8 ms·

Piracy, Overcoming Gravity, and the Digital Edition

46 points by luu 6y ago

synctext 6y ago
> Amazon's Kindle has around 61% market share on all e-Book sales. > Royalties are 70% if your book is priced at $9.99 or below, but 30% if the book is above that price. Clear market failure. Monopoly marketplace, bad for content creators.
eps 6y ago
> I'm generally tired of the whole "I pirate it but if the content is good I will buy it" line of thinking This is a natural thing to do when buying expensive physical books, because that's exactly what you can do in a bookshop. Imagine if all books in a bookshop were shrink-wrapped. The need to do this has been somewhat alleviated by Amazon's "peek inside" feature, but for the books that don't have it's basically a binary choice between not buying it at all and getting a shady pdf first and then deciding if to purchase the real thing or not. Applies to cooking, technical, programming, history books - pretty much all of non-fiction. Especially if it's thick and over $50. So it's possible that his drop of 40% in sales basically means that 40% of his prior buyers regretted purchasing a book and would've not bought it if they had a chance to preview.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  I sincerely doubt that the inside pages of books are a major factor in any buying decision.
  - iamben 6y ago
    Curious as to why you think that? It definitely affects my decision when buying non fiction - particularly if it's a book with a lot of photos.
  - azalemeth 6y ago
    It the factor in my decision for programming / scientific books: I have a PhD, am interested in many disparate things and therefore need to find texts at the right level for my current amount of understanding in the topic. This is surprisingly hard. Flicking through the pages is the best way to do it. I've never bought an e-Book with DRM. I never will. Occasionally I've downloaded PDFs of books I have the dead-tree version of but want to be able to search through. Most publishers really are terrible at moving into the 21st century. Online e-library lending restrictions are a gigantic pain in the arse, are massively over-engineered, and pointlessly exist to restrict information from those who are best placed to understand it.
Thorrez 6y ago
>Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition was pirated around August or September of 2012. Not sure how still, probably an insider from Amazon. Was there a digital version available? If so, it could almost certainly have been pirated by people outside of Amazon.
TameAntelope 6y ago
For sure correlation between piracy and sales, but causation? I'm not convinced. I've always been a strong proponent of, "piracy is theft" with the caveat of, "theft is bad, but there are lots of worse things". I think we should stop building justifications and just call it what it is, theft, and admit society is probably more okay with theft than we're willing to admit to one another. Pirating content shouldn't fundamentally alter the "am I a good person?" equation, but it does sit with a negative sign next to it.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  Indeed... I have downloaded a lot of movies, TV show, music, software, and books over the years. But I’ve never felt it necessary to subscribe to this insane justification of it, or to glorify it as some sort of political statement with “information wants to be free”. I was simply to cheap to pay for these things. To be sure: I would have only bought a small fraction of what I pirated if that wasn’t possible. And I continue to believe that the lack of Spotify-style licensing is leaving a lot of money for creators on the table (journalism being the clear leader in that regard right now).
  - skinnymuch 6y ago
    This is usually what I am amazed by. The need for righteously justify things.
    - ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
      Doesn't it feel righteous to say "fuck you" to someone who's been fucking you over for years though? A whole host of industries have well documented anti-consumer practices which make it so people who pay are noticeably worse off than people who don't. From disappearing digital goods, to ads shoved in your face in paid products, to anti-piracy measures that are glorified malware, to harvesting and selling your data, I could go on...
      - IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
ALittleLight 6y ago
I'm confused how the author knows that piracy caused the decline in sales. Wouldn't sales naturally decay over time anyway? The author doesn't even know the month the book was pirated, so I'm pretty skeptical that they've measured the impact of piracy reliably. I also doubt that pirating a book selling 100 copies a month would be worthwhile for an Amazon employee with the needed access and know-how. If I had to pirate an ebook with zero insider connections I would just use a script, maybe something like autoit, to page through the ebook on my Kindle Cloud Reader and screenshot every page. Use tesseract to do OCR on the collection and now I have a poorly formatted copy of your book. I assume I could spend a bit more time on this and come up with something better that would keep formatting. I agree that piracy is bad and basically theft (disclosure, I pirated Excession because it wasn't available on Kindle and I knew I wouldn't buy a physical copy and Iain Banks is dead so I don't feel bad). I don't think this post is particularly compelling though.
- solarengineer 6y ago
  To add to what you’ve suggested - at least the cleanups can be outsourced via fiverr and such. (Edit: typos)
- dataflow 6y ago
  > Wouldn't sales naturally decay over time anyway? The author doesn't even know the month the book was pirated, so I'm pretty skeptical that they've measured the impact of piracy reliably. What...? The author gave a pretty darn clear timeline: - I released Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition in 2011 - Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition was pirated around August or September of 2012. - "Book sales immediately dropped 40% over 3 months."
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    I disagree that that's clear. What month was it released in? What month pirated? What was the trend of sales up to that point? Even the phrase "sales immediately dropped 40% over 3 months" is unclear because things that are immediate usually don't take 3 months. A graph showing sales with an annotation on when the piracy happened would be clear. Even better if it could be compared to similar books and sales figures.
unixhero 6y ago
Honestly if a product anyone has made becomes a worldwide hit amongst pirates, you can be sure it is of great quality. As such he should be proud and keep on working as he is now onto a path which will make him rich and famous if he wants. It is a monumental achievement. The world is gigantic and I am sure he hasn't even translated his book into Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and Hindu which will open up more markets. I have admiration for this guy for what he has achieved. Regarding piracy, live with it! Information wants to be free.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  You have great taste in shirts, and you should feel a sense of pride when you come home later today and all your shirts are gone. Clothes want to be free!
  - unixhero 6y ago
    Clothes are not information mate. Additionally, my great insurance will give me new shirts. Who cares. Nothing matters. Come watch TV.
gnicholas 6y ago
This explains why so many books are $9.99... > Amazon, in their drive to popularize digital content for Kindle out, made some changes to e-Books to basically force people to do $9.99. Royalties are 70% if your book is priced at $9.99 or below, but 30% if the book is above that price. Royalties of ~$7/book at $9.99 but your book has to be priced at $23.3 to make the same $7 royalty above the $9.99 limit.
- BLKNSLVR 6y ago
  Upon reading that it seemed to me that this practise of Amazon's is arguably as anti-artist as piracy.
belorn 6y ago
> "It was at this time that my then girlfriend's father heavily questioned if I had the ability to support his daughter, since I asked him right around the time OG2 was released." None of the culture in that sentence should still exist in 2015, and yet it treated as normal.
- 88 6y ago
  What’s wrong with a parent wanting their son/daughter to be partnered with someone who is financially stable?
  - incog_nit0 6y ago
    Flipped it - how's it read now? > It was at this time that my then boyfriend's father heavily questioned if I had the ability to support his son, since I asked him right around the time OG2 was released." I appreciate women bear the brunt of child rearing but I find this patriarchal attitude a bit of an anachronism too.
  - hrktb 6y ago
    If it was his partner asking that question it would be different, their relationship is their problem. Coming from the parent it’s a another can of worm, including the very notion they have a say in their adult children’s basic life choices.
  - belorn 6y ago
    The idea that parents decide to "give away" their daughters to a person they deem "suitable" comes from a very outdated culture of forced marriages. The second problematic culture aspect is the enforcement of gender role where men are expected to support the woman while she take care of the house and children. A father asking the guy if he is able to support his daughter is no less sexist than if he asked his daughter to quit her job when she got pregnant. Neither should be treated as normal coming from 5 years ago.
- readflaggedcomm 6y ago
  No culture is better than another.
dartharva 6y ago
>Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition was pirated around August or September of 2012 >Book sales immediately dropped 40% over 3 months. The sales over time went from 60% and kept declining to 25% by 2015-2016 Spurious correlation. Those sales would have declined irrespective of the book being pirated, there have already been enough research debunking the myth that literature sales drop with piracy [0] I understand watching their content getting pirated must be frustrating for smaller creators, but you have to take into account accessibility among people. As Gaben said, Piracy is almost always a service problem. I am one of those who has always condoned piracy. I have consumed countless pirated copies of books, media and software across my childhood, not because I didn't care for ethics, but because I lived in an environment where it was simply impossible for a kid to buy those things the right way - they were either not launched in my country's market at all or if they were, they were priced too high for our family income. Windows 10, for instance, still retails at ₹14799 - the price of an entire (cheap) desktop/laptop computer. Needless to say almost no one actually buys a Windows license here unless it comes preinstalled in a vendor's machine. A kindle copy of Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective costs ₹10135 - almost twice the price of the Kindle itself. [0] https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59ea4ec1-a19b-11e7-b92d-01aa75ed71a1 https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59e...
robtherobber 6y ago
There's a fairly common misconception that if the people couldn't have pirated a book (song, film), they would have bought it, as if there's some sort of guarantee that a book will necessarily be purchased simply because it's been published, disregarding that people need to (1) be convinced they want it and (2) consider the price worthwhile. Sure, a X number of people have downloaded it for free simply because they could, but this doesn't automatically means that they would have bought it in the first place. It's likelier that some five thousand people in developing countries who couldn't afford a £30 Java study book would find other means to learn Java (other ebooks based on it, Youtube tutorials, Stack Overflow, forums etc.) if that book simply cannot be pirated for whatever reason, than the fact that those people would suddenly start to buy that £30 book.

46 points by luu 6y ago

> Amazon's Kindle has around 61% market share on all e-Book sales. > Royalties are 70% if your book is priced at $9.99 or below, but 30% if the book is above that price. Clear market failure. Monopoly marketplace, bad for content creators.

eps 6y ago

> I'm generally tired of the whole "I pirate it but if the content is good I will buy it" line of thinking This is a natural thing to do when buying expensive physical books, because that's exactly what you can do in a bookshop. Imagine if all books in a bookshop were shrink-wrapped. The need to do this has been somewhat alleviated by Amazon's "peek inside" feature, but for the books that don't have it's basically a binary choice between not buying it at all and getting a shady pdf first and then deciding if to purchase the real thing or not. Applies to cooking, technical, programming, history books - pretty much all of non-fiction. Especially if it's thick and over $50. So it's possible that his drop of 40% in sales basically means that 40% of his prior buyers regretted purchasing a book and would've not bought it if they had a chance to preview.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
I sincerely doubt that the inside pages of books are a major factor in any buying decision.
- iamben 6y ago
  Curious as to why you think that? It definitely affects my decision when buying non fiction - particularly if it's a book with a lot of photos.
- azalemeth 6y ago
  It the factor in my decision for programming / scientific books: I have a PhD, am interested in many disparate things and therefore need to find texts at the right level for my current amount of understanding in the topic. This is surprisingly hard. Flicking through the pages is the best way to do it. I've never bought an e-Book with DRM. I never will. Occasionally I've downloaded PDFs of books I have the dead-tree version of but want to be able to search through. Most publishers really are terrible at moving into the 21st century. Online e-library lending restrictions are a gigantic pain in the arse, are massively over-engineered, and pointlessly exist to restrict information from those who are best placed to understand it.

Thorrez 6y ago

>Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition was pirated around August or September of 2012. Not sure how still, probably an insider from Amazon. Was there a digital version available? If so, it could almost certainly have been pirated by people outside of Amazon.

TameAntelope 6y ago

For sure correlation between piracy and sales, but causation? I'm not convinced. I've always been a strong proponent of, "piracy is theft" with the caveat of, "theft is bad, but there are lots of worse things". I think we should stop building justifications and just call it what it is, theft, and admit society is probably more okay with theft than we're willing to admit to one another. Pirating content shouldn't fundamentally alter the "am I a good person?" equation, but it does sit with a negative sign next to it.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
Indeed... I have downloaded a lot of movies, TV show, music, software, and books over the years. But I’ve never felt it necessary to subscribe to this insane justification of it, or to glorify it as some sort of political statement with “information wants to be free”. I was simply to cheap to pay for these things. To be sure: I would have only bought a small fraction of what I pirated if that wasn’t possible. And I continue to believe that the lack of Spotify-style licensing is leaving a lot of money for creators on the table (journalism being the clear leader in that regard right now).
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  This is usually what I am amazed by. The need for righteously justify things.
  - ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
    Doesn't it feel righteous to say "fuck you" to someone who's been fucking you over for years though? A whole host of industries have well documented anti-consumer practices which make it so people who pay are noticeably worse off than people who don't. From disappearing digital goods, to ads shoved in your face in paid products, to anti-piracy measures that are glorified malware, to harvesting and selling your data, I could go on...
    - IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

ALittleLight 6y ago

I'm confused how the author knows that piracy caused the decline in sales. Wouldn't sales naturally decay over time anyway? The author doesn't even know the month the book was pirated, so I'm pretty skeptical that they've measured the impact of piracy reliably. I also doubt that pirating a book selling 100 copies a month would be worthwhile for an Amazon employee with the needed access and know-how. If I had to pirate an ebook with zero insider connections I would just use a script, maybe something like autoit, to page through the ebook on my Kindle Cloud Reader and screenshot every page. Use tesseract to do OCR on the collection and now I have a poorly formatted copy of your book. I assume I could spend a bit more time on this and come up with something better that would keep formatting. I agree that piracy is bad and basically theft (disclosure, I pirated Excession because it wasn't available on Kindle and I knew I wouldn't buy a physical copy and Iain Banks is dead so I don't feel bad). I don't think this post is particularly compelling though.

solarengineer 6y ago
To add to what you’ve suggested - at least the cleanups can be outsourced via fiverr and such. (Edit: typos)
dataflow 6y ago
> Wouldn't sales naturally decay over time anyway? The author doesn't even know the month the book was pirated, so I'm pretty skeptical that they've measured the impact of piracy reliably. What...? The author gave a pretty darn clear timeline: - I released Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition in 2011 - Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition was pirated around August or September of 2012. - "Book sales immediately dropped 40% over 3 months."
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  I disagree that that's clear. What month was it released in? What month pirated? What was the trend of sales up to that point? Even the phrase "sales immediately dropped 40% over 3 months" is unclear because things that are immediate usually don't take 3 months. A graph showing sales with an annotation on when the piracy happened would be clear. Even better if it could be compared to similar books and sales figures.

unixhero 6y ago

Honestly if a product anyone has made becomes a worldwide hit amongst pirates, you can be sure it is of great quality. As such he should be proud and keep on working as he is now onto a path which will make him rich and famous if he wants. It is a monumental achievement. The world is gigantic and I am sure he hasn't even translated his book into Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and Hindu which will open up more markets. I have admiration for this guy for what he has achieved. Regarding piracy, live with it! Information wants to be free.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
You have great taste in shirts, and you should feel a sense of pride when you come home later today and all your shirts are gone. Clothes want to be free!
- unixhero 6y ago
  Clothes are not information mate. Additionally, my great insurance will give me new shirts. Who cares. Nothing matters. Come watch TV.

gnicholas 6y ago

This explains why so many books are $9.99... > Amazon, in their drive to popularize digital content for Kindle out, made some changes to e-Books to basically force people to do $9.99. Royalties are 70% if your book is priced at $9.99 or below, but 30% if the book is above that price. Royalties of ~$7/book at $9.99 but your book has to be priced at $23.3 to make the same $7 royalty above the $9.99 limit.

BLKNSLVR 6y ago
Upon reading that it seemed to me that this practise of Amazon's is arguably as anti-artist as piracy.

belorn 6y ago

> "It was at this time that my then girlfriend's father heavily questioned if I had the ability to support his daughter, since I asked him right around the time OG2 was released." None of the culture in that sentence should still exist in 2015, and yet it treated as normal.

88 6y ago
What’s wrong with a parent wanting their son/daughter to be partnered with someone who is financially stable?
- incog_nit0 6y ago
  Flipped it - how's it read now? > It was at this time that my then boyfriend's father heavily questioned if I had the ability to support his son, since I asked him right around the time OG2 was released." I appreciate women bear the brunt of child rearing but I find this patriarchal attitude a bit of an anachronism too.
- hrktb 6y ago
  If it was his partner asking that question it would be different, their relationship is their problem. Coming from the parent it’s a another can of worm, including the very notion they have a say in their adult children’s basic life choices.
- belorn 6y ago
  The idea that parents decide to "give away" their daughters to a person they deem "suitable" comes from a very outdated culture of forced marriages. The second problematic culture aspect is the enforcement of gender role where men are expected to support the woman while she take care of the house and children. A father asking the guy if he is able to support his daughter is no less sexist than if he asked his daughter to quit her job when she got pregnant. Neither should be treated as normal coming from 5 years ago.
readflaggedcomm 6y ago
No culture is better than another.

dartharva 6y ago

>Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition was pirated around August or September of 2012 >Book sales immediately dropped 40% over 3 months. The sales over time went from 60% and kept declining to 25% by 2015-2016 Spurious correlation. Those sales would have declined irrespective of the book being pirated, there have already been enough research debunking the myth that literature sales drop with piracy [0] I understand watching their content getting pirated must be frustrating for smaller creators, but you have to take into account accessibility among people. As Gaben said, Piracy is almost always a service problem. I am one of those who has always condoned piracy. I have consumed countless pirated copies of books, media and software across my childhood, not because I didn't care for ethics, but because I lived in an environment where it was simply impossible for a kid to buy those things the right way - they were either not launched in my country's market at all or if they were, they were priced too high for our family income. Windows 10, for instance, still retails at ₹14799 - the price of an entire (cheap) desktop/laptop computer. Needless to say almost no one actually buys a Windows license here unless it comes preinstalled in a vendor's machine. A kindle copy of Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective costs ₹10135 - almost twice the price of the Kindle itself. [0] https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59ea4ec1-a19b-11e7-b92d-01aa75ed71a1 https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59e...

robtherobber 6y ago

There's a fairly common misconception that if the people couldn't have pirated a book (song, film), they would have bought it, as if there's some sort of guarantee that a book will necessarily be purchased simply because it's been published, disregarding that people need to (1) be convinced they want it and (2) consider the price worthwhile. Sure, a X number of people have downloaded it for free simply because they could, but this doesn't automatically means that they would have bought it in the first place. It's likelier that some five thousand people in developing countries who couldn't afford a £30 Java study book would find other means to learn Java (other ebooks based on it, Youtube tutorials, Stack Overflow, forums etc.) if that book simply cannot be pirated for whatever reason, than the fact that those people would suddenly start to buy that £30 book.