6 ms·

On downloading books: “Free” Books Aren’t Free

35 points by bensummers 16y ago

wccrawford 16y ago
They aren't talking about free, they're talking about theft. -yawn- Yet another content creator upset that they can't make money on piracy. "If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list." Yeah, that's a BIG hint that piracy and sales aren't linked in any useful way. Stop wishing you could turn any portion of that into real sales. Download numbers aren't related to sales numbers at all. Just face reality: Your book isn't actually popular at all.
- maushu 16y ago
  She wouldn't have hit the NYT Bestseller list if that happened since she forgot to also add half of those people who didn't buy the books in the NYT Bestseller list.
- dholowiski 16y ago
  Yeah. It's sad that this author cant sell more books, but the people who download books are not the same people who buy books- it's the same as with people who download movies. It's hoarding plain and simple. I would seriously suggest that the author have a look at Cory Doctorow's work. Right on his home page, you can download his books in any free, non drm format you like. Yet he seems to do quite well selling his books too. Heck, if your book is out of print and still getting 800+ downloads a week, I'd contact the download site and tell them you'd bless the download if they put a donate link in the book or on the download page. What have you got to lose? Or, you could always sue your customers, that's worked well for the RIAA.
  - foljs 16y ago
    > I would seriously suggest that the author have a look at Cory Doctorow's work. Right on his home page, you can download his books in any free, non drm format you like. Yet he seems to do quite well selling his books too. Yes, but he is also a popular figure known before the times of mass ebook piracy, and connected to one of the most popular blogs on the internet. How does this work for the average writer? I remember Stephen King doing an experiment with free online content that ended horribly.
  - bugsy 16y ago
    That's a pretty good suggestion. The 800 downloads won't go away. If she offers the book for download at her personal site, she can have a forum there for fans to talk and give feedback. That would give a better idea of the real interest in the book and she'd have control over it and better good will from readers.
- benologist 16y ago
  "Download numbers aren't related to sales numbers at all." You have two groups of people, one buying, one pirating, and they share the common goal of obtaining x. To claim pirated copies are completely unrelated when there's quite obviously that relationship is just as extreme and silly as claiming they're all lost sales.
  - luu 16y ago
    "To claim pirated copies are completely unrelated when there's quite obviously that relationship is just as extreme and silly as claiming they're all lost sales." To be sure, there is a relationship, but it’s not at all obvious what the sign of the relationship is. John Scalzi noted that physical sales of his books shot up after he released free ebook versions (33%, 20%, and 9% for The Ghost Brigades, Old Man's War, and The Android's Dream, respectively). I'm not arguing that pirating ebooks isn't wrong -- I think the author should have the choice of whether or not her own works are available for free. Just sayin', your "You have two groups of people, one buying, one pirating, and they share the common goal of obtaining x." model oversimplifies things.
  - sqrt17 16y ago
    The common goal is not just obtaining x - people buy a book to have a physical book and the sensory experience reading it. People who download (pirated versions of) books may or may not do the same with the book. Given that people who pirate books often download more than they would ever buy (or consume, for that matter), I think the equivalent would be more people sitting in a bookshop and casually browsing the book. Saying that you can convert HALF of the people who browse through your book in a bookstore to buyers is, if anything, proof that you lost contact with reality. The one thing that I do completely agree with in the article: "If you REALLY can’t afford books, ask your library to order them." Libraries are a great way for people to share books, and usually the cost of actually running the library (i.e. staffing and room) dwarfs acquisition costs for the books. Hence, recommending a book to your library that other people could like is generally a good thing. (And you have a nice, physical book, and the authors get some money. What's not to like).
    - 16y ago
- p_nathan 16y ago
  She's popular to the tune of 800 free downloads per week and 10 sales per week. Anecdotally, one of the ISVs over on Programmers.stackexchange had a piracy problem; when he started detecting pirated software and reminding the user to buy, not steal, his sales numbers directly went up. I think this idea that downloading IP for free is ok is really wrong. If you want something, you should pay the price for it, whether the price be fixed or negotiated. IP piracy is theft.
  - beoba 16y ago
    Where do libraries fit in your world?
    - p_nathan 16y ago
      They have paid the price already. You pay the libraries cost either directly or through your taxes.
      - beoba 16y ago
        A single copy being handed out potentially infinitely! For free! THEFT!
        mattmanser 16y ago
        Some countries actually pay a fee per time leant out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right And a single copy can only service a small number too, not an infinite number, as only one person can be in possession of it at one time and usually borrow it for weeks at a time.
      - olalonde 16y ago
        So if I call up my local library and make sure the book is available, it is ethical to download the pirated copy... right?
        16y ago
- rflrob 16y ago
  >>"If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list." > >Yeah, that's a BIG hint that piracy and sales aren't linked in any useful way. There was an article on HN a while ago about how 1% isn't the lowest possible number, as in "if just one percent of people who see our ad buy our product..." I'm sad that this is happening to authors, but it does sound a little like whining at this point.
ThomPete 16y ago
No progress without consequences. What did you imagine? That you could just by magic reach potentially 6Billion people without any cost of distribution and be the only one allowed to take advantage of it? Here is the thing. If you want to make it hard for people to copy your books, don't distribute them digitally. Or charge 1 USD pr. book. Or learn to do the design, marketing and printing yourself Add something to your book that makes it worth buying. There are so many ways to approach this and you have no option but to embrace it and accept it and learn to sell in that environment cause thousands and thousands today can write books.
flawawa2 16y ago
It's weird. What I get from this post is "if you won't buy my book, please read something else". That, of course sounds logical but she is missing that she is telling freeloaders to download some other author's works, thus "marketing" the other author and not her. I would not do it like that.
moultano 16y ago
If she's getting 800 downloads a week, next time, screw the publisher. Put up a link to an epub and mobi with a paypall button for $1.99.
- norswap 16y ago
  Agreed. She also invokes the fact that she cannot publish everywhere. There are some self-publishing services out there that can do the trick. Seems like an awful lot of whining to me.
  - JimmyL 16y ago
    If she's already gone with a publisher (which she has), it's no longer up to her - she (likely, but it depends on her contract) can't submit that work to a separate publisher even if she wanted. I'm also not sure I buy the people saying that she should go at it alone next time, and solely self-publish. Doing so means that, among other things, she'd have no advance to live on while writing it, no editors to work with her on making the copy better, no typesetters to make the text flow well on whatever platforms it gets distributed on, no artists for cover design, no translation support to release international editions, and - this is the important one - no advertising and distribution support to get the book places into bricks-and-mortar stores (as most stores look down hard on self-published books). It's not just a matter of saying "OK, I'll self-publish"; there are all sorts of other costs that are a part of publishing a book that a publisher normally covers, which you have to pay for yourself should you self-publish.
    - Tichy 16y ago
      The thing is, there is no entitlement to being a successful book author. If she can't make a living doing it, maybe it is not meant to be.
    - chc 16y ago
      If she really believes she can get 800 downloads a week with no promotion, most of your objections there kind of disappear. (The typesetters, editors and translators are the only ones that continue to matter, and those can be hired for fairly cheap — take a look at http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ for a real ebook author's take on the matter.)
juiceandjuice 16y ago
"Even if half the people that borrowed my book in the library bought it, I would make more money"
imperator 16y ago
I am an author and have a book distributed over Kindle. People who bought my book wanted to buy it, and people who pirated it wanted to get it for free. That's okay with me. The two are not linked. I would never get angry if someone loaned one of my books to another person, so why would I get angry about someone pirating it. And if people had not loaned me many books, I would never have grown to love writing. It's just the case that the internet can loan many books to people easily (or so I see it). The market is very fickle about what it likes. Effort spent fighting piracy should be spent on writing more books and promoting them. In the meantime, I would endorse piracy of a commercially failed book as a way of spreading my name. It's obvious this person's book didn't fail in touching people, it just failed in inspiring them to buy. The solution to any writer's problem is to write more.
nerdyworm 16y ago
The problem is you can get the book faster and easier by typing "Name of Book torrent" than "Name of Book buy". Perhaps this is a problem that someone from this community should address. Easier Than Stealing dot com sounds nice.
- oscardelben 16y ago
  Actually you can get it faster by downloading it from your kindle.
  - nerdyworm 16y ago
    You are 100% correct. Perhaps this argument only stands true for movies.
  - Natsu 16y ago
    There's only one way to compete with free: easy.
  - liedra 16y ago
    This is exactly what I do, which is why it frustrates me so much when some authors/publishers/wives of dead authors (like with the Wheel of Time series) won't allow the release of the ebook until well after the hardcover. Instead I resort to piracy because the whole reason I got a kindle was to avoid buying physical novels and particularly hardcovers, since I travel/move countries so much. Publishers and authors and whatnot who do this are just insane. You should tap into the fact that many fans of popular fantasy/science fiction are also gadget freaks, and allow them to buy your books when they come out instead of losing sales due to piracy.
foljs 16y ago
> They aren't talking about free, they're talking about theft. -yawn- Yet another content creator upset that they can't make money on piracy. Yes, how selfish of him, the CREATOR. > Yeah, that's a BIG hint that piracy and sales aren't linked in any useful way. Stop wishing you could turn any portion of that into real sales. Download numbers aren't related to sales numbers at all. No, but they are related to people BREAKING THE LAW and reading YOUR WORK for free. Even if they weren't about to buy it no matter what, they should pay for READING IT anyway. Oh, and If you ain't gonna read it, don't download it. What are you, a hoarder?
impendia 16y ago
The article suggests that some readers had problems obtaining a copy of the book. If you can get a copy of the book legally, you should, but it seems like some customers weren't able to, and had to choose between obtaining it illegally, or waiting indefinitely on the whim of the publisher. I find it difficult to fault them for the former.
- docgnome 16y ago
  While I agree, the publisher should be providing books in every region they can, it's not as simple matter of the publisher saying "I hate China, let's make them wait for the new book cause I'm a jerk." It's a matter of if they print an edition there do they believe they can recoup the losses of printing it. Publishers are out to make money. Saying that there is nothing wrong with illegally downloading a book or whatever just because it isn't legally available in your area is rubbish. It's like saying having your friend in the US steal an Xbox from a store and ship it to you is ok because you can't legally buy one where you are. It's obviously not as simple as that, but it's just lame to rationalize breaking the law because you want to.
  - hellrich 16y ago
    The stolen Xbox is gone, nobody can buy it. The Ebook can be downloaded no matter how many times someone does so without paying. I'm not sure about books, but at least for US movies/tv-series it can take quite an amount of time to be legally available in Europe. Even if they are available via Hulu inside the US! I understand the reason (earning money by selling licenses to foreign TV channels), but it surely encourages "stealing" the content by using nonofficial media-portals.
    - docgnome 16y ago
      Even if it "encourages" it hardly justifies it. It is breaking the law, plain and simple. I'm rather tired of people shifting the blame to the content producers or publishers. If you're going to break the law, at least own up to it and don't try to shift the blame.
petercooper 16y ago
Because that’s what it boils down to is convenience. People who illegally download books are more interested in their convenience than in supporting the authors they want to read. It’s not hard to go to the library, it just takes time.. Since you're treating your writing as a business (which is fine) why not actually give your customers what they want? If your customers want to be able to buy your e-book in their location, why can't they? Blame your publisher (I do, but I'm also OK with people pirating that book). J A Konrath is an author who's highly realistic about this. His post about piracy nails it: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/piracy-again.html http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/piracy-again.html - He's selling his books for merely a few dollars each and on a DRM-ed platform (the Kindle) and is still making more. One of the comments on the post struck me, too: I have a professional musician on my friends list and he makes posts like this all the time. He said the amount of time he spends cracking down on his albums being distributed illegally (he's a fairly popular, but completely independent artist) is ridiculous. And that he'll be at a show and someone will come up and just cheerily tell him that, "Hey, I illegally downloaded your songs, man. LOVE THEM!" It's insane how entitled people are. Someone AT his show? You mean, someone pirated his almost zero marginal cost material and then paid up good money to attend his show and that's a bad thing? Thankfully, many sane independent musicians have realized this is a great way to go and are profiting from it.
- bugsy 16y ago
  That's a very good point. The download was a very effective marketing tool whether the musician wanted it to be or not. Really, the hardest thing in these creative industries is marketing, promoting your personal or band brand identity and developing a following. Smart communities wait to see where paths form and then put in walkways. Smart marketing is seeing what actually works to promote your product and then encouraging more of it. Clearly for the described musician downloads were building a fan base from which he was able to then make a living.
elvirs 16y ago
it is wrong to estimate that all those who downloaded the book illegally would go and buy paperback if there was no way to download it for free. i bet a good share of those who downloaded free copy downloaded it to maybe read sometime in the future but never read it. only 20%-30% of those who downloaded a free copy are potential buyers of paperback book. the author should take a look at freemium models and come up with a creative way of making money from the books while adapting world WILD web
jgilliam 16y ago
This story makes me so sad, not because people are stealing her work, but because the author doesn't look at those 800 people a week as potential fans who would fund her next book. Forget about selling the book itself, use the book as a way to find new fans. If half those 800 people each week signed up for her email list or followed her on Twitter, she would have a huge fan base which should could tap to FUND HER NEXT BOOK on Kickstarter. Sell the making of the content, not the consumption of the content. The hardcore fans will want her to write the next book, so they will fund it. Some percentage of the random people who download her book will turn into hardcore fans. It's a scalable, repeatable cycle. 400 people a week = 20k in a year. 5% of that giving $15 is $15,000, her entire advance. EDIT: I did basically this model for documentaries and built an audience of a million members.
- docgnome 16y ago
  Out of curiosity, do you know of anyone who has actually done this? I'm not entirely convinced this model is as repeatable as you think. I'd be interested to see more data on the subject.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    He mentioned that he did it himself. Occasional success stories pop up on HN, too.
    - bugsy 16y ago
      Music works the same way. You use CDs to build up a fan base. It's a physical artifact they can keep and develop loyalty towards. When the fan base is big enough, you can make a living. Maybe. After 20 years of hard work. Being an artist that works in creative original artwork, be it sculpture, music or books is NOT an easy path. Easy path is a corporate job with benefits. Very easy path is government job with benefits you can't get fired from and where you don't actually have to work. Both these are bureaucracy and administration. If you want to be artsy, you won't have stable or high income unless you are lucky, a very hard worker, smart at marketing, brilliant at art, and work at it every day for at least 10-30 years.
yason 16y ago
I bet some money that without the folks downloading free copies of the book the author wouldn't have sold as much in the first place.
Tichy 16y ago
To be honest, this is almost bordering on the ridiculous. Why should people go to extreme lengths to find a hardcopy of the book? There is this feeling of entitlement, "I am an artist, so I am not supposed to have to worry about all this commercial stuff". Meanwhile, other people have discovered that convenience actually makes people buy stuff rather than pirate it.
kragen 16y ago
Possibly the 800 people per week who download the book aren't reading it? In http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-October/000928.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-October... I did some numbers, and reading an ebook costs around 240 times as much as simply downloading it. So a purely self-interested person would download it if there's more than about a ½% chance that they'd actually read it. If most people downloading it are just over that threshold, then 800 downloads per week might represent only 5 new readers per week. (There is some discussion at http://www.mail-archive.com/silklist@lists.hserus.net/msg19701.html. http://www.mail-archive.com/silklist@lists.hserus.net/msg197...) If you download a torrent containing many different ebooks, the ratio goes even higher. I have a Project Gutenberg torrent containing several thousand public-domain books. By the time I finish downloading it, it might turn out to have cost me ten minutes of my time, about a thousand times less than it would take me to navigate a web site to download a single book.
deleted 16y ago
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bugsy 16y ago
I own thousands of printed books. A few I have actually read. I don't own an ereader and don't plan to get one. I also hate reading pdfs on the computer since the text is straining and I prefer to read for fun lying down or outside and not at a desk. I think the author of the article is delusional. She thinks of herself as a NYT best selling author because of some number she estimated of downloads of her work, all of which she assumes are by people who want to not only read her work, but buy it as well. First there is no evidence of the number that read it electronically. So 10 a week bought it, fine those are the fans. But the others may be hoarders, may be downloading bots, who knows. Second, if comparing to best selling authors by multiplying sales figures by a factor of 80 to account for "piracy", one should also multiply the big name authors' sales figures by 80 as well since they should be accorded the same privilege. And then, not a best selling author anymore since the relative ranking is the same as before. What is very normal is most authors never make back their advance. This has been happening for 100 years. An advance of $15,000 says that the publisher knew the book would not sell a lot of copies, and they were right. It's nice to have a printed book, gives you some credibility. It's not typical to make a living selling printed copies of your work, that's something that only happens for a small number of authors. To make more money, improve your skills, write more, and even develop a fan base by giving away free short stories, or selling them to magazines for the (very low) magazine rate. Few read magazines anymore so you can instead develop fans with free samples. It's very unlikely that the pirated copies are changing the bottom line in any meaningful way. It's just as likely they are bringing in more fans and sales as it is that sales are being lost. It's entirely possible that without the free advertising of the piracy she only sells 5 hard copies a week instead of 10.
- davidw 16y ago
  > I also hate reading pdfs on the computer since the text is straining and I prefer to read for fun lying down or outside and not at a desk. Ignoring the rest of your post, the Kindle basically solves the above problems. I can read for hours with it, whereas I get fidgety reading a PDF on the computer in a few minutes, and my eyes feel tired as well.
  - bugsy 16y ago

35 points by bensummers 16y ago

They aren't talking about free, they're talking about theft. -yawn- Yet another content creator upset that they can't make money on piracy. "If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list." Yeah, that's a BIG hint that piracy and sales aren't linked in any useful way. Stop wishing you could turn any portion of that into real sales. Download numbers aren't related to sales numbers at all. Just face reality: Your book isn't actually popular at all.

maushu 16y ago
She wouldn't have hit the NYT Bestseller list if that happened since she forgot to also add half of those people who didn't buy the books in the NYT Bestseller list.
dholowiski 16y ago
Yeah. It's sad that this author cant sell more books, but the people who download books are not the same people who buy books- it's the same as with people who download movies. It's hoarding plain and simple. I would seriously suggest that the author have a look at Cory Doctorow's work. Right on his home page, you can download his books in any free, non drm format you like. Yet he seems to do quite well selling his books too. Heck, if your book is out of print and still getting 800+ downloads a week, I'd contact the download site and tell them you'd bless the download if they put a donate link in the book or on the download page. What have you got to lose? Or, you could always sue your customers, that's worked well for the RIAA.
- foljs 16y ago
  > I would seriously suggest that the author have a look at Cory Doctorow's work. Right on his home page, you can download his books in any free, non drm format you like. Yet he seems to do quite well selling his books too. Yes, but he is also a popular figure known before the times of mass ebook piracy, and connected to one of the most popular blogs on the internet. How does this work for the average writer? I remember Stephen King doing an experiment with free online content that ended horribly.
- bugsy 16y ago
  That's a pretty good suggestion. The 800 downloads won't go away. If she offers the book for download at her personal site, she can have a forum there for fans to talk and give feedback. That would give a better idea of the real interest in the book and she'd have control over it and better good will from readers.
benologist 16y ago
"Download numbers aren't related to sales numbers at all." You have two groups of people, one buying, one pirating, and they share the common goal of obtaining x. To claim pirated copies are completely unrelated when there's quite obviously that relationship is just as extreme and silly as claiming they're all lost sales.
- luu 16y ago
  "To claim pirated copies are completely unrelated when there's quite obviously that relationship is just as extreme and silly as claiming they're all lost sales." To be sure, there is a relationship, but it’s not at all obvious what the sign of the relationship is. John Scalzi noted that physical sales of his books shot up after he released free ebook versions (33%, 20%, and 9% for The Ghost Brigades, Old Man's War, and The Android's Dream, respectively). I'm not arguing that pirating ebooks isn't wrong -- I think the author should have the choice of whether or not her own works are available for free. Just sayin', your "You have two groups of people, one buying, one pirating, and they share the common goal of obtaining x." model oversimplifies things.
- sqrt17 16y ago
  The common goal is not just obtaining x - people buy a book to have a physical book and the sensory experience reading it. People who download (pirated versions of) books may or may not do the same with the book. Given that people who pirate books often download more than they would ever buy (or consume, for that matter), I think the equivalent would be more people sitting in a bookshop and casually browsing the book. Saying that you can convert HALF of the people who browse through your book in a bookstore to buyers is, if anything, proof that you lost contact with reality. The one thing that I do completely agree with in the article: "If you REALLY can’t afford books, ask your library to order them." Libraries are a great way for people to share books, and usually the cost of actually running the library (i.e. staffing and room) dwarfs acquisition costs for the books. Hence, recommending a book to your library that other people could like is generally a good thing. (And you have a nice, physical book, and the authors get some money. What's not to like).
  - 16y ago
p_nathan 16y ago
She's popular to the tune of 800 free downloads per week and 10 sales per week. Anecdotally, one of the ISVs over on Programmers.stackexchange had a piracy problem; when he started detecting pirated software and reminding the user to buy, not steal, his sales numbers directly went up. I think this idea that downloading IP for free is ok is really wrong. If you want something, you should pay the price for it, whether the price be fixed or negotiated. IP piracy is theft.
- beoba 16y ago
  Where do libraries fit in your world?
  - p_nathan 16y ago
    They have paid the price already. You pay the libraries cost either directly or through your taxes.
    - beoba 16y ago
      A single copy being handed out potentially infinitely! For free! THEFT!
      - mattmanser 16y ago
        Some countries actually pay a fee per time leant out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right And a single copy can only service a small number too, not an infinite number, as only one person can be in possession of it at one time and usually borrow it for weeks at a time.
    - olalonde 16y ago
      So if I call up my local library and make sure the book is available, it is ethical to download the pirated copy... right?
      - 16y ago
rflrob 16y ago
>>"If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list." > >Yeah, that's a BIG hint that piracy and sales aren't linked in any useful way. There was an article on HN a while ago about how 1% isn't the lowest possible number, as in "if just one percent of people who see our ad buy our product..." I'm sad that this is happening to authors, but it does sound a little like whining at this point.

ThomPete 16y ago

No progress without consequences. What did you imagine? That you could just by magic reach potentially 6Billion people without any cost of distribution and be the only one allowed to take advantage of it? Here is the thing. If you want to make it hard for people to copy your books, don't distribute them digitally. Or charge 1 USD pr. book. Or learn to do the design, marketing and printing yourself Add something to your book that makes it worth buying. There are so many ways to approach this and you have no option but to embrace it and accept it and learn to sell in that environment cause thousands and thousands today can write books.

flawawa2 16y ago

It's weird. What I get from this post is "if you won't buy my book, please read something else". That, of course sounds logical but she is missing that she is telling freeloaders to download some other author's works, thus "marketing" the other author and not her. I would not do it like that.

moultano 16y ago

If she's getting 800 downloads a week, next time, screw the publisher. Put up a link to an epub and mobi with a paypall button for $1.99.

norswap 16y ago
Agreed. She also invokes the fact that she cannot publish everywhere. There are some self-publishing services out there that can do the trick. Seems like an awful lot of whining to me.
- JimmyL 16y ago
  If she's already gone with a publisher (which she has), it's no longer up to her - she (likely, but it depends on her contract) can't submit that work to a separate publisher even if she wanted. I'm also not sure I buy the people saying that she should go at it alone next time, and solely self-publish. Doing so means that, among other things, she'd have no advance to live on while writing it, no editors to work with her on making the copy better, no typesetters to make the text flow well on whatever platforms it gets distributed on, no artists for cover design, no translation support to release international editions, and - this is the important one - no advertising and distribution support to get the book places into bricks-and-mortar stores (as most stores look down hard on self-published books). It's not just a matter of saying "OK, I'll self-publish"; there are all sorts of other costs that are a part of publishing a book that a publisher normally covers, which you have to pay for yourself should you self-publish.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    The thing is, there is no entitlement to being a successful book author. If she can't make a living doing it, maybe it is not meant to be.
  - chc 16y ago
    If she really believes she can get 800 downloads a week with no promotion, most of your objections there kind of disappear. (The typesetters, editors and translators are the only ones that continue to matter, and those can be hired for fairly cheap — take a look at http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ for a real ebook author's take on the matter.)

juiceandjuice 16y ago

"Even if half the people that borrowed my book in the library bought it, I would make more money"

imperator 16y ago

I am an author and have a book distributed over Kindle. People who bought my book wanted to buy it, and people who pirated it wanted to get it for free. That's okay with me. The two are not linked. I would never get angry if someone loaned one of my books to another person, so why would I get angry about someone pirating it. And if people had not loaned me many books, I would never have grown to love writing. It's just the case that the internet can loan many books to people easily (or so I see it). The market is very fickle about what it likes. Effort spent fighting piracy should be spent on writing more books and promoting them. In the meantime, I would endorse piracy of a commercially failed book as a way of spreading my name. It's obvious this person's book didn't fail in touching people, it just failed in inspiring them to buy. The solution to any writer's problem is to write more.

nerdyworm 16y ago

The problem is you can get the book faster and easier by typing "Name of Book torrent" than "Name of Book buy". Perhaps this is a problem that someone from this community should address. Easier Than Stealing dot com sounds nice.

oscardelben 16y ago
Actually you can get it faster by downloading it from your kindle.
- nerdyworm 16y ago
  You are 100% correct. Perhaps this argument only stands true for movies.
- Natsu 16y ago
  There's only one way to compete with free: easy.
- liedra 16y ago
  This is exactly what I do, which is why it frustrates me so much when some authors/publishers/wives of dead authors (like with the Wheel of Time series) won't allow the release of the ebook until well after the hardcover. Instead I resort to piracy because the whole reason I got a kindle was to avoid buying physical novels and particularly hardcovers, since I travel/move countries so much. Publishers and authors and whatnot who do this are just insane. You should tap into the fact that many fans of popular fantasy/science fiction are also gadget freaks, and allow them to buy your books when they come out instead of losing sales due to piracy.

foljs 16y ago

> They aren't talking about free, they're talking about theft. -yawn- Yet another content creator upset that they can't make money on piracy. Yes, how selfish of him, the CREATOR. > Yeah, that's a BIG hint that piracy and sales aren't linked in any useful way. Stop wishing you could turn any portion of that into real sales. Download numbers aren't related to sales numbers at all. No, but they are related to people BREAKING THE LAW and reading YOUR WORK for free. Even if they weren't about to buy it no matter what, they should pay for READING IT anyway. Oh, and If you ain't gonna read it, don't download it. What are you, a hoarder?

impendia 16y ago

The article suggests that some readers had problems obtaining a copy of the book. If you can get a copy of the book legally, you should, but it seems like some customers weren't able to, and had to choose between obtaining it illegally, or waiting indefinitely on the whim of the publisher. I find it difficult to fault them for the former.

docgnome 16y ago
While I agree, the publisher should be providing books in every region they can, it's not as simple matter of the publisher saying "I hate China, let's make them wait for the new book cause I'm a jerk." It's a matter of if they print an edition there do they believe they can recoup the losses of printing it. Publishers are out to make money. Saying that there is nothing wrong with illegally downloading a book or whatever just because it isn't legally available in your area is rubbish. It's like saying having your friend in the US steal an Xbox from a store and ship it to you is ok because you can't legally buy one where you are. It's obviously not as simple as that, but it's just lame to rationalize breaking the law because you want to.
- hellrich 16y ago
  The stolen Xbox is gone, nobody can buy it. The Ebook can be downloaded no matter how many times someone does so without paying. I'm not sure about books, but at least for US movies/tv-series it can take quite an amount of time to be legally available in Europe. Even if they are available via Hulu inside the US! I understand the reason (earning money by selling licenses to foreign TV channels), but it surely encourages "stealing" the content by using nonofficial media-portals.
  - docgnome 16y ago
    Even if it "encourages" it hardly justifies it. It is breaking the law, plain and simple. I'm rather tired of people shifting the blame to the content producers or publishers. If you're going to break the law, at least own up to it and don't try to shift the blame.

petercooper 16y ago

Because that’s what it boils down to is convenience. People who illegally download books are more interested in their convenience than in supporting the authors they want to read. It’s not hard to go to the library, it just takes time.. Since you're treating your writing as a business (which is fine) why not actually give your customers what they want? If your customers want to be able to buy your e-book in their location, why can't they? Blame your publisher (I do, but I'm also OK with people pirating that book). J A Konrath is an author who's highly realistic about this. His post about piracy nails it: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/piracy-again.html http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/piracy-again.html - He's selling his books for merely a few dollars each and on a DRM-ed platform (the Kindle) and is still making more. One of the comments on the post struck me, too: I have a professional musician on my friends list and he makes posts like this all the time. He said the amount of time he spends cracking down on his albums being distributed illegally (he's a fairly popular, but completely independent artist) is ridiculous. And that he'll be at a show and someone will come up and just cheerily tell him that, "Hey, I illegally downloaded your songs, man. LOVE THEM!" It's insane how entitled people are. Someone AT his show? You mean, someone pirated his almost zero marginal cost material and then paid up good money to attend his show and that's a bad thing? Thankfully, many sane independent musicians have realized this is a great way to go and are profiting from it.

bugsy 16y ago
That's a very good point. The download was a very effective marketing tool whether the musician wanted it to be or not. Really, the hardest thing in these creative industries is marketing, promoting your personal or band brand identity and developing a following. Smart communities wait to see where paths form and then put in walkways. Smart marketing is seeing what actually works to promote your product and then encouraging more of it. Clearly for the described musician downloads were building a fan base from which he was able to then make a living.

elvirs 16y ago

it is wrong to estimate that all those who downloaded the book illegally would go and buy paperback if there was no way to download it for free. i bet a good share of those who downloaded free copy downloaded it to maybe read sometime in the future but never read it. only 20%-30% of those who downloaded a free copy are potential buyers of paperback book. the author should take a look at freemium models and come up with a creative way of making money from the books while adapting world WILD web

jgilliam 16y ago

This story makes me so sad, not because people are stealing her work, but because the author doesn't look at those 800 people a week as potential fans who would fund her next book. Forget about selling the book itself, use the book as a way to find new fans. If half those 800 people each week signed up for her email list or followed her on Twitter, she would have a huge fan base which should could tap to FUND HER NEXT BOOK on Kickstarter. Sell the making of the content, not the consumption of the content. The hardcore fans will want her to write the next book, so they will fund it. Some percentage of the random people who download her book will turn into hardcore fans. It's a scalable, repeatable cycle. 400 people a week = 20k in a year. 5% of that giving $15 is $15,000, her entire advance. EDIT: I did basically this model for documentaries and built an audience of a million members.

docgnome 16y ago
Out of curiosity, do you know of anyone who has actually done this? I'm not entirely convinced this model is as repeatable as you think. I'd be interested to see more data on the subject.
- Tichy 16y ago
  He mentioned that he did it himself. Occasional success stories pop up on HN, too.
  - bugsy 16y ago
    Music works the same way. You use CDs to build up a fan base. It's a physical artifact they can keep and develop loyalty towards. When the fan base is big enough, you can make a living. Maybe. After 20 years of hard work. Being an artist that works in creative original artwork, be it sculpture, music or books is NOT an easy path. Easy path is a corporate job with benefits. Very easy path is government job with benefits you can't get fired from and where you don't actually have to work. Both these are bureaucracy and administration. If you want to be artsy, you won't have stable or high income unless you are lucky, a very hard worker, smart at marketing, brilliant at art, and work at it every day for at least 10-30 years.

yason 16y ago

I bet some money that without the folks downloading free copies of the book the author wouldn't have sold as much in the first place.

Tichy 16y ago

To be honest, this is almost bordering on the ridiculous. Why should people go to extreme lengths to find a hardcopy of the book? There is this feeling of entitlement, "I am an artist, so I am not supposed to have to worry about all this commercial stuff". Meanwhile, other people have discovered that convenience actually makes people buy stuff rather than pirate it.

kragen 16y ago

Possibly the 800 people per week who download the book aren't reading it? In http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-October/000928.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-October... I did some numbers, and reading an ebook costs around 240 times as much as simply downloading it. So a purely self-interested person would download it if there's more than about a ½% chance that they'd actually read it. If most people downloading it are just over that threshold, then 800 downloads per week might represent only 5 new readers per week. (There is some discussion at http://www.mail-archive.com/silklist@lists.hserus.net/msg19701.html. http://www.mail-archive.com/silklist@lists.hserus.net/msg197...) If you download a torrent containing many different ebooks, the ratio goes even higher. I have a Project Gutenberg torrent containing several thousand public-domain books. By the time I finish downloading it, it might turn out to have cost me ten minutes of my time, about a thousand times less than it would take me to navigate a web site to download a single book.

deleted 16y ago

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bugsy 16y ago

I own thousands of printed books. A few I have actually read. I don't own an ereader and don't plan to get one. I also hate reading pdfs on the computer since the text is straining and I prefer to read for fun lying down or outside and not at a desk. I think the author of the article is delusional. She thinks of herself as a NYT best selling author because of some number she estimated of downloads of her work, all of which she assumes are by people who want to not only read her work, but buy it as well. First there is no evidence of the number that read it electronically. So 10 a week bought it, fine those are the fans. But the others may be hoarders, may be downloading bots, who knows. Second, if comparing to best selling authors by multiplying sales figures by a factor of 80 to account for "piracy", one should also multiply the big name authors' sales figures by 80 as well since they should be accorded the same privilege. And then, not a best selling author anymore since the relative ranking is the same as before. What is very normal is most authors never make back their advance. This has been happening for 100 years. An advance of $15,000 says that the publisher knew the book would not sell a lot of copies, and they were right. It's nice to have a printed book, gives you some credibility. It's not typical to make a living selling printed copies of your work, that's something that only happens for a small number of authors. To make more money, improve your skills, write more, and even develop a fan base by giving away free short stories, or selling them to magazines for the (very low) magazine rate. Few read magazines anymore so you can instead develop fans with free samples. It's very unlikely that the pirated copies are changing the bottom line in any meaningful way. It's just as likely they are bringing in more fans and sales as it is that sales are being lost. It's entirely possible that without the free advertising of the piracy she only sells 5 hard copies a week instead of 10.

davidw 16y ago
> I also hate reading pdfs on the computer since the text is straining and I prefer to read for fun lying down or outside and not at a desk. Ignoring the rest of your post, the Kindle basically solves the above problems. I can read for hours with it, whereas I get fidgety reading a PDF on the computer in a few minutes, and my eyes feel tired as well.
- bugsy 16y ago