5 ms·

Definitely not true. I have a "friend" who will buy an ebook if he can't find it on LibGen.

jbarrs 6y ago
I feel like this largely depends on the book. A novel between $10 and $20 that you may get multiple reads out of is better than a $100 university textbook that you only need for one year. The former you can bite the bullet on, the latter becomes harder to justify.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  Pirating novels also, well, should make people feel at least a little bad. I think there's this perception -- and, candidly, I think it's a perception that sites like TorrentFreak (where the linked article is on) push -- that Greedy Big Corporate Publishers take all the money and the creator doesn't get anything to speak of from an individual single sale. I can't speak to all industries, but in fiction publishing, this is absolutely, unequivocally not true. - First, you really do get per-unit royalties, and it's not "just a few cents"; even with traditional publishers, ebook royalties are 25% or more. (With my publisher, I get 50% if you buy directly from them and 35% if you buy on other ebook stores.) - Second, the vast, vast majority of fiction books sell in the thousands. Not millions, not even hundreds of thousands, and way more often than you think not in the tens of thousands. For a small press, a title that sells 5000 copies across its lifetime might qualify as a runaway best seller. - And third, contracts for future books often depend on how well previous books sell. A friend of mine published a book a few years ago that sold decently and was even nominated for a Nebula Award. Its sequel was well-reviewed but didn't sell as well, and even though it was meant as a trilogy, the publisher doesn't seem interested in the third book. So don't use the sales of J.K. Rowling or Stephen King or the like as a yardstick for how piracy affects fiction writers. A few thousand "lost sales" of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Gender Essentialism is a rounding error; a few thousand "lost sales" of my novel Kismet would literally double the title's revenue if they were converted to real sales.
  - snet0 6y ago
    Something I never really thought about until now is that I tend to feel okay with pirating "classics", or books by authors who have since died. At first, I felt like this was probably fine, since it's almost rent-collecting for the publisher at that point, but I suppose for more recent works, the royalties are still paid to the family of the deceased? Otherwise, I feel like a decent rule is that if the majority of your friends haven't heard of it, you probably shouldn't be pirating it.
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      They might be, if the deceased has an estate. Or the estate could be a corporation. At some point, though, it really does feel like rent-collecting for somebody, doesn't it? I don't know what the "correct" length of a copyright term is, but I'm pretty sure it's shorter than what we have now.
  - AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
    Questions from a mostly-legitimate-but-occasional-eBook-pirate[0]: 1) Do you believe piracy has any legitimacy in cases where the publisher simply refuses to release an eBook version in your region? Example: try finding "One Hundred Years of Solitude" for sale anywhere in the US. 2) Do you believe there is a moral/ethical way to protest perceived price gouging among eBooks from publishers? Example: A book from a well-known British fantasy author is £2.99 in its own region, but nearly double that price on the US store: https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-eternal-champion-1 https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-eternal-champion-1 https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-eternal-champion https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-eternal-champion [0] Submitted in bona fides is my catalog of legally-purchased e-books: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Aganar http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Aganar
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      I'm sort of hesitant to opine on "legitimacy"; while I believe in the abstract concept of copyright as a tool to protect the interest of creators, the actual real world implementation of copyright seems to often be a cascade of shit sandwiches. If copyright law is making it effectively impossible for you to give a creator money even if you want to, like the One Hundred Years of Solitude example, it's hard to see how it's helping anyone. (And that's without getting into the question of whether a 50-year-old work should really still be under copyright.) While I'm sure the current US publishers would disagree with me, it doesn't seem unreasonable to "pirate" the book in that case. As for protesting perceived price gouging, uh... [shrug emoji] I really don't know what to tell you. In the case of the Moorcock book, there are two different publishers there -- the US publisher is the independent Titan Books, while the UK publisher is Gollancz's "SF Gateway" line of low-priced reprint ebooks, which notes on their web site, "we have English language rights on all titles everywhere in the world except for the USA, its dependencies, Canada, and the Philippines." The problem child in this case isn't Gollancz; it may be Titan, but it might also be Moorcock or his agent. At any rate, "this price is obviously too high so I'm just gonna pirate it" is a road I'm not entirely comfortable going down, even when it seems that, well, yeah, the price is too high. (That's stopped me from buying any of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels in ebook; they're barely longer than novellas -- about the same length as the Elric books, if I'm remembering them right! -- and should really be priced at $2.99 or $3.99 a pop.)
- rightbyte 6y ago
  I think I had to pay 1 USD to print 10 pages or something. "University Physics" at 1600 pages was cheaper to buy then print. Using a laptop to read it would have been doable, but I found that distracting and cumbersome.
Enginerrrd 6y ago
I'm 10x more likely to buy a print copy of a book if I get a hold of a full copy of it in PDF form first.
- Karsteski 6y ago
  I'm very much down to buy a book if they provide a free electronic copy. What I'm not down to do is buy the physical book and then have to pay for the ebook just so that I can read on my kindle... It's absurd to me that this isn't standard already
rhino369 6y ago
Right. Clearly not every pirated copy is a lost sale. But a lot are. It's easy to say "I'd never pay 60 bucks for that" when you just copy as many games as you want for free. And I'm sure for some art, piracy adds value by creating demand. But that's the exception, not the rule.

I feel like this largely depends on the book. A novel between $10 and $20 that you may get multiple reads out of is better than a $100 university textbook that you only need for one year. The former you can bite the bullet on, the latter becomes harder to justify.

chipotle_coyote 6y ago
Pirating novels also, well, should make people feel at least a little bad. I think there's this perception -- and, candidly, I think it's a perception that sites like TorrentFreak (where the linked article is on) push -- that Greedy Big Corporate Publishers take all the money and the creator doesn't get anything to speak of from an individual single sale. I can't speak to all industries, but in fiction publishing, this is absolutely, unequivocally not true. - First, you really do get per-unit royalties, and it's not "just a few cents"; even with traditional publishers, ebook royalties are 25% or more. (With my publisher, I get 50% if you buy directly from them and 35% if you buy on other ebook stores.) - Second, the vast, vast majority of fiction books sell in the thousands. Not millions, not even hundreds of thousands, and way more often than you think not in the tens of thousands. For a small press, a title that sells 5000 copies across its lifetime might qualify as a runaway best seller. - And third, contracts for future books often depend on how well previous books sell. A friend of mine published a book a few years ago that sold decently and was even nominated for a Nebula Award. Its sequel was well-reviewed but didn't sell as well, and even though it was meant as a trilogy, the publisher doesn't seem interested in the third book. So don't use the sales of J.K. Rowling or Stephen King or the like as a yardstick for how piracy affects fiction writers. A few thousand "lost sales" of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Gender Essentialism is a rounding error; a few thousand "lost sales" of my novel Kismet would literally double the title's revenue if they were converted to real sales.
- snet0 6y ago
  Something I never really thought about until now is that I tend to feel okay with pirating "classics", or books by authors who have since died. At first, I felt like this was probably fine, since it's almost rent-collecting for the publisher at that point, but I suppose for more recent works, the royalties are still paid to the family of the deceased? Otherwise, I feel like a decent rule is that if the majority of your friends haven't heard of it, you probably shouldn't be pirating it.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    They might be, if the deceased has an estate. Or the estate could be a corporation. At some point, though, it really does feel like rent-collecting for somebody, doesn't it? I don't know what the "correct" length of a copyright term is, but I'm pretty sure it's shorter than what we have now.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  Questions from a mostly-legitimate-but-occasional-eBook-pirate[0]: 1) Do you believe piracy has any legitimacy in cases where the publisher simply refuses to release an eBook version in your region? Example: try finding "One Hundred Years of Solitude" for sale anywhere in the US. 2) Do you believe there is a moral/ethical way to protest perceived price gouging among eBooks from publishers? Example: A book from a well-known British fantasy author is £2.99 in its own region, but nearly double that price on the US store: https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-eternal-champion-1 https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-eternal-champion-1 https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-eternal-champion https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-eternal-champion [0] Submitted in bona fides is my catalog of legally-purchased e-books: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Aganar http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Aganar
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    I'm sort of hesitant to opine on "legitimacy"; while I believe in the abstract concept of copyright as a tool to protect the interest of creators, the actual real world implementation of copyright seems to often be a cascade of shit sandwiches. If copyright law is making it effectively impossible for you to give a creator money even if you want to, like the One Hundred Years of Solitude example, it's hard to see how it's helping anyone. (And that's without getting into the question of whether a 50-year-old work should really still be under copyright.) While I'm sure the current US publishers would disagree with me, it doesn't seem unreasonable to "pirate" the book in that case. As for protesting perceived price gouging, uh... [shrug emoji] I really don't know what to tell you. In the case of the Moorcock book, there are two different publishers there -- the US publisher is the independent Titan Books, while the UK publisher is Gollancz's "SF Gateway" line of low-priced reprint ebooks, which notes on their web site, "we have English language rights on all titles everywhere in the world except for the USA, its dependencies, Canada, and the Philippines." The problem child in this case isn't Gollancz; it may be Titan, but it might also be Moorcock or his agent. At any rate, "this price is obviously too high so I'm just gonna pirate it" is a road I'm not entirely comfortable going down, even when it seems that, well, yeah, the price is too high. (That's stopped me from buying any of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels in ebook; they're barely longer than novellas -- about the same length as the Elric books, if I'm remembering them right! -- and should really be priced at $2.99 or $3.99 a pop.)
rightbyte 6y ago
I think I had to pay 1 USD to print 10 pages or something. "University Physics" at 1600 pages was cheaper to buy then print. Using a laptop to read it would have been doable, but I found that distracting and cumbersome.

Enginerrrd 6y ago

I'm 10x more likely to buy a print copy of a book if I get a hold of a full copy of it in PDF form first.

Karsteski 6y ago
I'm very much down to buy a book if they provide a free electronic copy. What I'm not down to do is buy the physical book and then have to pay for the ebook just so that I can read on my kindle... It's absurd to me that this isn't standard already

rhino369 6y ago

Right. Clearly not every pirated copy is a lost sale. But a lot are. It's easy to say "I'd never pay 60 bucks for that" when you just copy as many games as you want for free. And I'm sure for some art, piracy adds value by creating demand. But that's the exception, not the rule.