![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Turning Pirates Into Customers
I originally wrote this for Shane Jiraiya Cumming's blog a month ago, during his Grand Conversation about ebooks; it was posted there a month ago. The conversation is fascinating series with input from many authors and publishers, and I encourage people to go read it. (And try out his books; he's got a couple of freebies and a set of very reasonably priced ebooks at Smashwords.) This essay was intended to be "a blog post;" Shane wound up posting it in 3 parts because blog posts shouldn't be 4500+ words long. But since this is DW that allows *cough* 50k word fanfics in a single post, I'm posting it all together here.
I do have some ideas on why it's important to consider pirates as potential customers, and how to convert them. (Or rather, how to convert the leeches; the uploading pirates are often already good customers.)
When I'm being technically accurate, I call it "unauthorized file sharing" because it might not be illegal.[1] Most of the time, I just call it "piracy" because that term has been embraced by several sides. Authors & publishers use it to imply they're being raided and stolen from by people outside of the reach of normal laws; uploaders and downloaders use it to imply they're creative rebels fighting against oppressive corporations. (Who did you root for—Captain Jack, or the East India Trading Company?)
While the legal and moral issues of "piracy" aren't certain, the practical truth is that it's both frustrating and scary for authors, who look at those downloads and think, "why aren't they buying my book, if so many of them like it?" Which comes to the heart of the problem:
What authors need (and publishers, if those are involved) is not "an end to digital piracy." What they need is more sales. They need more customers, and more of the current customers buying more ebooks. It doesn't matter if they stop pirates; book contracts aren't renewed based on the number of pirates stopped.
DMCA takedown notices to Megaupload and Rapidshare don't result in more sales. Shutting down ThePirateBay doesn't sell books. Even if takedown efforts resulted in removal of content, instead of pushing it laterally to somewhere else on the web, there's no evidence that those people would turn around and buy the legit versions of the content they formerly pirated, instead of turning to other, legitimate free content online.
I'm focusing on ebooks and not including print as an acceptable substitute. The solution to "the ebook isn't available at a price I can accept" will not be "just buy the paper version instead." First, because some of us don't read print, either as a matter of preference (like me) or ability (people whose hands are too weak or shaky for pbooks, or who need large text); second, because the most affordable print version is often second-hand… which still leaves the author out of royalties. Third … let's just allow there is a third, and fourth, and more possible reasons why print is not always a reasonable substitute. Telling people they should be reading more pbooks isn't going to work.
Might as well say, "if my book isn't available at a price you like, read something else." That’s a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot approach to potential customers when you stop and think about it.
"Pirates" are all potential customers. The most active—the ones who upload often, and download lots, not the ones who download the newest bestseller because it's faster than borrowing their brother's copy—are interested in ebooks. Pirates care about the works they share. (Or steal, depending on your vocabulary choices. Either way—people don't steal what they don't want, even if what they want is "a huge collection" rather than anything specific within that collection.)
To get them to buy instead of download, authors need to know what they're downloading, and why they're not buying it. It's not "because they're lazy, greedy criminals who would rather steal than pay artists." Most people want to support the artists who create the content they love; if they don't, it's because they either believe they can't afford to, or circumstances have made that support impossible for them.
The common response to "they can't afford to" is "well, then they shouldn't read those ebooks." But we are surrounded by content we aren't required to pay for. Television (taxed in some countries, but not on a per-use basis; you don't pay more if you watch more), movies watched at friends' houses, books borrowed or given by friends when they're done or picked up at rummage sales for $5 a bagful, prices so low as to be meaningless, and not resulting in payment to the writers. We've always had access to huge collections of entertainment and educational content without paying; insisting that the digital world is different makes no sense. It goes against centuries of cultural inertia; artistry has always been paid for by a few and enjoyed by the masses.
Which doesn't mean it couldn't be paid for by more people. More payments = more people devoted to writing instead of shuffling papers in an office; those of us who love books would like that. Nobody in ebook downloading circles says, "I download so that authors will go broke, because I want less ebooks in the world."
Before getting into how they might be convinced to buy instead of downloading, I want to go over what they download. Convincing people to buy requires knowing what they're expected to give up. Unauthorized ebook downloads—"pirated" books—consist of three main categories:
1) Commercial ebooks, with DRM removed if it existed, shared with people who either don't believe they can afford the legit version, or don't want to deal with its restrictions. (DRM, store requires a credit card instead of PayPal, not available in their format of choice, etc.) This includes (among other ebooks), many popular bestsellers, a lot of romance & erotica ebooks, and digital textbooks. When researches try to estimate the "damages" caused by piracy, they focus almost entirely on these books.
This is the category that potentially causes real financial losses; a free download of an ebook available for sale is unlikely to be bought. Some people do buy them, either out of a sense of obligation, or because they forgot they had a free version, or for the sheer convenience of getting it at the moment they're interested. However, the higher the price of the commercial version, and the more restrictive the DRM from the customer's perspective, the less likely these sales are.
This is the area where authors and publishers need to focus their efforts on convincing people to buy rather than pirate. This is the only area worth spending real effort on; nothing else is competing against actual sales. "Punish the wicked pirates" may be a fine goal, but it has nothing to do with selling books.
2) Books with no authorized digital edition, which includes both scanned-and-converted books and no-longer-sold commercial ebooks. This includes comic books and manga, very little of which is legitimately available digitally, and almost none of that is backlist; out-of-print graphic content tends to stay out-of-print. Most of the rest of the scanned ebooks are out-of-print books, although some have been re-released in paper; the publisher may not believe there's a market for the digital version, or hasn't the rights or resources to offer it digitally. Some are popular books that have no authorized digital version. This category also includes "not available in my country" ebooks … the digital text is not available, at any price, without breaking a law or violating a TOS somewhere.
It's unclear that this category causes any financial damage at all, and it likely drives up sales for print editions by keeping people aware of and interested in those authors or publishers. The most famous example is Rowling's books; the almost-never-discussed category is romance novels. (Harlequin just started a digital backlist program; until recently, they retired ebooks after only a few months.) Other ebooks drop out of availability as authors change publishers.
For this area, the potential customer can't just be redirected to a purchase. If the reader wants access to that ebook, she must either (1) painstakingly scan & convert it herself (which may or may not be entirely legal, depending on her location), or (2) avail herself of the generous work of others, who have procured a digital copy (either by scanning or purchasing a legit version) and made it available for download.
This is the category that authors and publishers need to acknowledge as, at worst, grey; it's hard to incite moral outrage for the nonprofit distribution of orphan works, with no known rights-holder, and out-of-print comic books, and niche publications that have no interest in exploiting a digital market. Piracy advocates point to this section first when the moral issue is raised, and the common author/publisher reaction of "if they're not legitimately available, just don't read them" is a weak response; it's interpreted as "we'll decide what you should be reading; your own tastes are irrelevant."
3) Scanned-and-converted books that differ from the authorized digital edition, often because they were scanned years before an authorized edition was released. These sometimes continue to be shared because their editing is better than the commercial release, which is often automatically OCR'd without proofreading and poorly formatted. (The 12-year-old digital versions of Tolkien's works are better-proofed than the ones sold today. The usenet .txt files didn't have "Tha Hobbit" on the title page.) Or they persist because they're available in formats not sold—often txt or html. Or because the authorized version is considered so very expensive that people will settle for a lower-quality makeshift—this is very common for textbooks.
This is the category that authors and publishers need to pay close attention to; it highlights the problems in their marketing plan. Readers are getting something from the amateur scanned edition that makes it more valuable than the professional release … the fact that this is not uncommon, shows the lack of quality of many professional ebook releases. Uncorrected OCR, formatting that looks awful on a dedicated reader (I've seen 1" hard-coded margins on the 3.5" wide screen), blocked search or print options in PDFs, lack of a functional (linked) table of contents… commercially-purchased ebooks are a crapshoot for quality issues, and one way to spot them is to check which bootlegs are not the same as the official download.
Sometimes, the previous scanned versions are shared because of inertia; those torrents are widely available and the new commercially-available, DRM-cracked ebook is not. But as sloppy and scattered as the download sites are, quality does get more attention than its lack; if the commercial version is notably better than the previous bootleg, it'll slowly replace it, and that ebook will slide into the first category instead of the third.
Not that the bootlegs are all great quality files; they have the same series of problems (well, except for the blocked print-and-search options)… but at their price, nobody complains. Anyone who feels inspired to fix the problems can do so, and release that version with no more moral qualms than they had before. A purchased book, with DRM, can't be fixed, no matter how bad it is.
Which brings me to the point that authors will be most interested in: How do you convince them to buy instead of downloading?
This is one of the first reasons (or excuses) offered for why people download instead of buying; purchased ebooks are a mix of "good enough" and "problematic," with the occasional nightmare (books with no punctuation at all, wrong book entirely—right filename, wrong contents). Anyone who's been burned on a purchase (some ebook stores have a "no returns AT ALL" policy; most others drag their feet about fixing bad digital purchases) might feel justified in turning to other sources for their ebooks.
Authors, harass your publishers to both proofread and check the formatting of ebooks on ebook readers, not just a computer screen. Publishers, invest in a few different readers for testing, and make sure each ebook is opened and checked by human eyes before it's pronounced ready to sell. You wouldn't release a new hardcover as loose-leaf pages of recycled newspaper held together with a rubber band around a couple of sheets of cardboard; don't do the digital equivalent with your ebooks.
Fix the formatting. Fix the metadata. And tell your customers about it… request ebook listings that have a spot to mention fonts, justification, line spacing, and proofreading. The average ebook buyer won't care, but will be pleased to note that you're paying attention. The potential pirates might reconsider bootleg downloads (with their erratic quality levels) if they're assured the legit versions are good
If you can't control how they're described in ebook stores, make sure the listing on the author or publisher's site talks about ebook formatting quality. Tell customers what anyone considering buying a print book would know at a glance: how long is it (word count is preferred to page count, for ebooks, but even filesize is some help), is it serif or sans serif, are the paragraphs indented or is there a blank line between them? What cover art does it have? Is there internal artwork? Does it have an index? A table of contents? Tell people what they're buying, and they'll be more likely to pay you. Tell them they don't need to crack the DRM to read it because it doesn't need to be fixed. Encourage reviewers to mention ebook formatting, just as they'd mention whether a printed book had margins too small or an easy-on-the-eyes typeface.
Of course, they may need to crack the DRM to read it because it's only offered in stores that are incompatible with their device. If you only sell at Amazon, with DRM, and the customer has a Sony Reader, she has some choices:
The question authors should be asking is not, "does DRM prevent (some) piracy?" because they don't need to prevent piracy. They need to gain sales, so they should be asking, "does DRM prevent more lost sales through piracy, than it prevents purchases through inconvenience?" Many former customers have said they'll never buy DRM'd ebooks again … several of those were active buyers, early adopters in a position to encourage their friends to try ebooks.
Many people also claim that DRM doesn't bother them, or that it's a necessary nuisance, and they don't mind it because it helps authors get paid. I've yet to see one of those posts/comments say, "of course it doesn't bother me that I can't share my Kindle books with my husband's Nook. We don't mind at all having to buy the same book twice so we can both read it." Nor has anyone said, "I lost access to 50 ebooks when Adobe changed from its old DRM system to ADE, but I was never going to read those again so I don't care. I'm happy to buy plenty of DRM'd books with the new system." It's only people who have never lost access to their purchases, never been frustrated by being prevented from what they thought was a perfectly reasonable use of their ebooks, who sing the virtues of DRM. (And publishers and authors, who scrupulously avoid offering any actual statistics to support their claims that DRM helps rather than hinders sales.)
I can't say "DRM costs more sales than it prevents losses through filesharing." I can say that authors and publishers should take a careful look at the facts, and start collecting useful statistics, because it's not as simple as "DRM prevents theft." DRM also prevents sales … and you don't get to be a bestselling author (or a full-time, quit-your-day-job author) by "preventing theft."
Ebooks don't have those costs. The marginal cost of an ebook sale is, not counting DRM, is pennies per book… if the hosting/sales platform is expensive to run. Everything else is a cost per-title; after the title sells X copies (where X covers the costs of creating and arrange for sales of the ebook), everything else is profit. That never happens with print books: every sale requires an outlay of 12%-30% (depending on which publisher you believe) of the cover price.
The issue shifts from "how high can we make the price and still convince customers to pay us, in order to cut down the marginal costs" to "how low can we make the price and still make a profit from our expected number of sales?"
Konrath thinks that the magic price-point is $2.99. TheNextWeb thinks it's between $3 and $10, with popularity of author playing a notable part. Teleread has some charts showing how it's not price, but price-plus-sales, that make for profit, and that there's a tipping point (in both directions) where a book makes less money than it could because it's at the wrong price point. Publishers imply that $8 ebooks will lose them money, which makes some of us wonder if Baen went bankrupt years ago and just forgot to tell anyone.
They insist that Konrath is a fluke, and so are the dozens of other self-published authors who're paying off their mortgages with $3 ebook sales.
I don't know if Konrath and others (Hocking, Larson, Kitt, etc.) are "flukes." Certainly, three dozen self-published authors out of the tens of thousands offering books for sale are not proof that it's a financially viable approach for most authors.
I do know that when I'm looking for something to read, I start by looking at freebies, and move on to ebooks that cost money, and I've never had to go higher than $6 to find something I know I'll thoroughly enjoy, and rarely higher than $3. Fiction ebooks priced about $6US are not on my radar. (Nonfiction's different. I've spent $30 on an RPG ebook.)
Why $6? Because Baen's maximum price for ebooks is $6, and I like a lot of Baen books. (And I'm poor; I grew up on secondhand, half-cover-price books.) For a lot of readers, the cap is $10, because they like mainstream bestsellers and don't care about DRM, and they can find bestseller ebooks for $10. But my impulse-buy level is $1-$3; I'll buy up to a $3 ebook based on a nice cover and interesting description; I'll only go up to $6 for authors I know or books that've been recommended by friends. Others have different ranges: $7 on a whim, $15 for books they've seen advertised on TV or have seen the movie of. Or only freebies, unless they've seen or heard something about a particular book, at which point they're willing to pay no more than $5 for it.
Authors need to find their customers' impulse-buy level, and their max price level, and find a way to sell books in that range. Publishers need to quit fearing that every ebook sold is a lost hardcover sale. Every ebook priced outside of the customer's range is, at best, money in someone else's pocket, and at worst, a temptation to piracy.
Convincing potential customers to change their price ranges is a lot harder than changing ebook prices, which should be bouncing all over the place. Authors and publishers should be struggling to find the sweet spot that maximizes the sales/profit ratio, not struggling to convince the public that the price they picked is what the customers should be paying.
Of course, it doesn't matter if the price is in the customer's range, if the book isn't available for purchase. Right now, the business assumption is that online sales of physical contents take place at the seller's warehouse, and are subject to those taxes and business arrangements. But sales of digital content are presumed to take place at the buyer's location. Or the buyer's ISP's location. Or the buyer's credit card's bank's location: A man in Australia is restricted from buying some ebooks from Amazon. Some of those books aren't available in his local shops, either. However, he can visit the United States and buy the physical books … but Amazon has no way to sell him a digital book when he's visiting the US.
The business contracts—not laws—that arranged these restrictions are perhaps understandable applications of copyright law and publishing contracts, but that doesn't make them less onerous to the customers. What they see is: I visit ebookstore, I find a book I like, I click "buy"—and get told, "No! Not for the likes of you!" Sometimes, this happens after several steps of shopping-cart hassles; the bookstore doesn't say "If your card isn't registered in the US, you can't use it for this book;" it just returns an error message instead of a receipt.
They don't care how complicated publishing contracts are; they don't care that buying the print version would indicate demand for the book in their country and maybe someone would buy the ebook distribution rights. Ebook stores that refuse to filter listings based on sales options come across as teasing, as mocking—deliberately showing off something the customer can't have.
At best, this results in the customer buying something else. At worst, they head off to the torrent sites, secure in the knowledge that they're not costing their favorite author any royalties. The author can't get royalties for sales that aren't permitted.
There's no easy way to turn these "pirates" into customers. The contracts that govern international sales are complex and varied, and changing this system would undermine a lot of IP-based business. It probably needs to be changed, and will … slowly. In the meantime, screaming at readers who got the only version available to them is probably not going to help future sales.
And it's unclear how "it wasn't available for sale, so I downloaded it" differs from "it's out of print, so I got it from a used book store." In both cases, the author gets a new reader who paid no royalties. Yes, the physical book can only have so many readers before it falls apart, necessitating a new sale … but if it's out of print, that new sale doesn't win any new royalties, either.
Charlie Stross pointed out, "Historically, only 25% of readers paid into the authors revenue stream. A 75% piracy rate may therefore be seen as a continuation of business as usual."
Digital sales might be able to change that percentage—by offering well-made ebooks, by letting the customer know what they're buying before purchase, by keeping prices reasonable, by making purchase convenient, by not insulting the customers. This is generic business 101: Quality. Price. Convenience. And don't call them thieves if you want to get money from them.
Commercial ebooks are still competing with free downloads. And the bottled water industry is competing with tap water. Authors and publishers have plenty of economic models to consider; they just have to figure out which ones can be applied to their craft.
The hardest part's already done: ebook pirates care about ebooks. They want authors to write more, and they know that means somebody has to pay those authors. Many of them would like to be part of that "somebody." They're invested in the ebook industry, opinionated and informed (sometimes even well-informed), and willing to explain their reasons at great length. Authors should take every "justification" offered for piracy as marketing research—this is what the commercial version isn't offering—and work to fix it. At the very least, you can count on the existence of other people who didn't pirate, but didn't buy the book either, for the same reasons.
You can't turn all the pirates into customers. You might not be able to turn any pirates into customers. But you can use pirates to find out how to get more customers.
That's what authors need: more ebook buyers. It doesn't matter how many free copies are floating around, legitimate or not; it matters how many people are buying, and why they're not. Find out why not. And fix whatever's standing in their way.
~ end ~
Customers in potentia
Everyone knows the title of this post is an attention hook, not an offer, right? Presumably, readers understand that if I actually had any magic button that would turn digital pirates into paying customers, I'd either use it out of the goodness of my heart and make the world a more honest, more profitable place, or sell it to Disney for ten billion dollars and retire to my own island while they completed their takeover of world culture.I do have some ideas on why it's important to consider pirates as potential customers, and how to convert them. (Or rather, how to convert the leeches; the uploading pirates are often already good customers.)
When I'm being technically accurate, I call it "unauthorized file sharing" because it might not be illegal.[1] Most of the time, I just call it "piracy" because that term has been embraced by several sides. Authors & publishers use it to imply they're being raided and stolen from by people outside of the reach of normal laws; uploaders and downloaders use it to imply they're creative rebels fighting against oppressive corporations. (Who did you root for—Captain Jack, or the East India Trading Company?)
While the legal and moral issues of "piracy" aren't certain, the practical truth is that it's both frustrating and scary for authors, who look at those downloads and think, "why aren't they buying my book, if so many of them like it?" Which comes to the heart of the problem:
What authors need (and publishers, if those are involved) is not "an end to digital piracy." What they need is more sales. They need more customers, and more of the current customers buying more ebooks. It doesn't matter if they stop pirates; book contracts aren't renewed based on the number of pirates stopped.
DMCA takedown notices to Megaupload and Rapidshare don't result in more sales. Shutting down ThePirateBay doesn't sell books. Even if takedown efforts resulted in removal of content, instead of pushing it laterally to somewhere else on the web, there's no evidence that those people would turn around and buy the legit versions of the content they formerly pirated, instead of turning to other, legitimate free content online.
I'm focusing on ebooks and not including print as an acceptable substitute. The solution to "the ebook isn't available at a price I can accept" will not be "just buy the paper version instead." First, because some of us don't read print, either as a matter of preference (like me) or ability (people whose hands are too weak or shaky for pbooks, or who need large text); second, because the most affordable print version is often second-hand… which still leaves the author out of royalties. Third … let's just allow there is a third, and fourth, and more possible reasons why print is not always a reasonable substitute. Telling people they should be reading more pbooks isn't going to work.
Might as well say, "if my book isn't available at a price you like, read something else." That’s a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot approach to potential customers when you stop and think about it.
"Pirates" are all potential customers. The most active—the ones who upload often, and download lots, not the ones who download the newest bestseller because it's faster than borrowing their brother's copy—are interested in ebooks. Pirates care about the works they share. (Or steal, depending on your vocabulary choices. Either way—people don't steal what they don't want, even if what they want is "a huge collection" rather than anything specific within that collection.)
To get them to buy instead of download, authors need to know what they're downloading, and why they're not buying it. It's not "because they're lazy, greedy criminals who would rather steal than pay artists." Most people want to support the artists who create the content they love; if they don't, it's because they either believe they can't afford to, or circumstances have made that support impossible for them.
The common response to "they can't afford to" is "well, then they shouldn't read those ebooks." But we are surrounded by content we aren't required to pay for. Television (taxed in some countries, but not on a per-use basis; you don't pay more if you watch more), movies watched at friends' houses, books borrowed or given by friends when they're done or picked up at rummage sales for $5 a bagful, prices so low as to be meaningless, and not resulting in payment to the writers. We've always had access to huge collections of entertainment and educational content without paying; insisting that the digital world is different makes no sense. It goes against centuries of cultural inertia; artistry has always been paid for by a few and enjoyed by the masses.
Which doesn't mean it couldn't be paid for by more people. More payments = more people devoted to writing instead of shuffling papers in an office; those of us who love books would like that. Nobody in ebook downloading circles says, "I download so that authors will go broke, because I want less ebooks in the world."
Before getting into how they might be convinced to buy instead of downloading, I want to go over what they download. Convincing people to buy requires knowing what they're expected to give up. Unauthorized ebook downloads—"pirated" books—consist of three main categories:
1) Commercial ebooks, with DRM removed if it existed, shared with people who either don't believe they can afford the legit version, or don't want to deal with its restrictions. (DRM, store requires a credit card instead of PayPal, not available in their format of choice, etc.) This includes (among other ebooks), many popular bestsellers, a lot of romance & erotica ebooks, and digital textbooks. When researches try to estimate the "damages" caused by piracy, they focus almost entirely on these books.
This is the category that potentially causes real financial losses; a free download of an ebook available for sale is unlikely to be bought. Some people do buy them, either out of a sense of obligation, or because they forgot they had a free version, or for the sheer convenience of getting it at the moment they're interested. However, the higher the price of the commercial version, and the more restrictive the DRM from the customer's perspective, the less likely these sales are.
This is the area where authors and publishers need to focus their efforts on convincing people to buy rather than pirate. This is the only area worth spending real effort on; nothing else is competing against actual sales. "Punish the wicked pirates" may be a fine goal, but it has nothing to do with selling books.
2) Books with no authorized digital edition, which includes both scanned-and-converted books and no-longer-sold commercial ebooks. This includes comic books and manga, very little of which is legitimately available digitally, and almost none of that is backlist; out-of-print graphic content tends to stay out-of-print. Most of the rest of the scanned ebooks are out-of-print books, although some have been re-released in paper; the publisher may not believe there's a market for the digital version, or hasn't the rights or resources to offer it digitally. Some are popular books that have no authorized digital version. This category also includes "not available in my country" ebooks … the digital text is not available, at any price, without breaking a law or violating a TOS somewhere.
It's unclear that this category causes any financial damage at all, and it likely drives up sales for print editions by keeping people aware of and interested in those authors or publishers. The most famous example is Rowling's books; the almost-never-discussed category is romance novels. (Harlequin just started a digital backlist program; until recently, they retired ebooks after only a few months.) Other ebooks drop out of availability as authors change publishers.
For this area, the potential customer can't just be redirected to a purchase. If the reader wants access to that ebook, she must either (1) painstakingly scan & convert it herself (which may or may not be entirely legal, depending on her location), or (2) avail herself of the generous work of others, who have procured a digital copy (either by scanning or purchasing a legit version) and made it available for download.
This is the category that authors and publishers need to acknowledge as, at worst, grey; it's hard to incite moral outrage for the nonprofit distribution of orphan works, with no known rights-holder, and out-of-print comic books, and niche publications that have no interest in exploiting a digital market. Piracy advocates point to this section first when the moral issue is raised, and the common author/publisher reaction of "if they're not legitimately available, just don't read them" is a weak response; it's interpreted as "we'll decide what you should be reading; your own tastes are irrelevant."
3) Scanned-and-converted books that differ from the authorized digital edition, often because they were scanned years before an authorized edition was released. These sometimes continue to be shared because their editing is better than the commercial release, which is often automatically OCR'd without proofreading and poorly formatted. (The 12-year-old digital versions of Tolkien's works are better-proofed than the ones sold today. The usenet .txt files didn't have "Tha Hobbit" on the title page.) Or they persist because they're available in formats not sold—often txt or html. Or because the authorized version is considered so very expensive that people will settle for a lower-quality makeshift—this is very common for textbooks.
This is the category that authors and publishers need to pay close attention to; it highlights the problems in their marketing plan. Readers are getting something from the amateur scanned edition that makes it more valuable than the professional release … the fact that this is not uncommon, shows the lack of quality of many professional ebook releases. Uncorrected OCR, formatting that looks awful on a dedicated reader (I've seen 1" hard-coded margins on the 3.5" wide screen), blocked search or print options in PDFs, lack of a functional (linked) table of contents… commercially-purchased ebooks are a crapshoot for quality issues, and one way to spot them is to check which bootlegs are not the same as the official download.
Sometimes, the previous scanned versions are shared because of inertia; those torrents are widely available and the new commercially-available, DRM-cracked ebook is not. But as sloppy and scattered as the download sites are, quality does get more attention than its lack; if the commercial version is notably better than the previous bootleg, it'll slowly replace it, and that ebook will slide into the first category instead of the third.
Not that the bootlegs are all great quality files; they have the same series of problems (well, except for the blocked print-and-search options)… but at their price, nobody complains. Anyone who feels inspired to fix the problems can do so, and release that version with no more moral qualms than they had before. A purchased book, with DRM, can't be fixed, no matter how bad it is.
Which brings me to the point that authors will be most interested in: How do you convince them to buy instead of downloading?
Sell something worth buying.
It starts with quality. Printed books have a known quality level; even if the writing itself is poor, the book is not; the typeface is readable (or if not, the reader can opt not to buy; people who need large-print books don't buy Mass-Market Paperbacks), the margins are reasonable; the paragraphs are formatted correctly according to whatever stylesheet the publisher prefers. Typos are rare; chapter headers in plain text without page breaks are nonexistent. For nonfiction, a table of contents is almost always present. Ebook buyers can count on none of these things.This is one of the first reasons (or excuses) offered for why people download instead of buying; purchased ebooks are a mix of "good enough" and "problematic," with the occasional nightmare (books with no punctuation at all, wrong book entirely—right filename, wrong contents). Anyone who's been burned on a purchase (some ebook stores have a "no returns AT ALL" policy; most others drag their feet about fixing bad digital purchases) might feel justified in turning to other sources for their ebooks.
Authors, harass your publishers to both proofread and check the formatting of ebooks on ebook readers, not just a computer screen. Publishers, invest in a few different readers for testing, and make sure each ebook is opened and checked by human eyes before it's pronounced ready to sell. You wouldn't release a new hardcover as loose-leaf pages of recycled newspaper held together with a rubber band around a couple of sheets of cardboard; don't do the digital equivalent with your ebooks.
Fix the formatting. Fix the metadata. And tell your customers about it… request ebook listings that have a spot to mention fonts, justification, line spacing, and proofreading. The average ebook buyer won't care, but will be pleased to note that you're paying attention. The potential pirates might reconsider bootleg downloads (with their erratic quality levels) if they're assured the legit versions are good
If you can't control how they're described in ebook stores, make sure the listing on the author or publisher's site talks about ebook formatting quality. Tell customers what anyone considering buying a print book would know at a glance: how long is it (word count is preferred to page count, for ebooks, but even filesize is some help), is it serif or sans serif, are the paragraphs indented or is there a blank line between them? What cover art does it have? Is there internal artwork? Does it have an index? A table of contents? Tell people what they're buying, and they'll be more likely to pay you. Tell them they don't need to crack the DRM to read it because it doesn't need to be fixed. Encourage reviewers to mention ebook formatting, just as they'd mention whether a printed book had margins too small or an easy-on-the-eyes typeface.
Of course, they may need to crack the DRM to read it because it's only offered in stores that are incompatible with their device. If you only sell at Amazon, with DRM, and the customer has a Sony Reader, she has some choices:
- Don't buy the book. Whether or not the reader's happy with this, the author's out a sale.
- Buy, and read on desktop instead of ebook device. Reader is not happy; she bought the device to allow her to read on the go.
- Buy, and crack the DRM. Download one of the various programs written for this (dodging around a DMCA violation; it's not illegal to have such programs, but it's illegal to distribute them; it's unclear if it's legal to use them to be able to read your own purchases), google for instructions on how to run it, crack the book. Download a conversion program like Calibre (free, open source, legal) and run the cracked version through that to get to a format her device supports. Author's happy with the purchase; reader may be happy with the reading but annoyed at the amount of extra effort involved.
- Skip all that, type [book title] [free ebook download] into Google, and get a version someone else has gone to the effort of cracking, in a format she can just load onto her device. Reader's happy; author's not.
The question authors should be asking is not, "does DRM prevent (some) piracy?" because they don't need to prevent piracy. They need to gain sales, so they should be asking, "does DRM prevent more lost sales through piracy, than it prevents purchases through inconvenience?" Many former customers have said they'll never buy DRM'd ebooks again … several of those were active buyers, early adopters in a position to encourage their friends to try ebooks.
Many people also claim that DRM doesn't bother them, or that it's a necessary nuisance, and they don't mind it because it helps authors get paid. I've yet to see one of those posts/comments say, "of course it doesn't bother me that I can't share my Kindle books with my husband's Nook. We don't mind at all having to buy the same book twice so we can both read it." Nor has anyone said, "I lost access to 50 ebooks when Adobe changed from its old DRM system to ADE, but I was never going to read those again so I don't care. I'm happy to buy plenty of DRM'd books with the new system." It's only people who have never lost access to their purchases, never been frustrated by being prevented from what they thought was a perfectly reasonable use of their ebooks, who sing the virtues of DRM. (And publishers and authors, who scrupulously avoid offering any actual statistics to support their claims that DRM helps rather than hinders sales.)
I can't say "DRM costs more sales than it prevents losses through filesharing." I can say that authors and publishers should take a careful look at the facts, and start collecting useful statistics, because it's not as simple as "DRM prevents theft." DRM also prevents sales … and you don't get to be a bestselling author (or a full-time, quit-your-day-job author) by "preventing theft."
Make them pay.
Being successful as an author (on a financial level; I'm assuming the ones who only care about reaching a wide audience don't mind piracy a bit) requires selling lots of books. That'd seem to be an obvious point, except that a lot of publishers seem to think that they don't need to sell as many books, as long as they get a big enough profit on the ones they do sell. This is a good, or at least reasonable, approach for paper books, where each book has to be printed, bound, stored, shipped, displayed, and sold to a customer, and each of those steps involves resources that cost money and people, who probably want to be paid. The fewer pbooks you sell, the less you have to pay for all those steps. (Assuming, of course, that sales include everything that's printed. Which they don't, but that's a separate issue.) If publishers could sell a single book for $50,000, they wouldn't need to print 5000 copies of it and ship them all over the country.Ebooks don't have those costs. The marginal cost of an ebook sale is, not counting DRM, is pennies per book… if the hosting/sales platform is expensive to run. Everything else is a cost per-title; after the title sells X copies (where X covers the costs of creating and arrange for sales of the ebook), everything else is profit. That never happens with print books: every sale requires an outlay of 12%-30% (depending on which publisher you believe) of the cover price.
The issue shifts from "how high can we make the price and still convince customers to pay us, in order to cut down the marginal costs" to "how low can we make the price and still make a profit from our expected number of sales?"
Konrath thinks that the magic price-point is $2.99. TheNextWeb thinks it's between $3 and $10, with popularity of author playing a notable part. Teleread has some charts showing how it's not price, but price-plus-sales, that make for profit, and that there's a tipping point (in both directions) where a book makes less money than it could because it's at the wrong price point. Publishers imply that $8 ebooks will lose them money, which makes some of us wonder if Baen went bankrupt years ago and just forgot to tell anyone.
They insist that Konrath is a fluke, and so are the dozens of other self-published authors who're paying off their mortgages with $3 ebook sales.
I don't know if Konrath and others (Hocking, Larson, Kitt, etc.) are "flukes." Certainly, three dozen self-published authors out of the tens of thousands offering books for sale are not proof that it's a financially viable approach for most authors.
I do know that when I'm looking for something to read, I start by looking at freebies, and move on to ebooks that cost money, and I've never had to go higher than $6 to find something I know I'll thoroughly enjoy, and rarely higher than $3. Fiction ebooks priced about $6US are not on my radar. (Nonfiction's different. I've spent $30 on an RPG ebook.)
Why $6? Because Baen's maximum price for ebooks is $6, and I like a lot of Baen books. (And I'm poor; I grew up on secondhand, half-cover-price books.) For a lot of readers, the cap is $10, because they like mainstream bestsellers and don't care about DRM, and they can find bestseller ebooks for $10. But my impulse-buy level is $1-$3; I'll buy up to a $3 ebook based on a nice cover and interesting description; I'll only go up to $6 for authors I know or books that've been recommended by friends. Others have different ranges: $7 on a whim, $15 for books they've seen advertised on TV or have seen the movie of. Or only freebies, unless they've seen or heard something about a particular book, at which point they're willing to pay no more than $5 for it.
Authors need to find their customers' impulse-buy level, and their max price level, and find a way to sell books in that range. Publishers need to quit fearing that every ebook sold is a lost hardcover sale. Every ebook priced outside of the customer's range is, at best, money in someone else's pocket, and at worst, a temptation to piracy.
Convincing potential customers to change their price ranges is a lot harder than changing ebook prices, which should be bouncing all over the place. Authors and publishers should be struggling to find the sweet spot that maximizes the sales/profit ratio, not struggling to convince the public that the price they picked is what the customers should be paying.
Of course, it doesn't matter if the price is in the customer's range, if the book isn't available for purchase. Right now, the business assumption is that online sales of physical contents take place at the seller's warehouse, and are subject to those taxes and business arrangements. But sales of digital content are presumed to take place at the buyer's location. Or the buyer's ISP's location. Or the buyer's credit card's bank's location: A man in Australia is restricted from buying some ebooks from Amazon. Some of those books aren't available in his local shops, either. However, he can visit the United States and buy the physical books … but Amazon has no way to sell him a digital book when he's visiting the US.
The business contracts—not laws—that arranged these restrictions are perhaps understandable applications of copyright law and publishing contracts, but that doesn't make them less onerous to the customers. What they see is: I visit ebookstore, I find a book I like, I click "buy"—and get told, "No! Not for the likes of you!" Sometimes, this happens after several steps of shopping-cart hassles; the bookstore doesn't say "If your card isn't registered in the US, you can't use it for this book;" it just returns an error message instead of a receipt.
They don't care how complicated publishing contracts are; they don't care that buying the print version would indicate demand for the book in their country and maybe someone would buy the ebook distribution rights. Ebook stores that refuse to filter listings based on sales options come across as teasing, as mocking—deliberately showing off something the customer can't have.
At best, this results in the customer buying something else. At worst, they head off to the torrent sites, secure in the knowledge that they're not costing their favorite author any royalties. The author can't get royalties for sales that aren't permitted.
There's no easy way to turn these "pirates" into customers. The contracts that govern international sales are complex and varied, and changing this system would undermine a lot of IP-based business. It probably needs to be changed, and will … slowly. In the meantime, screaming at readers who got the only version available to them is probably not going to help future sales.
And it's unclear how "it wasn't available for sale, so I downloaded it" differs from "it's out of print, so I got it from a used book store." In both cases, the author gets a new reader who paid no royalties. Yes, the physical book can only have so many readers before it falls apart, necessitating a new sale … but if it's out of print, that new sale doesn't win any new royalties, either.
Charlie Stross pointed out, "Historically, only 25% of readers paid into the authors revenue stream. A 75% piracy rate may therefore be seen as a continuation of business as usual."
Digital sales might be able to change that percentage—by offering well-made ebooks, by letting the customer know what they're buying before purchase, by keeping prices reasonable, by making purchase convenient, by not insulting the customers. This is generic business 101: Quality. Price. Convenience. And don't call them thieves if you want to get money from them.
Commercial ebooks are still competing with free downloads. And the bottled water industry is competing with tap water. Authors and publishers have plenty of economic models to consider; they just have to figure out which ones can be applied to their craft.
The hardest part's already done: ebook pirates care about ebooks. They want authors to write more, and they know that means somebody has to pay those authors. Many of them would like to be part of that "somebody." They're invested in the ebook industry, opinionated and informed (sometimes even well-informed), and willing to explain their reasons at great length. Authors should take every "justification" offered for piracy as marketing research—this is what the commercial version isn't offering—and work to fix it. At the very least, you can count on the existence of other people who didn't pirate, but didn't buy the book either, for the same reasons.
You can't turn all the pirates into customers. You might not be able to turn any pirates into customers. But you can use pirates to find out how to get more customers.
That's what authors need: more ebook buyers. It doesn't matter how many free copies are floating around, legitimate or not; it matters how many people are buying, and why they're not. Find out why not. And fix whatever's standing in their way.
~ end ~
[1] Judge Gertner, in Sony v Tenenbaum:
… file sharing for the purposes of sampling music prior to purchase or space-shifting to store purchased music more efficiently might offer a compelling case for fair use. Likewise, a defendant who used the new file-sharing networks in the technological interregnum before digital media could be purchased legally, but who later shifted to paid outlets, might also be able to rely on the defense.
no subject
I need an icon with my Nook on it - this ipod is the best I have now.
no subject
no subject
I commented on a few, but couldn't keep up, and with no notifications, kept forgetting to go back & check if I had replies.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
I know for myself I don't hesitate to buy a 1 dollar ebook but or even necessarily a 4-6 dollar ebook but after 6 dollars I go and look to see if I can find a another version.
no subject
no subject
And thanks. :)
no subject
no subject
Publishing companies aren't interested in creating a healthy literary enviorment, but making a quick buck. They aren't looking for the next Ken Kesey, or the next Iris Murdoch, they're looking for the next Dan Brown and/or JK Rowling. They treat readers as "customers" who can be sold anything as long as it's properly marketed and wrapped, instead of (potentially intelligent) readers. Books, above all, are about ideas and spreading these ideas, education, and intellectual discourse. Sure, they can be fun and light, but even then, if nothing else, they contribute to feeding the readers literary passions just like an apple between meals won't satiate your huger, but will be welcome as a treat.
If the original poster is out to make the argument that if we (the readers) stop buying books fewer books will be written, I think he's wrong. Perhaps fewer "bad" books will be written. A "real" writer will write regardless of how much (or little) money s/he makes. And a writer will also write regardless of whether s/he ever gets published during his/her lifetime, or at all (just look at Emily Dickinson). By the by, Tolkien, who made a shitload of money for his publishers (among many other things), wrote for himself. Not for an "audience", "readership", or "customers". Same with Isak Dinesen, who while not making quite that much money for anyone, has been shortlisted for the Nobel prize in literature several times.
Interesting fact: even if all the writers would stop writing as of this moment, and no new books would be published from this day forward, the average reader would still have enough books to keep him/her occupied for the rest of several lifetimes. While it's wonderful to have new authors and new books to read, not having them would not mean the end of civilization as we know it, as long as people still read what has already been written. Actually, it wouldn't even mean the end of publishing: they're still making money off Plato and Shakespeare and they've been dead for centuries, and millennia, respectively.
What I think needs to happen is for everyone to start pushing for people to READ. Not to buy books, but read them. Buy them second-hand, download them, pirate them, get them from the library, friends, steal them. READ! Once people start reading the books, trust me, they'll also start buying them! And they'll probably have enough discernment by that time to buy the good ones, so perhaps we'll stop being flooded by bad books and poor writing hidden behind pretty covers.
PS. It also bears mentioning that the quality of books (as objects) has decreased considerably. I've books that are over 80 years old and are in better shape than what I bought 10 years ago (hardbacks). The paper is horrid, and the binding worse. If I buy books, I buy them because I want to keep them. As they sell them now, that has become more or less impossible.
no subject
Publishing companies aren't interested in creating a healthy literary enviorment
Agreed. Konrath says that publishers aren't in the literature business; they're in the paper-selling business. And Dean Wesley Smith points out that they treat books like produce--something that goes bad in a few weeks or months.
A "real" writer will write regardless of how much (or little) money s/he makes.
But even a "real" writer won't write as much if she has to shuffle papers in an office or push a broom or teach 9th-graders how to do quadratic equations all day. One of the reasons to pay authors for writing is to get them to do it instead of other jobs, or instead of some other jobs.
There are indeed plenty of great authors who've managed to become so by writing in the evenings, after their paying work for the day is done. But if there's no chance of payment for that, why distribute widely instead of just to a few friends? Especially, why distribute anything that's controversial?
And for myself, I often enjoy formulaic writing. I read mainstream romances and cliched fantasy novels with the same joy I used to put toward rewatching a favorite cartoon. I know by page 5 how it's going to end; I want to watch how *this* set of characters gets there. Remove payment, and the formulaic entertainment novels vanish.
Tolkien, who made a shitload of money for his publishers (among many other things), wrote for himself.
For someone who didn't care about "customers," his estate cracks down awfully hard on what they believe is piracy.
Mainly, though, I wasn't trying to imply that all authors are concerned with getting a customer base. (Although I think I can safely say that publishers do.) I was speaking to authors who *do* care about customers. Those who don't, and only want as extensive a readership as they can gain, won't care about ebook piracy.
What I think needs to happen is for everyone to start pushing for people to READ.
I agree. And I want publishers & authors to be aware that ebook pirates are part of their readers, that they've already passed the first great hurdle towards getting them to contribute to an economic system that supports authors. Pirates *love* what they download & exchange; nobody goes out of their way to get digital content they don't care about.
Getting people to read is the first step toward getting them to buy books (which is what keeps publishers in business, and allows authors to write instead of doing other things with their time), and the current publisher reactions to ebooks seems like they want to discourage reading altogether if it doesn't start with a price tag.
Once people start reading the books, trust me, they'll also start buying them!
Depends. If the free version is of passable quality, and the paid version is horrifically expensive, or hard to use, or requires giving up sensitive personal information, they may continue to bootleg instead of buying. If it's all three, "passable" quality drops considerably.
If I buy books, I buy them because I want to keep them. As they sell them now, that has become more or less impossible.
Commercial ebooks are worse. Sometimes they're riddle with typos (OCRos?) and formatting errors, and they aren't forward-compatible with new digital technology. They're expected to work through one, maybe two OS upgrades/reinstalls, and that's it. Publishers would love digital books to come with an expiration date in addition to all the other limitations on them. (And they've started it! HarperCollins is now selling library ebooks that can only be loaned out 26 times.)
no subject
And for myself, I often enjoy formulaic writing. I read mainstream romances and cliched fantasy novels with the same joy I used to put toward rewatching a favorite cartoon. I know by page 5 how it's going to end; I want to watch how *this* set of characters gets there. Remove payment, and the formulaic entertainment novels vanish.
This is an interesting point, and while I can definitely see the logic in it, I am not sure I completely agree. There are writers out there who genuinely enjoy writing these books so I don't think they're going to vanish. However, I do believe their quality might increase on the whole. There is, for example, a marked difference in "Star Trek" books written by authors who love/know the universe, and authors who are commissioned to write a novel. Franchises are a whole different can of worms, obviously, but I don't think that "fun" or "light" books would disappear. :)
And yes, writers might write less if they also had to work during the day flipping burgers or driving taxi-cabs, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing. We might get fewer books, but of better quality, perhaps. Who knows... Either way, if a writers wants to write, s/he will. And if they want to share their work, they might still send it out to publishers even if they are aware of the fact that they might not become millionaires overnight. I am also not sure they should... there are, after all, plenty of writers whose work has markedly changed after they became well known.
Well, Tolkien's estate isn't Tolkien. He had been writing since the late 1910s, showing his work to few people, and later sharing with his son Christopher and the Inklings. He did publish academic material in the mean time, but the books that made him famous were not initially meant for "public consumption". :) Tolkien did have a bone to pick with Ace Books over "piracy" (they claimed the book was not protected by copyright in the US) back in the early 60's, however, his concern wasn't the same publishers have now: Ace Books was making money (off the readers and fans) by selling printed copies of "The Lord of the Rings" and not paying royalties to either him, or his publishers. Also, the copies they were selling were not completely accurate. Not that I don't agree with your point, am just saying. :)
Pirates *love* what they download & exchange; nobody goes out of their way to get digital content they don't care about.
I could not agree more with that statement!
Depends. If the free version is of passable quality, and the paid version is horrifically expensive, or hard to use, or requires giving up sensitive personal information, they may continue to bootleg instead of buying. If it's all three, "passable" quality drops considerably.
They might not buy a paper-based version of a book they already own electronically (pirated or otherwise), but the chances of someone who is an avid reader entering a bookstore on a whim while in the mall or out on a stroll in the city increase. Ditto to impulse purchases online, for it is often convenient and easier to buy a book for $9.99 (or, whatever) than to spend three hours searching for it online, getting your computer infected with viruses (this happens often, just try to google, I don't know, something by Michael Ondaatje and 99% of the hits you'll get are bullshit). This doesn't happen, however, if "customers" remain just that: they need to be readers first, and READING is not encouraged, buying books is.
All this and the above is, as I have previously stated, not in disagreement with the original post. I am trying however to look at this from a reader's point of view, or, rather, if you will, of someone who enjoys literature and the world of ideas, not "products", and also of someone who has a profound mistrust of modern publishing, such as it is. I would be happy if anyone cared enough to make digital content available at decent prices, and at a good quality. In the current climate, I don't think that will happen, though. Not unless the publishing crisis becomes so serious they need a complete paradigm shift in order to survive. Right now, they're still making enough money to "afford" running things the way they want to.
The expiration date on library books is absolutely appalling. I have just recently read about it and thought it was a joke.
no subject
I think it's getting there. I don't think it'll happen nearly as soon as some people predict; a lot of the technorati have forgotten that the vast majority of people in the world don't have computers, much less an interest in ebooks. But they are facing big problems--the big-box bookstores have squeezed out the mom&pop stores, and Amazon is squeezing out the big boxes; there may not be a bookstore to wander into and buy a book on a whim in 10 years.
The Big 6 publishers are working *frantically* hard to sustain a business model that's always been fraught with problems (bookstore returns are a huge drain on the industry), because it's at least been a fairly stable model. It's now become unstable, and they're trying to prop it up instead of looking at other options--because all the other options are new & untested, and it's certain that some of them will fail horribly. And they don't even know how to evaluate them; for the last century, publishers' customers have been distributors, not bookstores, not readers; they have no idea how to take online individual-reader data and turn that into a sales model.
I have sympathies for them, and for the authors who are stuck with them. The sympathies don't extend as far as handing them money for something I don't want, though; DRM'd ebooks are not going to save them.
----
Normally, I write as a reader, as someone who loves books & wants every day to contain an hour or two of leisure reading. I want access to MOAR BOOX, and I can barely tolerate paper anymore; I read constantly on my Sony PRS-505. And since most of my paper reading was books that never got royalties to the authors, I didn't consider it a problem that much of my digital reading never got royalties to the authors.
I bought a lot of used books, and got a lot of loans from friends, and went to a lot of $5/bag-o-books rummage sales. The ebook equivalent is... promotional freebies, and unauthorized downloads. And I was absolutely baffled that so many authors and publishers *scream* about how *evil* these things are--not about whether or not they're losing sales (they yell about that too, but most grudgingly acknowledge that no, not all those downloads are lost sales), but like it's immoral to read without paying royalties. Like the majority of reading I did in my childhood was some kind of depraved idea-theft, because I spent money at yard sales and used bookstores, and friends & I shared books.
Mentioning this directly to most modern authors, esp. ebook authors, hits a blank wall of confusion. I think that, before the last few years of ebook publishing, I'd never heard an author say, "if you can't or won't pay full price for my books, don't read them."
I had several jaw-dropping moments of, "did you really just tell people who like your writing to go away & read something else?" I don't know if they're under the impression that paying fans spring up spontaneously, with no history of reading anything they didn't pay for. Or that there are so *few* books these days, so *little* digital content available, that when they do have spare money, that author's name will be the one that snaps into their heads.
I don't get it. This was part of a set of several posts I've made trying to work through that idea. This one was aimed at authors and publishers, trying to remind them that it's a lot easier to get fans to buy stuff, than to convince random people-who-buy-stuff to become fans.
no subject
As things, are, I fear we are being drowned in a sea of irrelevance and cannot see the forrest for the trees. There are too many books on the market that shouldn't be there, pushed on an ignorant "customer" base that can't tell Virginia Woolf from Tom Wolfe and neither of the two from Gene Wolfe, will buy whatever is on a "bestseller list" then delude themselves into thinking they are "readers" because they're up to date on the latest Dan Brown novel. Not dissing Dan Brown (although I dislike his writing profoundly), just saying that the publishing industry could definitely use a shake-up, because right now they are into the business of miseducating people, distracting them from the relevant issues, and, at best, entertaining them. Then again, an ignorant and trivia starved public is easier to manipulate into buying anything offered than an educated one, and perhaps both Orwell and Bradbury have been wrong all along, and Huxley right, and books don't have to be burned, banned, or censored: there just have to be enough bad/irrelevant ones published and marketed well and people won't be able to tell the difference anymore. :/
I apologize for the rant. I feel rather strongly about this, as you can see.
Paolo Coelho said that he is happier when people read his books than when they buy them. He encourages readers to give the books away to friends, to lend them and make gifts of them, to buy second hand, loan from libraries. I have heard Neil Gaiman say similar things. They simply want people to READ. Basically, anything. Obviously, these authors might not be brilliant examples, as they are both popular and fairly well off, but neither compares to JK Rowling (money-wise) for example, and I haven't heard HER say anything similar. She might have, and if she had, I take that back, still, I think the second half of your reply exemplifies what I am trying to say regardless. I gather it depends on the author, as they are people too, and it's difficult (and unfair) to generalize. Still, then "weeding" of the general authorial population wouldn't bother me tremendously. They'll adapt, or they'll die. It's that easy. Books and ideas (good ones as well as bad ones) will never stop existing though, regardless of the medium they'll be expressed in, and that I find encouraging.
I have only recently (yesterday) discovered this community, and I haven't had the opportunity to look through all the posts yet. This one caught my eye, and I've replied to it. Perhaps much of what I have said (and by which I stand on the whole) is slightly out of place within the general context of what you have been trying to say over several posts.
I prefer paper-bound books to digital ones, but seeing that I am limited in means (I make less than $200 a month) and some of the books/authors I am interested in have not been translated into my language or made available here (I live in Eastern Europe), I have invested in a Kindle and have found the experience gratifying. I feel no worse downloading a book I want from Rapidshare than I would from taking it out of the library, to be honest. If I had the means, I would buy them (I own well over 1500 paper-bound books, in 6 languages), but I simply cannot. Not all of them, anyway.
no subject
I agree that the book marketplace is flooded with low-quality crap. The ebook marketplace, even moreso. The number of people who think that access to the internet has turned them into pro-quality writers because they can get their words to show up on someone else's screen is just staggering.
I don't mind the idea of gatekeepers or filters, but I certainly don't trust traditional publishers to decide what is, and is not, worth reading & remembering.
I suspect part of the problem is the whole history of literature--it was originally an upper-class activity, limited to those with extensive education, resources & leisure time. As it gradually was extended to the poor, the upper classes were shocked that they wanted books about, well, lives like theirs: books that addressed issues in ways that made sense to them. Which meant, in addition to impoverished and minority protagonists, low-brow humour, storylines that could be absorbed by exhausted and stressed readers, and language that was understandable by people without much formal education.
The war between "quality literature" and "mass-produced boilerplate schlock" has been going on for a long time, and isn't likely to go away. Some of the mass-produced schlock is occasionally stunningly good... but for the most part, it's cheap entertainment for people who have no interest in deep thinking. I don't think that's bad; I'd just like more effective ways of telling them apart. (I like Harlequin/Mills & Boon romances. At no point do I think they're "literature," though. They're the textual equivalent of fuzzy bunny slippers... comfy and warm for around the house. I don't go to work in fuzzy slippers, and I don't try to claim formula-driven romances are ageless, boundary-stretching art.)
The good news about ebooks is that the mass-produced schlock has a chance to find its niche and its customers without having to convince huge publishing corporations that they're writing fine literature for the ages. And the fine literature has the ability to get to people who would never have been able to afford a leatherbound special edition, or who couldn't read it because their eyes just won't put up with 850 pages of 8-pt text.
I haven't had the opportunity to look through all the posts yet.
A lot of my previous posts are scattered in my journal or at Mobileread. A couple of months ago, there was a big multijournal rant explosion about ebooks; it started when a fan twittered an author saying "your book isn't sold as an ebook in Australia, so I downloaded it from a torrent & I loved it." And the author, and several other authors, went off on long rants about people "stealing" from them, by reading books they hadn't paid for.
They seemed to, um, miss the point that most of us grew up reading books we hadn't paid for. Nobody got to love books by buying them full-price new.
no subject
I think this argument is somewhat undermined by fanfic. I mean, yes, fandom over all is a pretty small part of the population, but it's still a bit wider than a few friends and mostly people do it for "free" (although here you get into the whole social currency issue with doing it for feedback etc). But yeah, I don't do a lot of art myself any more because it's just not as rewarding (emotionally or financially) as spending my time with my husband and dog.
no subject
Even huge, HUGE BNFs are essentially distributing to "a few friends." (Okay, many "friends." A few thousand readers, in some cases.) At slash cons, some of us have done some informal checking, and we can't name 5 fanfic authors from different fandoms who are known to a majority in all those fandoms. (The only name known almost universally is Cassie Claire.)
I don't do a lot of art myself any more because it's just not as rewarding (emotionally or financially) as spending my time with my husband and dog.
Yep. Lots of former fanfic authors who have stopped or mostly stopped writing because it became more work than it was worth. Payment for creative works--whether that's cash or squee--is an important part of Getting More Stuff Made.