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 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