Digital piracy hits the e-book industry (CNN.com)

[Jon Loomis]

(CNN) -- When Dan Brown's blockbuster novel "The Lost Symbol" hit stores in September, it may have offered a peek at the future of bookselling.

On Amazon.com, the book sold more digital copies for the Kindle e-reader in its first few days than hardback editions. This was seen as something of a paradigm shift in the publishing industry, but it also may have come at a cost.

Less than 24 hours after its release, pirated digital copies of the novel were found on file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent. Within days, it had been downloaded for free more than 100,000 times.

Digital piracy, long confined to music and movies, is spreading to books. And as electronic reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble's Nook, smartphones and Apple's much-anticipated "tablet" boost demand for e-books, experts say the problem may only get worse.

More at the link: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/01/ebook.piracy/index.html

Nobody could have predicted this would happen...

[Jon Loomis]

Sure, people have been pirating books electronically for years, but two things are different now. First, even a couple of years ago there was no particularly user-sexy platform for ebooks: you could download them, but you had to read them on your PC or laptop, which hardly anyone really wanted to do. Second, even a year ago ebooks weren't really a mass-culture thing; now, with the rise of the Kindle and the big industry/media push ebooks are getting, they are definitely a thing. It's all about scale: a few thousand wankers on the internet downloading free copies of The Stand isn't really going to hurt Stephen King. A few million downloads are a different story: then he's pretty much out of business. I'd be worried, too, if I was King--but I'd be more worried if I was King's publisher.

[John McFetridge]

If you're right that books are now a mass-culture thing and that it's a different thing than it was before and the scale is different then likely new rules will have to apply, adjustments made, etc..

One thing that really sets books apart from music or even movies and TV shows is the number of those things each person can consum in a year, or a month or a day. Even if they're free, not many people read more than a couple dozen books a year but most people can listen to a couple dozen songs a day or watch three or four hours of TV/movies a day.

So, publishers should be able to make the adjustments, especially for the big, big-sellers. If the demand is there certainly arrangements can be made.

Disney is now experimenting with a subscription service. For a monthly fee people will get online access to everything Disney - movies, music, TV shows and even books. I have mixed feelings about subscription services, but it does seem to be the future. Possibly even for publishers.

[I. J. Parker]

This is not entirely new. We used to have book club memberships by subscription. This sort of thing could easily be revived for the publisher's own imprints. What it might mean is that publishers would think more in terms of genre-bundling in the future. I don't see thos sort of thing helping non-fiction imprints, but it might keep fiction alive.

On the other hand, publishers aren't really very inventive about marketing, are they?

[John McFetridge]

Yes, it's really just a electronic book-of-the-month club.

When the price of an e-reader gets below a hundred dollars a lot of things become possible.

I would expect some publisher to start a subscription service and give away a free e-reader when you sign up for two years worth of books - one a month.

I should give this idea to Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime - imagine what cool looking covers he'd come up with for the e-readers. I could see lots of other publishers that

Of course, it will likely be Harlequin that does it first, or maybe even something Amazon will do if these other e-readers do become real competition.

[Dana King]

Someone is doing this already with hardcovers, selling subscriptions to all the books the publisher puts out. I don't remember who off the top of my head--it might be the new venture Allison Jansen is working on.

[John Dishon]

There's still no real evidence yet though. You're just assuming that only a few thousand have pirated The Stand. The number could be much higher, and could have been for years. No one knows the figures for that.

The biggest problem, though, is you're still equating a download with a lost sale. They're not equal. So even if a million people download a book, we have no way of knowing just how much impact that is having on the books sales. Maybe half of those million would never have bought it to begin with. Maybe on 10%. Who knows?

It's too soon to fly into panic mode.

Also, you always refer to the demise of the music industry (referring to a different comment in this thread), but the music industry is still there. What's fallen? Which artists are not making music anymore because they can't make enough money to do it? Maybe some small time musicians who were never making it to begin with. I haven't heard of any major record companies folding either. Yeah, CD sales are down. So are cassette sales. Cassette tapes aren't the preferred format anymore, and neither are CDs. Digital downloads have taken over. Touring has always been the money maker for musicians anyway, so to see how the industry is doing, I would put more stock in touring sales than CD sales.

[Jon Loomis]

you always refer to the demise of the music industry

No, I don't. I'm always careful to differentiate the music industry from the recording industry. If you don't believe that the recording industry is hurting, take a look at this seminal Rolling Stone article from 2007:

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/15137581/the_record_industry...

There's little doubt, if you actually look at the numbers, that the recording industry is in dire straits, largely because of illegal downloading and the recording industry's abject failure to respond appropriately when they had the chance.

[EDWARD C MORGAN]

Interesting. This thread has kind of covered music and books. Talking about changes in the music industry. A band called Silversun Pickups was the first band in 11 years from an independent label to hit number 1 on billboard.

I'd be curious to know, being from an independent label, how they got the word out -- I hear them sometimes on one of the alternative radio stations on sirius satellite.

[minervaK]

I assume that last line is ironic...

[Mike Dennis]

A few months back, I posted a blog on my website about this topic called "Publishing and the Record Business", and now, seeing the animated exchange on this forum, I decided to post another blog today on the same subject.

The publishing business is a latter-day plantation system which has outlived its usefulness. I'm pretty certain that, as I write this, there are people in New York trying to put together a viable business model that will carry them through this period of digitalization. This will undoubtedly lead to a certain amount of decentralization in the business, and New York had better be ready to accept it. No longer will the majority of authors live in the outbuildings of the "big house" of their respective Big Apple publishers.

Yes, there's digital piracy of books, and yes, it's going to get worse before it gets better. And there's really nothing any of us can do about it, except maybe quit writing so none of our stuff gets pirated. But I don't really see that happening.

The real future of publishing, though, does lie in our hands. With the onset of the digital revolution, more and more writers are being published today than ever before. And this number will only increase. These are writers, who just a few years ago would've stood little chance of publication, who are now, thanks to eBooks, eReaders, and POD technology, earning money from their art.

This same type of convulsion occurred in the movie business in the 1950s, when television destroyed the studios' plantation system. The studios today bear no resemblance at all to those of the first half of the 20th century, but they're making money. And plenty of it. Because they learned how to adapt. More and more people are making smaller, independent movies today, where they would've been shut out sixty years ago by the studio cartel.

It's where we're all headed. We may as well enjoy the ride.

[minervaK]

The publishing business is a latter-day plantation system which has outlived its usefulness.

Mike, I am totally quoting you on this one, whenever and wherever I get the chance...

[Bob]

"The real future of publishing, though, does lie in our hands. With the onset of the digital revolution, more and more writers are being published today than ever before. And this number will only increase. These are writers, who just a few years ago would've stood little chance of publication, who are now, thanks to eBooks, eReaders, and POD technology, earning money from their art."

Yes they do earn money from their art, BUT, I spend more on soda pop in a day than they earn each quarter.

Ebooks = piracy = reduced revenues for writers to the point that being an author will be a hobby not an occupation. Do the math ... Ebooks offered at 99 cents by apple return 60 cents net to the publisher. The publishers are squeezing the authors to 10% of net on digital sales. That's 6 cents per sale. An average book sells 10,000 copies which equates to $600, less costs, for a year's work. No matter how you look at it, push the percentage to RH 20% and push the digital sale to $6, it's still slave labour for writers.