As I write the headline for this post, I can already hear a thousand authors and publishers sharpening their knives. I want to make it clear from the start that I’m not defending piracy, nor am I attacking it. I’m merely posing a question, and would love to hear some answers from people on it.
I’d also like to stress that by “piracy” I mean the type that involves copyright infringement, not boats and eyepatches. The type of piracy that involves the selling and/or free distribution of another person’s work without their permission.
It has been the scourge of Hollywood pretty much since home video arrived on the scene and people started passing around knock off VHS copies of movies, but it’s increasingly becoming something the book publishing industry is having to deal with.
The reason I’m writing this post is because I wonder if it’s such a terrible thing. As an author, I of course rely on book sales to allow me to feed my family and keep them alive, so I’m all for people buying my books. I positively encourage it. In fact, don’t bother reading the rest of this post, go buy one of my books and read it instead. It’ll entertain you immensely, while simultaneously making you more popular with your peers.
So buying books = good for authors. That’s that established. But does that mean downloading books is bad for authors? Is it possible that pirated books could lead to an increase in sales overall for authors? It could be regarded as free marketing, and in many ways it isn’t much different from library borrowing, surely?
Yes, the libraries obviously buy a copy to begin with, but that may then be loaned out twenty or thirty times over, if not more. Authors do get a small payment when their books are borrowed, but this only currently applies to physical books, not ebooks or audio books. Also, lots of libraries are being handed over to volunteers, and the government has said authors will receive no money from books loaned out by these libraries.
Is piracy merely the charity book shop of the 21st century? I know people who never buy books new and only buy them from charity shops. An author receives no money for this. Some charity shops even put stickers on their books encouraging those buying them to return them once they’ve finished, so the shop can sell it again. One original sale for the author, potentially several more for the charity shop. Isn’t piracy almost exactly the same?
Or does it all come down to numbers? One book from a charity shop may feasibly be resold a dozen times at the very most, whereas a digital file can be downloaded thousands upon thousands of times. But there are around ten thousand charity shops in the UK. If they all sell the same book multiple times you’ve potentially got a hundred thousand sales for which the author doesn’t see a single penny.
Am I suggesting we ban charity shops from selling books? Of course not. I buy lots of books in charity shops, and am more than happy for mine to be sold in there. I want as many people as possible to read my work, and I know from emails I’ve received that some of my biggest fans have stumbled upon my work in a charity shop then gone on to buy the rest of my books.
And of course I’m not against libraries either. Quite the opposite. Read this post to find out just some of the reasons why I love ‘em.
Do I endorse piracy? Absolutely not. In an ideal world it wouldn’t happen. Everyone would buy my books in print from a local bookshop and read them religiously every day until they were forced to buy new copies from all the wear and tear, but we don’t (alas) live in an ideal world, and piracy is here to stay. Hollywood hasn’t been able to stamp it out, and they’ve got Robocop and Batman working for them.
All I’m asking is, do we need to be too worried about it? Is it really going to spell the end for the publishing industry, or will it all even itself out in the end? I’d love to hear thoughts authors and readers alike. Got something to say? Post it in the comments below.
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I love your thought process here. I have often thought that piracy is not much different than checking a book/CD/movie out from a library. I am replying from the United States, and here authors don’t make any money off of their books being checked out from the library. But in my experience, when I read a book from the library, or listen to a cd I’ve never heard before, if I like it I typically add them to my to buy list. This is even true with several bands my friend gave me mp3s of. I will buy the CDs at live shows. With an author I’d likely buy the books off their website or at a reading if it was a book I enjoyed through the library.
But something that does hurt is the overabundance of precautions that publishers have attached to ebooks. One of the joys of owning a book for me, even if I hardly reread it is knowing that if I meet someone who I think will really enjoy a book I can hand it to them. I own your books in ebook form, and I am completely unable to pass them around to friends, and that is a frustration borne from an industry who is WAY more afraid of piracy than it really needs to be. The example I would cite would be John Scalzi’s recent novel Redshirts, which was released DRM free, and hasn’t suffered any significant loss in sales. I would love to hear statistical justification for publisher’s fears; I just haven’t seen them.
Thanks for commenting, John. Yeah, if authors in the US don’t get any money for library loans then it’s even more similar to piracy. I doubt anyone can argue that libraries are a fantastic thing, yet piracy is painted as the root of all evil.
And maybe it is. Maybe it will eventually lead to me being out of a job, and all creative endeavour coming to an end, I don’t know. I just don’t think so.
Interesting point about DRM. I suppose the issue is if you lend a print book then it’s only one copy changing hands. I’m not sure how it works with lending ebooks – does both the lender and lendee (made up word alert) then have a copy? So it’s a duplicate of the original file? Or does it then become unavailable for the lender to read until the lendee (and again) returns it? I must investigate that further.
On Piracy…..
I’m basically in agreement. The big corporates who ‘represent’ the interests of the copyright holders should spend more time and money marketing online access and coming up with new ways of persuading people to part with what they deem an acceptable amount of money for the product, rather than spending it pi**ing off people who are in fact their *customers* by trying to restrict their access to it and by punishing them through the courts. It all boils down to corporate greed IMHO and the grubby requirement for them to increase prefits on a yearly basis. The technical revolution of file sharing has moved too fast for them so they are reacting in the only way they know how to…negatively. I download films from time to time but still go out and buy files and go to the movies. The net result of file sharing has not been for me to buy less films or go to the movies less, its been for me to *watch more films*. People have a finite amount of money in their pocket at the end of the day so whilst I still buy DVDs as much as I ever have, because I like to have to physical item and the quality and basically ‘because I want to’, I also download some films and watch those as well, and quite often having watched a film on download I may then pick it up at the super market a few months down the line (once the price has dropped !) because I know its a good film. If I hadn’t seen the downloaded film then I probably would not consider the risk or parting with hard earned cash for a film I might not like as acceptable. I think all of this basically applies to the Book market as well.