As I’ve said in the past, I’m a fan of Neil Gaiman as well as his work.
Well, every once in a while I have that fandom reaffirmed. It happened this morning. As I was perusing the internet(s), I came across this video of Neil talking about the web piracy of his work. He has a unique take on it. It’s only a few minutes long but worth the watch.
I think for right now, at this time and place, web piracy helps books sales. After all, Neil told me that in the video and of course I believe Neil. Who wouldn’t? But I have to wonder as this internet machine keeps growing and more and more books are released digitally, will there be a breaking point where sales are in fact being lost at the detriment of the writer?
It seems a mathematical certainty to me. More and more people have eReaders, making reading digital books easy compared to reading them on a computer screen. With more eReaders comes more digital copies hitting the world. With more copies hitting the world the more places those copies will be found. And with more access to digital copies, the more people will download them for free.
Will honor of doing the right thing and buying one’s creative work save writers? Or will humanity’s urge to get everything and anything for free because it is there swallow writers whole?
I know Christopher Moore has expressed his worry over this exact scenario. Other writers have as well. I wonder what Neil thinks about the future of publishing and eReaders? Would be fun to talk to him about that very point.
You all are smart, savvy readers who keep up on such things. What do you think?
This is what I think is going to happen.
eBook sales are going to kill the sales of paperbacks, and as demand increases, people will insist on lower prices for ebooks. After all, what’s the price of reproducing digital content for the publisher? It approaches $0.00, since there are no consumables, only the cost of a website, which tends to be smallish compared to paper, printing presses and so on. As the prices for ebooks decrease, I think mass publishers will stop distributing them, since the margins are so small, and the distribution of ebooks will fall back to the authors, who already have websites, and can do simple things like take a Word document and make a PDF from it.
In the end, this is actually a good thing, since the profits for author distributed content go directly to the author, and are likely to be higher than what they receive in kickbacks from the publishers.
Additionally, a market will spring up for tracking, rating and announcing ebooks. An ideal site would list all works by that auther, by title and ranking and allow filtering and sorting by the end users. There will be a variety of feeds that you can subscribe to, by author, by genre, or by custom fields set in your account on the site.
I agree with you, Colin, on most of your points, except one. The cost of a hardcover or paperback book is more than just the consumable paper and ink. It costs money to edit a book. It takes money to lay it out. It takes money to produce cover art and lay that cover out. It costs money to proof, market, and publicize. If you break down the consumables and how much they represent in a cover price, it’s only around 10%. That’s it. Therefore you won’t see ebook prices come down a great deal because the publisher has to recoup their investment somehow.
That said, I think you are absolutely right in that ebook sales will bite into mass market sales, and ultimately that will help publishers because they will be making an extra 10% (the lack of using consumables).
Neil Gaiman is right. “Piracy”* benefits authors. Maybe it’s not good for companies who publish these authors. But maybe they (the companies) should evolutionate in their business model. Just as candle makers, or chariot drivers. Sell books in a confortable way for the user (no DRM -which are easily breakable, anyway-, standard formats, low prices, etc), and user will buy them. Because it’s more comfortable, faster, easier and safer than “pirating” them.
Don’t listen to the user, and they will “pirate” the product to have it as they like, or just won’t buy it.
If Nike makes bad runners, nobody will buy them. It’s the same for books, music or movies. And the industry will have to adapt or die. Like any other industry. There are examples that work: iTunes, Netflix, Spotify, Grooveshark,Hulu, etc. Books won’t be very different.
And, BTW, artist don’t need the industry. Always in human history, there has been art, and so will be in the future, despite publishers. So it’s their choice to adapt or to die
*remember that sharing for free is absolutely legal in many countries, I don’t think piracy it’s the best term, but we can agree on it
Well, then put your books for free in a website and put some ads in that website.
It is an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, pirated or freely released e-copies of works increases exposure, bringing those works to new audiences around the world (the point made by Gaiman). On the other hand, those pirated or freely released e-copies could one day saturate the market so thoroughly that purchasing the text will be irrelevant and harm sales (your point, Shawn).
This is the same issue that the music industry has faced since the advent of Napster and Kazaa. As we have seen, Digital Rights Management locks only hold the truly lazy or truly law-abiding. As we’ve seen with music, true fans, those who appreciate the art form and the effort involved in making the music, will still purchase the music, either in digital format or physical. Musicians do have the added advantage of being able to go on tour and drumming up interest and revenue for themselves through live concerts whereas live readings, with few exceptions, do not draw thousands of screaming fans.
I think authors will survive thanks to those relatively few honorable readers who require physical copies and need to feel the brush of the page across their fingertips. Also, they’ll survive from airport bookstore sales. Air travel will forever maintain at least a peripheral need for literature. I’m sad to think that hard copies and legally purchased copies will provide only a peripheral market, but I’m a cynic.
(Sorry for the summary at the top. Helps me think)
I major factor that has been over looked is the eReaders that are becoming popular. iPad, iPod/iPhone, Kindle, Nook. All of these devices are fairly locked down. Sure you can hack these devices, but you average Joe or Jane isn’t gonna do that. If they have dished out the cash to buy one of these readers, there’s a very good chance they can afford and do buy their books from the devices respective stores.
You can compare the piracy of music or movie to that of ebooks because anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can download music/movies. Not so with ebooks. Sure they can download an ebook and read it on their PC but the majority won’t do that. The popularity of ebooks has everything to do with the popularity of a few reader….and like I said, those are locked down.
Study after study has shown that privacy is a cause of two things. 1) Availablity: You want something now but can’t get it easily enough (or at all) and 2) A culture or piracy: they people pirate for the sake of piracy. The vast majority in my opinion is a result of availablilty. I want to watch a movie now, it’s not available OnDemand or Netflix so I download it. Thanks to places like Amazon, iBook and so on, most books are available legally when I want them. This was not the case with music and certainly not with movies. If the content providers actually listen to their customers and make available what they want HOW they want it priracy wouldnt be a problem.
You are never going to stop piracy because of second group of people I mentioned, but that group is do small that said industry wouldn’t even notice an effect in their numbers.
To play Devil’s Advocate, David, if what you say is true and piracy is a “small” issue, then why did Neil see such a large jump in his sales?
You are certainly right about people not knowing how to crack ebooks. But from what I can tell, most people don’t do it themselves. Someone else out there — a complete stranger — does it, puts it up on Torrent or some other file sharing system, and that average person moves over the file to their eReader. I have to admit I have no idea what file extension people download from file sharing systems, so maybe it is more complicated than that? Would love to learn more if you’ll share.
Gaiman makes perfect sense, for the moment, but with the advent and popularity of ereaders will what he said still apply in the future? The majority of people don’t want to read an entire book on their computer in pdf format; it is simply not comfortable to do so, so it makes sense that they would go out and purchase his books after being exposed to them online. But as ebooks and ereaders become more popular and mainstream I can easily see someone downloading a pirated book, transferring it to their ereader and feeling perfectly content having a copy that way. Hardbacks will continue to live on for those who are still used to reading bound pieces of paper and those who still like to own and collect actual tangible copies of the books they read and really liked, but there’s no question piracy is going to take a huge bite in the future, especially out of the paperback market. Think of it this way, If libraries were giving away brand new books every time the newest one came out, would you ever bothering going to the bookstore to purchase one at $15-25 a pop?
It all depends upon your model of people: Are most people honest? Of course there will always be some percentage of opportunists. But, remember? — music piracy was ubiquitous when iTunes came on the scene, with the result that a huge percentage of consumers were just as happy to become honest a pay a bit of money for their songs.
I tend to think business people tend to believe the worst of consumers (perhaps because the dog eat dog world of business encourages this view). (And I work in the corporate world.)
Hows this for an allegory? Where I live, a private company was contracted to automate highway toll booths, and their business model was they would get a percentage of the fines for catching people who didn’t pay. I guess they thought they would make out big, because who would stop and pay a toll if there was no gate and no person (a camera was used to catch people). The result: they went bankrupt and the government took over. Yeah, that’s right, people paid their 35 cents even if it was terribly easy to run the toll.
I think that if you offer a fair price and an easy to use route to honestly buy something, then we’ll discover that most people are quite willing to be honest and support the people who provide their books. Of course, if you try to gouge customers, all bets are off.
Therein lies the problem though, H. “Fair price.” For some reason — mostly I think attributed to Amazon — people think ebooks should be $9.99 or lower. They believe this because Amazon loss-leads, losing money on every ebook sale that is at that price as part of their marketing for people to buy their Kindle and become life-long customers.
If people believe “fair price” is below $10, there is going to be a problem. I already see it on numerous Amazon boards where people are angry at publishers for demanding a book be sold for how much it costs to create. Kindle owners seem to have this belief that if you take away the pages and ink, a book costs next to nothing to produce. Unfortunately they forget the words on those pages and the amount of money it takes to get those pages to the consumer. Ignorance might lead to piracy turning ugly, unfortunately.
@David Redding, as Shawn Speakman says, there’s no need of cracking the readers. The readers just protect the books you’ve bought with DRM, but if there’s no DRM, you can read whatever you whish. And tutorials to crack, for example, Kindle’s DRM are widely spread over the net. Even more, you don’t need to crack anything, is really easy to find over torrent/emule networks thousands of books without DRM, much more books than you (or me) will have time to read in our lives. As all DRM does, DRM only burdens people who “legally” buys “DRMed” things, ie: if I buy a dvd, I have to watch all the legal stuff, some trailers, etc. If I donwload through torrent, with 99% of probability, I’ll be able to skip all that crap and watch my movie without any more messing.
And affordable ebook readers is just a matter of time. Same as was with mp3 readers. Firsts of them cost hundreds of euros/dollars. Now, they’re almost given for free when you subscribe to a magazine or can be bought for less than 20 € (sorry, I don’t know current US prices for them, I assume they’re similar to western europe’s).
Shawn, it’s not only the paper & the ink… you also reduce the distribution and storaging cost (and remember that we’re talking about worldwide distribution posibilitys, not local one as in physical world!). Yes, you have to pay the servers and so, but they’re much lower.
I don’t see the point in paying the same money for a physical book than por a electronic one… their cost is much lower.
Even more, the authors can publish their books in their own websites, so they don’t need intermediaries rising prices to take their share
You are right, Joselu. I’m not implying the ebooks should be the same price as hardcover books. The problem lies in that the price that people want is far below what the actual price is, minus distribution, paper, ink, glue, etc. Take away those things, a $28.95 hardcover should be around $12 – $14 as an ebook. That’s removing distribution and physical costs from the price. Yet when publishers ask that to be the price that ebook distributors sell it at, people balk at it because it’s not closer to $7-$10.
As for authors selling it on their own websites, have you ever seen a manuscript from a bestselling author before it is edited? I have. Dozens of them. Authors need editors. They need copy editors. They need someone to produce the cover art for them and lay out the book correctly. Books don’t come fully edited and realized with a first draft or even a third draft by the writer. Professionals at those “intermediaries” are responsible for aiding the author in polishing their vision and giving the best possible reading experience to the reader. So in my opinion they are needed — whether at a publishing house or whether an author hires them on spec and must include those prices in their overall self-publishing price.
You are right, Joselu. I’m not implying the ebooks should be the same price as hardcover books. The problem lies in that the price that people want is far below what the actual price is, minus distribution, paper, ink, glue, etc. Take away those things, a $28.95 hardcover should be around $12 – $14 as an ebook. That’s removing distribution and physical costs from the price. Yet when publishers ask that to be the price that ebook distributors sell it at, people balk at it because it’s not closer to $7-$10.
As for authors selling it on their own websites, have you ever seen a manuscript from a bestselling author before it is edited? I have. Dozens of them. Authors need editors. They need copy editors. They need someone to produce the cover art for them and lay out the book correctly. Books don’t come fully edited and realized with a first draft or even a third draft by the writer. Professionals at those “intermediaries” are responsible for aiding the author in polishing their vision and giving the best possible reading experience to the reader. So in my opinion they are needed — whether at a publishing house or whether an author hires them on spec and must include those prices in their overall self-publishing price.
I’d like to second what Shawn said. There is this strange perception (especially among pirates) that publishers are these useless middlemen who contribute nothing and should be eliminated by any means fair or foul. Nothing could be further from the truth. My wife is an author, and supports our family with her writing. She writes a good book, but there’s a night and day difference between what she sends her editor and what hits the final pages. The publisher also handles cover art, cover layout, interior layout, marketing, distribution and returns. MAYBE we could learn all of those skills (though probably not a professional level), but if were spending countless hours doing those things the book production would slow to a crawl.
The bottom line is that publisher and authors split the work fairly evenly, and when it’s all said and done, the profits are pretty evenly divided as well. Take the publishers out of the equation, and expect to see a noticeable decline in quality.
P.S. While the cost of selling/distributing ebooks is lower than paper, it’s nowhere near zero. Amazon and most retailers charge 30% of the cover price. In paper, that’s usually closer to 40% or 50% of the cover price. So it’s cheaper, but still significant.
I have been nicking books from anonibooks since, oh, 2001 now.
Through it, I found, for instance, Neil here, as well as tons of other Science Fiction and fantasy writers I would never have found about from mainstream authors, as well as reading alot of out of print books.
My copy of American Gods, which I keep besides Anansi Boys began as image of a lolcat and ended as hardcover (Aquired through some difficulty I might add) on my shelf.
The thing is, ebooks aren’t a big thing and the overwhelming majority of people I’ve spoken to find it incomprehensible. Maybe that will change but I doubt it will in this decade, if not even the next.
I still pirate books. My country has a single specialty bookstore that has to handle all forays into my areas of interest for the entire nation. I have also picked up alot of stuff that’s out of print and impossible to find. Old books from TSR or Del Ray, for series older than I am.
Through it I’ve discovered authors like Zahn and shit.
The view of piracy as loss of sale I find silly. I just go to the library. I’ve read every Pratchett book on my computer before I bought it as well as every Harry Potter book.
So there’s that.
(Incidently, pardon my lacklustre english, it is my third language.)