David Flanagan (JavaScript Definitive Guide author) on piracy | Hacker News Reader

David Flanagan (JavaScript Definitive Guide author) on piracy

davidflanagan.com

58 pointstelemachos30 comments

What I found in this article: unrealistic suggestion that Google should decide which page on the internet contains or doesn't contain copyrighted material.

What I didn't find:

1. A single piece of data, even of the anecdotal variety, that piracy is responsible for his declining royalties. By his own admission: he doesn't know and there are other trends that might explain decline in print sales.

2. A description of how he tried to find new ways of making money in the world of declining dead-trees sales.

I've bought several technical, self-published books as PDFs. I believe some people (e.g. HN regular Amy Hoy) make decent money doing that. Has the author tried that? No.

I bough 30+ books on my kindle. Did the author try to self-publish on kindle in order to get higher royalties (70% vs., say, 15% from print) hence more revenue (even with lower price)? No.

His books would be perfect for such an experiment because he already has an audience thanks to 4 popular books he wrote in the past.

Also missing is the fact, pointed out in one of the comments to his post, that Google already filters suggestions:

http://torrentfreak.com/google-starts-censoring-bittorrent-r...

Essentially every page on the internet contains copyrighted material. Which pages contain copyright infringing material is another matter entirely. Because copyright is based on permission, you have to know who has given whom permission to do what, and that data simply isn't available. You can guess, but if third parties became legally liable for being wrong, things would get ugly fast.

For example, just the other day, the book "Basics of Compiler Design" was up on HN. The authors are giving a PDF of it away for personal use and at-cost reprinting. If one naively assumed that everyone giving away PDFs of published books was some sort of evil pirate, they'd have been banned from Google for their generosity.

The joie de vivre of Flangan's concise writing is a joy to behold; it's awful to think the modern world can't support that level of craftsmanship.

It may not be piracy, but that the free resources have become good enough, combined with programming becoming easier to lower the bar for support materials like books. i.e. he's been disrupted. For example, Stackoverflow contributes to this.

I think he's right that the size of his markets means dropping the price wouldn't recoup enough via volume. He can easily get work writing tech materials for proprietary languages and systems (in-house and for-sale e.g. at MS or Oracle) - but what a loss for him and us!

uhhhmm... maybe google could "hire" him? Giving him the same freedom as royalties, and just release his work for free (because it grows the web, which helps google) - perhaps in collaboration with O'Reilly, because authors still need great editors. Though Google might want Android in a Nutshell. Google might also be able to target his work more precisely, with their data on searches, and whether people seem to be happy with the public resources they find, and what particular aspects. Data-driven writing...

I'm totally, 100% with you on piracy. Your work should not be stolen.

However, if your goal is a business as a full-time technical author, piracy is not your major enemy. Can I strongly suggest looking at the self-published ebook versus traditional published book choice as if you were offered it for the first time today? The first gets you on Amazon, puts you in full control of your marketing, let's you experiment with pricing and message, gives you post-launch opportunities for improvement, and bumps your "royalty" to 70 ~ 95%. The second gets wee little advances. If you look at those advances as buying equity in your book, they're the equity equivalent of a personal loan from CapOne.

I agree with you on the general point, but the deal with the publisher can get you quite a bit more than "wee little advances." The publisher lends credibility/gravitas to the enterprise (which may or may not be important, depending upon the type of work), and can (if they choose) bring a large marketing budget (and sophisticated marketing apparatus) to bear on your behalf.

I'm not arguing that self-publishing isn't the more lucrative option in many cases; I'm just saying that going with a traditional publisher is not necessarily a sucker bet.

Agreed, but you should at least try out the non-traditional route before dismissing it, especially since he's already got a blog and decent search traffic. eg. No, no downloads here - just a 4.95 javascript e-book with a couple chapters for free.

I do not know whether or to what extent piracy is responsible for my declining income. I suspect that the internet and the transition from print books to ebooks has more to do with it than piracy does. But I also suspect that piracy has a non-trivial impact, too.

There's also the recession, other legal free sources online (which he mentions later), and possibly more competition in his publishing field.

I do feel bad for people whose livelihoods get thrown out of whack and are forced into an uncomfortable position, but it is to be expected with technological advances and is actually happening all over the place (tech-related or not). I wouldn't want to be a teacher in the US these days, either. Take nothing for granted. Don't count on anyone looking out for you, no job is a promise. You basically are on your own in our modern economy.

Also posted this in the comments on the site, thought I'd join the discussion here.

I appreciate David's perspective on piracy, but I also embrace and understand where Tim O'Reilly is coming from (Far worse to be irrelevant . I think I have the solution. Why not create an entirely new genre of content that offers a greater level of utility than static digital eBooks?

Knowledge is getting created faster than it can be certified, and we need early-adopting gurus like you to light the path forward to new technologies. I'm particularly happy to pay for content on its own, particularly if I perceive that the original content creator is taking a lion's share of the profit.

I know that may not even cross many author's minds, but if there were messages like "95% of the profits from this eBook will be contributed to the author, so that they will continue producing high value content", I believe more people would be inclined to purchase.

Also I won't mention the name of my company here and get flamed for self-promoting, but I will say that I think there's a huge opportunity for publishers, authors, and content creators to disrupt a much larger, adjacent industry, education and its steady "diet" of certifications.

> I know that may not even cross many author's minds, but if there were messages like "95% of the profits from this eBook will be contributed to the author, so that they will continue producing high value content", I believe more people would be inclined to purchase.

I doubt it. If they don't have the character to buy the book normally, an appeal to the authors needs won't help. You do know it takes more than an author to make a quality book (editor, typesetting, etc).

People aren't that black and white.

Little statements like that definitely make a difference.

A lot of pirates do it to avoid buyer's remorse, and finding a message inside appealing to them to support the author is hardly unnoticed.

I find it very interesting that the pirate would care about the author but not care about the other people who put in the effort to get the book in a clean and readable form.

For any authors reading - how do royalty rates compare for paper books, international paper editions, ebooks and subscriptions on things like safari? Maybe people are buying books through mediums that make lesser money for the author? Also maybe people are buying more used books ? (I regret to say that I mostly buy used books)

I've written about it at http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/ in the past.

But the Cliff Notes version is that with Apress I'm meant to get anywhere between 10% and 20% for paper copies (sliding scale depending on # of copies sold) and double the print rate for e-books (so between 20% and 40%). With Pragmatic Programmers I believe the rate is 50%.

Yes. With PragProg it's 50%, but it's 50% profit sharing really. There's no advance up-front, but you split the profits with the publisher. It's pretty awesome because in a way, it's a lot like self-publishing, but you get all the support that comes from a publisher, including copy editors, indexers, and development editors.

So you can win on that deal or lose. If you sell 400 copies, you'd have been better off taking a $10,000 advance. If you sell 4000 copies, you're gonna be much happier with this situation.

David Flanagan looking for a salaried job? My first thought is, that's a sad end of an era. My second thought is, I wish I were hiring right now.

Its the best of times, its the worst of times!

Ok here's my take on your situation. First of all I don't see why getting a salaried job would be so bad for you. You're an MIT Grad, that alone will get you a high paying job anywhere in the field. Second you know your stuff and you seem like a pretty smart guy. Sorry about your royalties being cut short and I really do understand the "I have to provide for my family" situation. But here's where I stand, I'm actually glad people pirate ebooks. Let me tell you why. Consider my situation, I'm a CS Student with a part time job and my source of income sure enough is not even half of what you make in royalties. I simply don't have the money to pay for most of the books that are required for my classes. So anytime I find a pirated book on the internet that otherwise would cost $60/$100 I jump up with joy. After all I'm saving my cash. This last statement sounds a little selfish to most, but I believe is not. You have a degree David (From MIT) I've might add and I don't. If resources are available online, that are going to make me a better programmer and give me a chance to better my future from learning these skills I'm sure as heck going to download the book. Plain and Simple. I believe information should be free for those that are striving to achieve something. Lastly If anything that I said offends or ticks you off, I would simply advise you to look at things like this. Maybe your royalties are decreasing but your book is helping this individual secure a better a life for himself. So I would like to Thank you none the less for a wonderfully written book.

He makes a good point. Since Google recently went after the content farms that hurt their search results, it would be nice if they extended that to authors and legitimate content producers.

Honestly, this has recently given credence to the idea that Google is just broken recently. I can hardly find anything I'm looking for anymore. Even for freely available books, searching for the PDF just links me to a content farm that doesn't even have it. It's just a maze of "herbal Viagra" ads.

The content farm issue has different incentives from the authors and content produces. In the content farm the user is usually landing onto substandard content and the click is basically a user search that has "failed" because it has not produced a high quality response. For the ebooks its likely that the user is looking for precisely the book, and not providing the book would in fact be the "failed" search.

This is a good point. Why is it still so hard to find legal, DRM free ebooks to buy?

It doesn't make sense that when you search +"title" +ebook you get almost only pirate sites. This is the same problem that used to exist with music. Unless it becomes easier to buy ebooks legally, the "pirates" will win.

This is not really Google's fault only though... Some weeks ago I tried to buy a scifi ebook, but was bounced by Amazon because I'm not from the USA. In other stores I had similar problems.

Authors: at least make sure everyone can buy your ebook legally!

But wouldn't people looking for that full 'free' content, go look it somewhere else?

Maybe another search engine?

When I find a technical book that I want to buy, the first thing I do is search to see if it's available as a download. I'm happy to pay - I just don't see any need to own a physical book that consists primarily of extremely tangential technical knowledge. I have tons of outdated technical ballast (e.g. "The SQL 2000 Bible", "The IIS 5.0 Pocket Guide") gathering mold in boxes in my basement already.

You've touched on an important issue: some books (or texts, in general) are much related to the current state of art, and won't be very useful in 10 years. Contrast SICP -- pretty much transcendental, every other hacker recognizes those four letters -- with jQuery reference. jQueries of this world come and go.

Now the question is, what is the value added of having a hardcopy of SICP, and what is of having a hardcopy -- or e-copy -- of jQuery?

Another issue is bit rot of e-books. With no common long-lived e-book format (perhaps beyond HTML and PDF), you can't readily expect an e-book to be handy with technology in 10 years. It's a fast changing market, as of now.

So, in the end, what is a realistic price for a short-lived e-book?

You need to be really careful how you "motivate" people in these kinds of situations if you want to have a positive effect. A study was done at Petrified Forest National Park comparing the rates at which petrified wood was stolen depending on whether signage said people had stolen petrified wood in the past. Turns out 4x more people were willing to steal if they knew other people had done it before them.

Unfortunately, I think the method used in the post falls into the "4x more" category. David may have unwittingly increased piracy rather than reducing it.

[1] http://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/cialdini.pdf (see the section on Environmental Theft).

Just for independent verification purposes, I tried to find a free copy of this book using his search terms, and didn't come up with anything in a few minutes of clicking after results.

It appears that there is a 5th edition of his Javascript book and a 6th edition of another author's HTML book easily reachable from those terms, but no free electronic copy of a 6th edition Javascript book.

Google will remove links to pirated copies of books, one needs only submit a DMCA request. I doubt that DMCA requests will drive publicity for your book launch like an entitled blog post, though.

Not just that, but there seems to be no sixth edition available from anywhere at all, with the possible exception of a torrent that I didn't bother to look closer at.

Why are we talking about this issue at all?

I wish people would stop calling this sort of thing "piracy". Proper piracy -robbery, abduction and so forth on the high seas - is a continuing problem. This is hardly in the same league. May I suggest using "theft" instead, which at least is more or less accurate.

general definition of theft (not legal): the dishonest taking of property belonging to another person with the intention of depriving the owner permanently of its possession.

When I go to Youtube and listen to an extremely good song by Twilightning or Edguy, what am I taking from the band? Due to a few different reasons (money, I don't have to) I have never run across anything I will pay money to listen to or watch, books being a small exception since I like well made hardcovers a la Practical Common Lisp. I will, however, refer others to the good movies or music I stumble upon.

Unlike many proponents of torrents, I heavily disagree that all music should be free; that simply is not sustainable in my opinion. Not enough people will then go out of their way to pay for it and I have no idea how well bands do when it comes to concerts/merchandise. I do think that free music benefits bands but that overall benefit increases exponentially with how hard it is to obtain it, because those of us who would never have listened to a band's music before the internet (finding obscure bands via radio is nigh impossible) will often refer them to friends, while the rest who are willing to pay take the easier route - this is important - and buy music.

Currently, torrents, youtube (amusingly, even the official youtube versions are often worse to listen to due to censorship - VEVO is a good example) and other avenues are the better choice for anyone with loose morals, after taking into account risk and ease of access.

tl;dr those of you who will pay for music should subsidize the rest of us.

I almost want to pirate this just to see if his "nagging pirates to buy the book" section has been stripped out.

I always think these things are funny, because the only people who tend to see them are paying customers.

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