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.
September 15 2011, 06:46:42 UTC 5 years ago
Having said that however, this kind of thing will happen and in fact has been happening since St Finian sued St Columba in 561 AD. Until the copyright act of 1891 extended protection to foreigners many US publishers made a living by publishing pirated copies of British authors like Dickens and Sir Walter Scott and Conan Doyle.
The problem for you and other authors is how to make a living in a world in which this does happen. How to use free stuff to help sell stuff. My impression, for what it is worth, is that you are already doing this - providing free stuff on your blog which is under your control and which provides a something extra of real value to your fans which also works as a taster to those who don't know you and an attractive alternative to those who would otherwise go looking for unlicensed stuff. I hope it is working for you as I think you are one of the most original SFF authors on the scene today and I'm looking forward to reading lots more of your stuff over the coming decades.
On the future I think that maybe we are looking at different timescales. I know how much the world has changed over my lifetime and I don't see the pace of change slowing down. Imagine twenty years from now!
I am shocked at your picture of the US. Is it really that bad? Is there really anyone in the US who can't afford a TV set? There must be millions of old sets being dumped every year which no thief would be interested in. Computers too. What hardware will be in the goodwill stores in ten years time?
If unlimited WiFi is available for the price of a cup of coffee today then how much cheaper will it be in ten years time? In twenty years time?
I do agree with you that this future is not guaranteed. I do what little I can to help bring it about and hope for the best.
And I love you dearly too. Be well, live long, write lots, and prosper.
September 15 2011, 15:25:00 UTC 5 years ago
And then there are the places where there is no internet. I live in a state that has one of the most important fiber-optic trunks on the continent, and yet there are broad, broad swathes of populated area that has no internet connection. There are people who are still using the old AOL dialup discs, if they're even using that. There is no DSL; there is no fiber. VTEL is rolling out blanket LTE within the next 10 years, but even that will cost money. If you're barely able to pay your electric bill, even $25/mo for internet is going to be something that simply doesn't happen.
And my state is not the only one in this position. There are a LOT of places in the US that simply do not have internet access save for dialup, at any price. Blanket LTE or WiMax won't be happening unless someone spends on the infrastructure. And if the rest of the country gets gigabit ethernet, what happens to the parts of the country that don't have that infrastructure? You might say, "Oh, use cheap dialup," but what happens when dialup goes away? And heck, what happens NOW, when dialup is already so slow as to make it virtually impossible to download things - and downloading books is what we're talking about here.
eBooks aren't the answer. We need paper books and libraries still, for exactly the reasons our kind hostess pointed out - we need ways for those who can't afford expensive hardware to still be able to read, to discover.
The barrier to entry in the Digital Age isn't dropping; there's used hardware, but it rarely ends up in Goodwill, and people often have much more important things to be spending their money on. Beyond that, as technology progresses, you'll need higher-end hardware and connections to even ride the coattails of progress. Upgrades like that just aren't in the budget for so many people.