annoyedInstead, I want to talk about illegal resales.
Yesterday afternoon, some bold soul wandering the internet jungles encountered a site that looked too good to be true: a private seller offering huge numbers of ebooks, some by extremely popular authors, for two dollars each, or ten for ten. That's, like, amazing! That's incredible! And best of all, that's totally against the law! This individual told a few authors, who told a few more, who told a few more, and then the wrath of the internet came down upon that seller's head, since people don't take kindly to being stolen from. The sales page was taken down. The seller changed the name on her twitter. All done, right?
Not quite.
First, there's the matter of the seller herself. She's not going to be named, because I don't play that kind of game, but I think it's important to note that she justified her actions by saying that she was trying to make money to pay for her kidney transplant medications. This? Is a sad story. It may even be a true story. It's also the kind of thing that's sort of calculated to make people back off and not want to be the bad guy by yelling at the woman who's just trying to afford her drugs, so she doesn't die. To this I say...
I am so very, very sorry that people are ill. I hate that we live in a country without medical care for everyone. It's a huge, scary, horrible issue. But I can't sit back and let people profit off my work because they're sick. There are a lot of sick people, and sometimes, I'm one of them. If I said "oh, it's okay because you're sick," I'd wind up in a world of trouble. And Alice would be dead, since only being paid for my work enabled me to pay for her extremely expensive, extremely unexpected vet bill last year.
Second, I can almost understand people who put things up for free. Yes, they're stealing, and no, I don't condone it, but they're not trying to profit off someone else's property. They're not taking cookies out of the back of a bakery and selling them for half-price at a food truck down the street, they're giving out cookies for free. One of the big "you're over-simplifying, you're not seeing the big picture" arguments in the whole book piracy discussion is "not every download is a sale." Well, if someone is selling my books, independent of my publisher, every download is a sale, and it's a sale I'm not getting paid for.
People like getting things for less money. It's the natural way of mankind. It's why we clip coupons, shop at Ross, and wear last year's sweaters. But there's legitimate discounting, and there's stealing, and sadly, it can be hard to tell them apart.
Finally, and most troubling to me, this represents a snapshot of the biggest problem I see coming down the pike, as ebooks become a bigger and bigger percentage of the books sold: there is no ebook secondary market.
I love used bookstores. I exist because of used bookstores. In the last month, I have been to three Half-Price Books, two independent used bookstores, and a library book sale. When I was a kid, eighty percent of my books came from these places. Without the secondary market, I wouldn't have been able to read the way I did, and I would have grown up to be someone very different. I am worried about the smart, poor kids of today, and I can easily see more and more sites like this cropping up as people try to "resell" things that can't actually be resold.
I don't know that there's a solution. I'm worried, and I'm scared for what comes next. But this pirate site, at least, came down.
Please, remember that there's no secondary ebook market, and that if a price seems too good to be true, unless it's a promotion offered directly by a publisher...
...it probably isn't legit.
ETA: Please stop trying to make this a discussion about piracy. As noted above, that is not this post. We are treading old ground, and I do not have the energy or time to moderate this conversation right now.
← Ctrl ← Alt
Ctrl → Alt →
It is the business of the future to be dangerous
September 15 2011, 08:26:44 UTC 5 years ago
I think I have lost access to all the (few) DRMed things I have bought - because I can't be bothered to jump through hoops when I replace an old piece of hardware. It is a long time since I bought anything that was DRMed; instead I will buy the physical media. This may not be environmentally sound, but it is where we are at present.
On the one hand, since the invention of printing, and sheet music, every new invention was going to bankrupt the artists and specially those whose business it was to disseminate the art for profit. At each stage, the previous incident was a false alarm - no, of course sheet music didn't kill music creation, what were we thinking? but it is different this time. The gramophone is the end for us.
I'd look at this from the point of view that Malthus was logically correct in concept but wrong about the details, including timescale. One day it may be different, and this may be the time, but on balance I think (and hope) that this time there will eventually be found a way to make it all work tolerably for the people involved, something that is obvious in retrospect, and completely opaque beforehand.
Don't forget, in the late '70s/early '80s home taping killed the music industry. It must be true, they told us so at the time. The temporary low single digit downturn in sales in the UK had nothing to do with the severe recession, nor yet the double digit inflation, no, it was home taping that was the culprit.
Dishonest people have always been with us, and I won't comment further on that aspect save to say that it would be better if it were not so, and the day that happens I expect to observe porcine aviation. If only the human race were not so deeply flawed...
Re: It is the business of the future to be dangerous
September 15 2011, 17:46:12 UTC 5 years ago
September 15 2011, 16:54:00 UTC 5 years ago
I think that model has a lot of potential. Pay X amount and read X many books a week, checking out one at a time with expirations on the files. The concept for this is already there. Barnes & Noble has a "Lend Me" function for some books. Public libraries in some places are already looking into lending ebooks.
A Netflix type service, I think, would allow wider readership for cheap/free with the potential for people to purchase as well. Authors/Publishers would still get money and potentially a higher income than they would before. Because the books would expire, any person wanting a permanent copy would still have to go out and purchase it somehow.
I think digital content is here to stay and harsher regulation is only going to hurt the situation. I think our producers (not creators) need to stop being afraid of piracy and digital content and instead look for creative solutions to make money from digital content and to play to its strengths. I suspect licensing rights are the primary issue holding up things like a Netflix or Hulu type service. Although, now that I've said this, I keep getting images of reading an ebook and then having a full page ad pop up in between chapter breaks like Hulu commercials or magazines.
September 15 2011, 17:41:50 UTC 5 years ago
1. This explicitly was not a post about piracy; it was a post about theft. I've been asking and asking, but please stop trying to make this a discussion about piracy.
2. Books ARE different than other media. I have watched my favorite movies upwards of fifty times, each. I have listened to my favorite songs hundreds of times. I have only read my favorite books a few dozen times, and I'm rare in that I'm a re-reader. The lack of replay modifies the medium.
It's big and it's complicated, and it's not getting solved here.
September 16 2011, 17:20:46 UTC 5 years ago
Interestingly, I am more likely to re-read a book than re-watch a movie, with few exceptions. I am more likely to read a book that watch a movie for a first go-round, so maybe the percentage of times that I'll want to re-use it might be the same with just the scale being different. If I've watched a movie more times than I've read a book, it's only because a movie takes two hours (ish) and a book takes all day (ish).
I'm not sure I understand "the lack of replay modifies the medium". With regards to a secondary market, a book is exactly the same as a CD/DVD, isn't it? You bought it, subject to a non-commercial license, and can keep and re-use (re-watch, reread, re-listen) as often as you like, forever or until the physical media fail. You can transfer both the media and the license exactly once (sell the book to your local used bookstore, sell the CD/DVD to whoever buys used DVDs* - that is the definition of a secondary market), and you can't sell copies, or keep copies if you sell the original**. Neither item is consumed by use (watching listening reading or allowing a cat to sleep on it).
*Who buys used DVDs? I have way too many really bad discount rack movies that I'd like to get rid of.
**In some cases you're allowed to make copies, either for backup or to allow you to actually use the content (as in importing a CD into tunes to put it on your pod). Any discussion of keeping those copies is inherently a piracy discussion, and so not for this thread.
September 17 2011, 03:58:19 UTC 5 years ago
Where do you live, geographically speaking?
September 17 2011, 14:40:10 UTC 5 years ago
I am in Beautiful, Scenic(*), Saint Louis Missouri. If you're ever here it would be my great honor to feed and entertain you, should you be in need of such, and find me an acceptable companion... I am also available as Chauffeur and Bodyguard, should either be desired, and can provide a loaner machete if air travel prohibits bringing your own. What are the rules for bringing a machete on a commercial flight? If anyone knows it's you. :)
The secondary market is where I take chances. If I see a book and can't decide if it's going to suck or not (and it's not by someone I know, for varying degrees of "know"), I'll pass in a full price bookstore but buy used (most things I want to read the StLouis library system doesn't want to buy). If I buy used and it doesn't suck, I will seek out the author's other titles in the primary market and buy them there. If it does suck, I shelve it on a back row somewhere so it can be insulation, or give it to someone I don't like.
I really AM an odd book reader, and my family and I are odd book buyers as well. When a book comes out that more than one of us wants to read, it is often true that we'll want to read it simultaneously. That is facilitated by buying both a "tree" version, and a "bits" version (Kindle) both on the release day. I retain better hearing than reading, and so any book I know I'm going to want to reread I also buy in Audiobook format, if it exists. As a forexample, eighteen inches behind my head is a paper copy of every book you've published to date, except for One Salt Sea, which is in our daughter's room being read (technically, right now it's being slept next to). Hanging on the back of my desk chair upstairs is my fancy man-purse in which is (Among other things) my Kindle, containing digital copies of all of the same books, plus the "Ur-Bar Anthology", the title of which I cannot remember right now. Last, in the iTunes library on the computer I'm typing on is the Audible-format audiobook version of all of them that exist in that format to date. I buy several authors(**) this way, though in some cases it takes some work to track everything down or gets expensive when they've published 30+books, but one does what one can. About the only thing I don't do is go out of my way to buy both paperback and hardback copies of the same book (I do prefer to go hardback when possible, though). If I could only have one format per title, I'd buy almost all Kindle books on account of there's no more room for paper books here. Our livingroom contains one (double stacked on every shelf and some on top as well) bookcase per seating surface. In our dining room, the ratio of overfilled bookcases to chairs goes to 1.5:1, with the windosill also lined across during closed window seasons.
(*)State law requires me to describe it thus, otherwise I have to pronounce it S'nLouie Missourah and admit that it's just a town, much like any other.
(**) Elizabeth Bear, Cat Valente, Jim Butcher, Terry Pratchett, Lois Bujold, CJ Cherryh, Neil Gaiman ...
September 17 2011, 19:19:14 UTC 5 years ago
September 15 2011, 22:40:09 UTC 5 years ago
1) Access for those without tech.
2) Profit (or, possibly a less charged word) compensation for creators
3) Portability (for libraries and friend-loans)
4) Ownership (including transfers, ie. resale)
It seems to me that this is EXACTLY the sort of problem that Government is here to solve. How about a standard of ownership…Wait, first let’s establish levels…A) Complete ownership of ONE copy of ALL editions of a work (For example’s sake, I’m using “An Artificial Night,” referred to as AAN.), this gets you a first edition (hardcover, if that’s the first, kept in print for the LIFE of the work, or as long as folks have demand for level A, but remember, the subsequent printings do have different numbers, and will be priced according to demand), the ebook, and audiobook, B)ebook and audiobook (or any combination of the editions)…down to only one option, ie. C)ebook only. Everyone from Barnes & Noble, down to Borderlands could have licenses to sell ownership (some even contracting among themselves…I mean, c’mon, if Borderlands offers a SIGNED copy of AAN combined with Google’s ebook AND the audiobook, who wouldn’t go for it?)
Ownership could be registered in a single “official” database, regardless of which distributor it was bought from. Licensed playing devices would all recognize ownership. There would be NO NEED to “copy” for different devices/computers because the ownership comes with the person/family.
Distributors would contract with publishers, regulated by the Government, with a system allowing rights to be sold, ie. I bought the “Premium” package ten years ago, but, while I’d never part with my foil-embossed copy of AAN, I no longer need the epub rights, so I sell those for market value…or the “audio” portion, etc. In my estimation, ebook values would drop substantially, while hardcopy books would maintain some value…more than now, as the option of a “cheap read” by purchasing ebooks would probably shrink print runs.
This system, ideally, would come with the possibility of syncing your devices (or one device, with different “playback” options) so that you can go from listening to AAN while running (or, from my Bay Area days, if the Muni driver is experiencing a violent day) to reading an ebook on the couch and know exactly where you are in the other format. Apple has already made price control for ebooks a reality. This system would allow different publishers or distributors to offer “deals.” It would also offer power to the consumer. I want the Platinum package for Seanan’s books, but a new author, I’ll probably just try the e-option...but, HEY, if I come late to the McGuire camp, and I read “Late Eclipses” and am blown away, I can “upgrade” and get the whole package, INCLUDING the latest hardcopy of the text AND audio!
I’m sure that there’ll still be hacking, and piracy. Hell, 25 years ago it was selling coverless books. That is part of the game and should be prosecuted. What I’m trying to do is suggest a system to bridge what we can do and what we should do. The experts need to stop the folks doing what we shouldn’t do.
September 17 2011, 04:08:36 UTC 5 years ago
September 15 2011, 23:09:34 UTC 5 years ago
September 17 2011, 04:08:11 UTC 5 years ago
September 16 2011, 00:53:15 UTC 5 years ago
I hadn't thought about used book stores and the issues involved for readers, especially younger ones. I don't have a solution either, but I really hope things will work out in a positive manner.
Hopefully with everybody working together like they did this time it'll be harder and harder for these pirate sites to maintain.
September 17 2011, 04:07:56 UTC 5 years ago
September 16 2011, 16:47:58 UTC 5 years ago
No, on second thought, if I had an ebook in my library that was of no further interest to me (something too bad to even keep around), I'd have deleted it long before some crazy person could come asking me for it.
On third thought, I am an IT nerd so I've seen this a thousand times with software and an ebook is just software, really, so it's a resolved question with me. You can't generally resell bits, and you certainly can't buy them once and sell copies!
September 17 2011, 04:01:13 UTC 5 years ago
September 18 2011, 06:52:21 UTC 5 years ago
I earnestly hope though, that however things shake out culturally over use rights, that a good measure of the wonder of a shared experience of story and of continuity and history will persist. I'm one of those people who reads Terms of Use and License Agreements for e-books, and some of them interfere greatly. I've loved reading since I was two, in large part because the people around me did. My experience of a lot of stories was colored by the fact that these books were the ones my Dad bought when they were a dime in the Chicago second hand stores when he got his first job, or that my Mom brought over from when she moved here, or that someone just plain loved, and they read it with me, or to me, and then discussed it, situated it in my life. The idea that if I were to buy a story in e-book form I would not only not be allowed to read it to my potential offspring (because I've essentially given my word not to share it when I bought it, forget the DRM issues), but that they wouldn't be able to read it together, and ultimately that I wouldn't be able to leave it to them in my will, pains my heart. Stories set down are meant to be shared, but the model that I've seen in e-books seems to be that reading is a solitary thing. If I understand correctly, in some of the terms I've seen, if two people are reading the same story on a shared reader, each person must have a separate personal copy of it that the other is not allowed to see, which makes reading together somewhat difficult.
September 18 2011, 16:06:54 UTC 5 years ago
← Ctrl ← Alt
Ctrl → Alt →