The New York Times ran an article today about the rise of ebook piracy:
For a while now, determined readers have been able to sniff out errant digital copies of titles as varied as the “Harry Potter” series and best sellers by Stephen King and John Grisham. But some publishers say the problem has ballooned in recent months as an expanding appetite for e-books has spawned a bumper crop of pirated editions on Web sites like Scribd and Wattpad, and on file-sharing services like RapidShare and MediaFire.
This is common sense: as ebook demand rises, so does ebook piracy. Pirates, after all, aren’t interested in products for which there is no demand. Demand creates value, and once something is valuable, it’s worth stealing. The reaction on the internet has been interesting to watch. The ebook evangelists are all saying “so what,” pointing out that piracy is a sign of popularity, a kind of “progressive taxation” on the most successful. Others are even pointing out that it can lead to increased print book sales. Indeed, Cory Doctorow, who famously gives away his ebooks to sell more print books (a strategy that anecdotally seems to work at the moment but that will become increasingly less viable as market share of ebooks increases), is quoted in the article: “‘I really feel like my problem isn’t piracy,” Mr. Doctorow said. “It’s obscurity.””
Others, such as Michelle Lemay, one of the owners of Inkwell Bookstore in Cape Cod, MA (@michelleinkwell), have noted that despite those trumpeting its welcome side effects, piracy has a very negative effect on sales at small independent stores. She tweeted: “piracy hurts sales though; 2008 manga sales down 17%” and pointed to this article in Publishers Weekly. She also noted that the manga fans who normally shopped at her store seemed to see nothing wrong with finding the comics they liked online for free, and suggested that it’s difficult to educate kids about piracy when their parents are downloading music ripped from file-sharing sites like RapidShare.
So what to do about this? How can we stop people from effectively stealing from writers, publishers and booksellers? Writing on the Booksquare blog, Kassia Krozser makes the case for publishers to “reach readers where they live.” She goes on to map out a model: “There is strong evidence (Exhibit A: iTunes) that consumers are happy to pay for digital product…as long as certain conditions are met: price, selection, and convenience.”
I think this is key. For bookstores and publishers, the answer has to be this: make it more appealing – in every way – to buy the ebook than to steal it. Make your ecommerce site simple and direct. Make your customer service flawless. Offer the books people want and be as competative on price as you can be (Publishers, we indie bookstores could use a hand from you on this front). Make the experience reader-friendly, in every sense of the word. And then go a step further. Make shopping with you more like joining a club. Make it seem exclusive. In fact, everything I’ve just written really applies to brick-and-mortar bookstores, in general.
Don’t rely on educating or guilting your customers into shopping with you because: a) It won’t work, and b) It turns people off. People simply don’t like to be lectured to or guilted or threatened into doing something. Harlan Ellison might be a hell of a writer, and he’s more than reasonable to request that people pay him for his work, but when he says “If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump,” he’s risking turning people off (plus he sounds kind of crazy).
The challenge for bookstores and publishers is pretty simple: find out what people want to read and how they want to acquire it, and then meet those needs. If you don’t, you will go out of business, but it won’t be because of piracy.
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I must say I’ve found this discussion incredibly bizarre, as if human civilization has never before experienced the effect of turning a formerly physically contained media into one which is digitally contained. as if napster, torrents, tvshack, itunes, mp3, hulu, youtube, ipod and on and on had never happened.
Educating kids about piracy? … eeks. I’d suggest that if that’s even on the table as some kind of solution, well … godspeed.
it is indeed a challenge for ebook publishers how they will secure both their writers and consumers. The mere fact that people can’t stop patronizing pirated ebooks the problem won’t stop there.
The ebook is never going to catch on beyond being a mild trend, every possible bit of logic is against it. The only viable avenue for ebooks are textbooks. It would reduce the cost, lighten the load for students, etc. The problem of pirating would drop because textbooks get “updated” every couple of years. But as far as the mainstream, never gonna happen. And any publisher rallying behind the idea is as misguided as the people who invested in dot coms in the 90s IMHO.
The only interesting discussion here is what’s going to happen with newspapers.
Great article. Completely agree about reaching customers where they are & not trying to guilt them or lecture to them. However, I disagree with Michelle (though I love her blog): Manga sales aren’t down 17% because of piracy. Scanlations existed before 2008; what changed was Borders, the company that introduced manga to the mainstream, had a crappy year. What’s more, EVERYONE had a crappy year. People cut back on manga because they didn’t have money, and manga’s not a necessity.
@ HughM: It’s true this has happened many times before, but I think the book publishing industry has always felt insulated from the effects of digital piracy (with reason: look how piracy affects manga vs anime). Lack of technology is the main reason; once that’s fixed, though, watch out.
@ Justin: Actually, I think eBooks will catch on, if eReaders become relatively cheap, eReader technology improves, & the price of eBooks drop significantly. And, even if those things don’t happen (but they will), eBooks will become huge in areas where acquiring physical books is next to impossible: http://charles-tan.blogspot.com/2009/04/western-paradigm-on-book-orders.html
Justin,
The dot com bubble is an interesting analogy. When it burst, it wasn’t because web businesses were a bad idea or weren’t going to be profitable, rather it was because those specific businesses were overvalued as everyone rushed into the market. The strong companies have survived and become among the most economically viable companies in the world. Web commerce didn’t end with the dot com crash, it just matured.
I suspect we’ll see the same cycle with ebooks. Currently, ebooks are still relatively immature, as are ereaders. Ereaders as standalone devices may not be a successful model, but that doesn’t mean that the ebook doesn’t make sense for a great number of people. We’re still in the very early stages of the ebook market, so I suspect that we’ll look back on this and wonder why we thought these specific models were so good.
Patrick,
What I meant with the dot com analogy is that publishers are right now in the same place investors were in the 90s in that they have no concept of their market.
There’s an article in the current PW that basically says, as of yet, there is no real money to be made from ebooks for publishers, and that’s at the current pricing. They’re going to lower prices even more? That means cutting advances, which means authors are going to get shafted, which means that’s not going to work.
Add to that the fact that piracy is a given, and will be even worse than with MP3s. I keep hearing the “What about the iPod” argument, which is just silly. Trying to equate books to music is wrong headed, unless you are only talking about the disposable “pop” fiction books of a James Patterson. But again, those are the kind of books friends will share with each other, and those are the books which will be pirated the most. It’s a catch 22. Yes publishers would save on printing costs, but they would lose on every other level.
DRM hasn’t worked for MP3s, I doubt it will work for ebooks.
I’m not saying people don’t want to read the new Stephenie Meyer on their iPhone, I’m just saying I don’t think it will ever make sense economically for publishers.
Justin,
I don’t think pirating would drop with textbooks. I have used old editions in several classes. They are primarily business courses. Only a few numbers are changed from edition to edition while the text remains the same.