Rethinking Book Piracy

February 02 2010 — JA

It seems to me that we are reaching a mini apex of sorts when it comes to digital publishing, and that two things have happened in recent weeks to make it so. The first is the Google Book Settlement, which has seemingly reached its final stages with the Amended Settlement expected to be passed in February. For those of you who haven’t been following the case, Hackpacker has done a handy summary, but in short, this means that the Google Books project (which has digitised some 7 million titles to date) is likely to go ahead. Authors are quickly being pressured to opt in or out of what seems to be a rather nominal payment scheme by the end of January. Google has not yet begun digitising Australian content but naturally this seems to be only a matter of time. Considering the strength of the brand (since when was a company so present that it actually managed becomes a verb?), I also think that it’s only a matter of time until Google Books comes to grab a hefty slice of the market-share.

The second thing is that Apple have also launched their highly anticipated iPad. The name might seem a tad too er… sanitary, but we can expect some decent hype and savvy marketing when the product becomes available here. Again given the ubiquitous nature of the brand, I expect that this will have the effect of making ebooks much more common. iBooks, the literary equivalent of iTunes, is nigh.

So then, we will have greater access to online libraries and the applications on which to read them. We will also, presumably, see a significant increase in the amount of digital files available for copy. Debates about book piracy have been fiery – not least because of the core belief that an author should be able to make a living off their own work. When I first read about book piracy, my thoughts ran the gamut largely along these lines and while I still can’t help but dislike the idea of someone taking an author’s work and copying without their knowledge, I do feel that in light of new theories on the idea of copygift (keep a lookout for an essay by McKenzie Wark on this in the next issue of Meanjin) and the popularising of freemium models much like Cory Doctorow’s, there is much about book piracy that is worth rethinking. Recently, the Millions published a very interesting interview entitled ‘Confessions of a Book Pirate’ with a man under the rather endearing moniker of The Real Caterpillar – he’s a computer programmer by day, reader of illicit books by night. In it, he made these three points:

1) With digital copies, what is “stolen” is not as clear as with physical copies. With physical copies, you can assign a cost to the physical product, and each unit costs x dollars to create. Therefore, if the product is stolen, it is easy to say that an object was stolen that was worth x dollars. With digital copies, it is more difficult to assign cost. The initial file costs x dollars to create, but you can make a million copies of that file for no cost. Therefore, it is hard to assign a specific value to a digital copy of a work except as it relates to lost sales.

2) Just because someone downloads a file, it does not mean they would have bought the product I think this is the key fact that many people in the music industry ignore – a download does not translate to a lost sale. I own hundreds of paper copies of books I have e-copies of, many of which were bought after downloading the e-copy. In other cases I have downloaded books I would never have purchased, simply because they were recommended or sounded interesting.

3) Just because someone downloads a file, it doesn’t mean they will read it. I realize that buying a book doesn’t mean someone is going to read it either, but clicking a link and paying $10-$30 is very different – many more people will download a book and not read it than buy a book and not read it.

The second point seems particularly relevant to me because I think it’s shown in buying practices with printed books as well. I’ve often borrowed books that I would not have bought simply because friends had copies handy at the time. If I read a borrowed book and then liked it, I often went out and bought my own copy later so that I could read it again. Again, this harks back to the idea that free copies can boost rather than hinder sales.

Interestingly, the nuts and bolts of the practice also seem to be more time-consuming than I initially thought. While some ‘pirates’ may remove the spines of books and feed them through an automatic scanner, TRC said he preferred to keep the original books and so did everything by hand. Scanning bound physical copies took about 1 hour per 100 scans and then needed to be run through an OCR program to make the text machined-editable. He then spent anywhere between 5 to 40 hours proofing the scanned pages before uploading them to a file-sharing website such as BitTorrent. Access to file-sharing websites was not automatic – those with better quality titles were often invite-only, meaning that book piracy too is not without its gatekeepers.

On the issue of ethics, TRC stated that the while he felt that ‘morally, the act of pirating a product is, in fact, the moral equivalent of stealing… the impact of e-piracy is overrated, at least in terms of ebooks’. He also argued that that downloading of books was more of a ‘grey area’ these days, what with projects like the Baen Free Library (which is almost a mini-version of Google Books, without author-onus and without the payout). Any kind of equilibrium, he pointed out, would never be achieved by companies simply blocking their ears and seeking to over-regulate:

One thing that will definitely not change anyone’s mind or inspire them to stop are polemics from people like Mark Helprin and Harlan Ellison – attitudes like that ensure that all of their works are available online all of the time… The world is changing and business models have to change with it.

Book vendor in Peru, where piracy of physical books is a growing industry. Image via Guardian