paper copies. The ensuing discussion did get me thinking about digital piracy of print works. I've stated before that I don't really think pirate editions are wrong. They're generally scanned versions of books that are out of print and thus unavailable for sale anyway. But more to the point, the pirate market is just a minor blip on the radar. This isn't Napster, folks. Contrary to popular belief, Napster wasn't the dawn of digital music trading. Long before Napster came along, MP3s were flying around the net via pirate FTP sites. These sites were popular, but only among the geek set. You had to know the name, or sometimes just the numeric IP address, of the site, the user id and password to log on and in many cases, you had to upload two or three new songs that you ripped yourself before you could download a song you didn't have. In short, the technical know-how required to use these sites was too high for average computer users. Music trading didn't hit critical mass until Napster came along and made the process easy enough for anyone to do it. This hasn't happened for ebooks. Geeks may know that the web is just part of the Internet, not the whole thing, and how to use tools like NNTP and IRC to find ebooks. AOL users have never heard of such things, and would probably run screaming if they saw them. For that matter, AOL users' search for books online probably stops at Amazon, never going as far as Baen, Palm Digital or Fictionwise. Let's face it. Ebooks are a tiny percentage of the overall book market, and pirate ebooks are a tiny percentage of the ebook market. Stephen King's From A Buick 8 appeared on Usenet five months before the release of the novel in paper -- it must have been scanned in from galleys -- and I downloaded it as soon as I saw it. I, like many others, later paid for the book when it was released. A lot of others. If the leak of the text of the book in ebook form had any impact on the hardcover sales, I don't think anyone noticed. King made just as much money as he always does, and the world just kept on spinning. Book piracy is largely irrevelant, pure and simple. Even if someone comes up with a Napster-easy way to do it, it will never be as popular as music trading. Let's face it, our society is much more interested in music than reading. Baen has proven that even giving ebooks away ends up improving the bottom line by beefing up print sales. The same guy that brought up my pirate transgression made another interesting point, though. He stated that he wanted to see more older but still in copyright books available as ebooks, and he was afraid that piracy would remove the incentive for publishers to create these books. He may have a point. In the long run, though, I don't think it matters. Look at it this way. These older books are out of print. Modern bookstores only sell new books that move. They keep a selection of the classics on hand because classics sell -- that's why they're still classics -- but for the most part you won't find a book in a retail bookstore older than two years. If you want a legitimate paper edition, you have to skulk around used bookstores until you find it. And when you buy it from the used bookstore, the publisher and author get nothing from the sale. For that matter, when you buy a used book from Amazon, which list used books on the same page as new editions of the same book, the publisher and the author get nothing from the sale. Bottom line, how is this different from downloading a scanned edition from Usenet? The publisher and author get the same big fat zero either way. If publishers aren't interested in scanning and epublishing their backlists, they're only hurting themselves. The technobiliophiles out there will fill the vacuum with scanned editions of old paper copies, creating a vast digital library of "used" books that generate no revenue, just like paper used books. Saying that the existence of scanned pirate editons eliminates the incentive for publishers to create legitimate electronic editions of their backlist looks at the process from the wrong direction. The decision of publishers not to digitize their backlist leads to amateur scanned editions. By not making ebooks available, publishers are essentially saying they're not interested in that revenue stream, just like they do when they allow a book to fall out of print so that further sales of that book will be in used bookstores that do not compensate the publisher. Legally, so long as I pay for or have paid for a legitimate copy of the ebooks I download, I'm still not a pirate. I push the line a bit in some cases -- downloading From A Buick 8 a few months before I was allowed to pay for it at Audible -- but I've still followed the practice of paying for what I read. I've been asked what I would do if my books were pirated. I'd jump up and down. I'd sputter. I'd stammer. The veins would pop out on my neck. I'd be so freaking happy that I'd be uncharacteristically speachless. Finding one or more of my books on a pirate newsgroup or IRC channel would mean that someone read my book and liked it enough to recommend it to others with no financial incentive to do so. You can't buy PR like that. It's invaluable. And let's face it, as a relative unknown -- Between Heaven and Hell and Do Over! have done all right for indie ebooks, but I'm no Stephen King -- I need all the buzz I can get. The more I think about this issue, though, the fewer differences I see between it and used book sales, or even public libraries. Pirate ebooks don't equate to lost sales they way pirate music might -- and even that theory is iffy -- because in almost all cases the book being pirated is not available for sale as a new book. There's even an interesting argument to be made that book piracy serves an ultimately beneficial function by archiving a work permanently across the web and preventing it from disappearing into obscurity in that long twilight between going out of print and falling out of copyright. D'arr, matey, if being I pirate is wrong, I don't think I want to be right. Jeff Kirvin
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