Piracy, Overcoming Gravity, and the Digital Edition | Hacker News Reader

Piracy, Overcoming Gravity, and the Digital Edition

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46 pointsluu54 comments

I'm confused how the author knows that piracy caused the decline in sales. Wouldn't sales naturally decay over time anyway? The author doesn't even know the month the book was pirated, so I'm pretty skeptical that they've measured the impact of piracy reliably.

I also doubt that pirating a book selling 100 copies a month would be worthwhile for an Amazon employee with the needed access and know-how. If I had to pirate an ebook with zero insider connections I would just use a script, maybe something like autoit, to page through the ebook on my Kindle Cloud Reader and screenshot every page. Use tesseract to do OCR on the collection and now I have a poorly formatted copy of your book. I assume I could spend a bit more time on this and come up with something better that would keep formatting.

I agree that piracy is bad and basically theft (disclosure, I pirated Excession because it wasn't available on Kindle and I knew I wouldn't buy a physical copy and Iain Banks is dead so I don't feel bad). I don't think this post is particularly compelling though.

A suppressed European Commission study found piracy to have negligible effect: https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s...

The study’s conclusion: With the exception of recently released blockbusters, there is no evidence to support the idea that online copyright infringement displaces sales. While this result is not unique, but consistent with previous studies, it begs the question:

Why did the Commission, after having spent a significant amount of money on it, choose not to publish this study for almost two years?

That study has to do with blockbuster movies and not purely digital goods. I am guess that things like ebooks and video games behave very differently. I heard of stories of AAA devs saying they can tell when a crack was released because their sales took a nose dive.

> That study has to do with blockbuster movies

It is not limited to them: "the study’s conclusion: With the exception of recently released blockbusters.."

There is a very obvious lack of respect for all other possible effects in the reddit post. A good reason for sales to drop 40% would be book sellers not featuring it anymore as "this years new and hot" a year after release. Another one might be the saturation of the market that is the authors larger social circle. Not mentioning such effects at all and just going "sales drop - must be pirates" sounds unreasonable and more like scapegoating. Honestly the whole post seems to me more like a desperate attempt at advertisement instead of any reasonable foundation for discussion.

Honestly, the drop in sales he describes sounds like every indie release ever. I don’t think it was caused by piracy, that’s just how sales work in niche markets.

> Wouldn't sales naturally decay over time anyway? The author doesn't even know the month the book was pirated, so I'm pretty skeptical that they've measured the impact of piracy reliably.

What...? The author gave a pretty darn clear timeline:

- I released Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition in 2011

- Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition was pirated around August or September of 2012.

- "Book sales immediately dropped 40% over 3 months."

I disagree that that's clear. What month was it released in? What month pirated? What was the trend of sales up to that point? Even the phrase "sales immediately dropped 40% over 3 months" is unclear because things that are immediate usually don't take 3 months.

A graph showing sales with an annotation on when the piracy happened would be clear. Even better if it could be compared to similar books and sales figures.

Can you clarify what exactly you're insinuating here? Do you think it's likely that sales in fact have been dropping 40% every 3 months but the author is too clueless to notice it for any other 3-month period except that one? Or are you alleging the author is lying? What scenario seems more plausible to you here than the one that involves piracy actually having caused the drop?

I don't think I'm insinuating anything. I'm forthrightly saying I don't think the evidence is clear enough to support the conclusions in the OP. I then pointed to specific problems - we don't know the publication date for the first book, the piracy date, the trend of sales before piracy, or what trends are typical of similar books. I also think the author's jump to accuse an Amazon employee of piracy is evidence of a tendency to jump to unsupported conclusions.

I personally doubt the author is lying. I assume the author is stating what they think and giving the evidence they have. That's good, but I don't think their conclusion follows from their evidence.

> Non-real number example: OG1 was selling 100 books/month by 2012. After piracy this dropped to 60 books/month. For instance, August 2012 had sales of 100 books, and by November 2012 it had dropped to 60 books/month. Over time, this slowly tapered from 60 to 50 to 40 to 30 to 25 books/month by 2015-2016. That's how drastic things were.

If post author had correctly identified the time that the book started getting pirated, the drop in revenue in that 3-month period is much more drastic that before and after, and is the most likely cause (another cause would need to have very compelling evidence).

It's like if I told you I lost my 1-year-old credit card and suddenly 3 months later I saw notifications of $10k in extra charges and therefore think someone is abusing it, and now you're objecting "but you don't even tell me what month this happened in??", "but how do you know those notifications were legit?!", "how many notifications did you get normally?!", etc...

At that point, you're throwing common sense out the window and insinuating the other person is either just stupid or deliberately lying to you, whether you explicitly say this or not.

Sales dropping over time is more common [1] than unexpected $10k charges to a credit card. It also has many more explanations. The scenarios are so different, the analogy is frankly dishonest.

[1] It is, in fact, the rule. And can be much faster and bigger than 40% in 3 months: https://www.addthis.com/blog/2014/04/21/can-social-buzz-pred...

We may agree that piracy is theft, but 'ALittleLight has a point.

From Novembrer 2011 — when it was published — to September 2012 — when the author believes it's been "pirated" — there is a window of just 10 months. Not 21 months. 10 months.

Now, did sales beging to drop only after September? Were them already going down? How long before? How do sales typically go over time for books? For Amazon books? Other possible causes?

Moreover, I think your analogy is completely off. Here is a better one.

You can't find your credit card anymore. You are notified of suspect online payments by your bank. Thinking about it, you're quite sure you left it at the supermarket; and you somehow conclude that that sneaky cashier must have stolen it.

But it turns out, your son got a trojan while trying to pirate a PlayStation game on your family PC with the magnificent Windows XP, and your card number was saved in Google Chrome.

A drop of sales is so common, and espeically a more sharper after the core customer base has bought the book.

So yes, the OP is probably a novice to the whole book selling buisness.

> If I had to pirate an ebook with zero insider connections I would just use a script, maybe something like autoit, to page through the ebook

Some of the more abusive text book publishers would only allow you to read their books via a very poorly done web application. In college I wrote scripts to do this and build pdfs from the screenshots because it was way too painful to read that way.

I've also never really pirated books, because there's very nice, legit and convenient sources to get them - namely physical, DRM free ones also available in public libraries... (only exception: George R.R. Martin when I didn't have 200€ to spend, because the library was reserved for years to come).

This changes for movies, where I try to buy Blu-Rays nowadays but I won't let copyrightholders kill my physical drive for it, so if they think they don't want me to give a suitable, high-def media I can effectively do whatever I want with: piracy it is.

To add to what you’ve suggested - at least the cleanups can be outsourced via fiverr and such. (Edit: typos)

> I'm generally tired of the whole "I pirate it but if the content is good I will buy it" line of thinking

This is a natural thing to do when buying expensive physical books, because that's exactly what you can do in a bookshop. Imagine if all books in a bookshop were shrink-wrapped.

The need to do this has been somewhat alleviated by Amazon's "peek inside" feature, but for the books that don't have it's basically a binary choice between not buying it at all and getting a shady pdf first and then deciding if to purchase the real thing or not. Applies to cooking, technical, programming, history books - pretty much all of non-fiction. Especially if it's thick and over $50.

So it's possible that his drop of 40% in sales basically means that 40% of his prior buyers regretted purchasing a book and would've not bought it if they had a chance to preview.

I sincerely doubt that the inside pages of books are a major factor in any buying decision.

It the factor in my decision for programming / scientific books: I have a PhD, am interested in many disparate things and therefore need to find texts at the right level for my current amount of understanding in the topic. This is surprisingly hard. Flicking through the pages is the best way to do it.

I've never bought an e-Book with DRM. I never will. Occasionally I've downloaded PDFs of books I have the dead-tree version of but want to be able to search through. Most publishers really are terrible at moving into the 21st century. Online e-library lending restrictions are a gigantic pain in the arse, are massively over-engineered, and pointlessly exist to restrict information from those who are best placed to understand it.

Curious as to why you think that? It definitely affects my decision when buying non fiction - particularly if it's a book with a lot of photos.

This explains why so many books are $9.99...

> Amazon, in their drive to popularize digital content for Kindle out, made some changes to e-Books to basically force people to do $9.99. Royalties are 70% if your book is priced at $9.99 or below, but 30% if the book is above that price. Royalties of ~$7/book at $9.99 but your book has to be priced at $23.3 to make the same $7 royalty above the $9.99 limit.

Upon reading that it seemed to me that this practise of Amazon's is arguably as anti-artist as piracy.

> Amazon's Kindle has around 61% market share on all e-Book sales. > Royalties are 70% if your book is priced at $9.99 or below, but 30% if the book is above that price.

Clear market failure. Monopoly marketplace, bad for content creators.

>Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition was pirated around August or September of 2012

>Book sales immediately dropped 40% over 3 months. The sales over time went from 60% and kept declining to 25% by 2015-2016

Spurious correlation. Those sales would have declined irrespective of the book being pirated, there have already been enough research debunking the myth that literature sales drop with piracy [0]

I understand watching their content getting pirated must be frustrating for smaller creators, but you have to take into account accessibility among people. As Gaben said, Piracy is almost always a service problem.

I am one of those who has always condoned piracy. I have consumed countless pirated copies of books, media and software across my childhood, not because I didn't care for ethics, but because I lived in an environment where it was simply impossible for a kid to buy those things the right way - they were either not launched in my country's market at all or if they were, they were priced too high for our family income. Windows 10, for instance, still retails at ₹14799 - the price of an entire (cheap) desktop/laptop computer. Needless to say almost no one actually buys a Windows license here unless it comes preinstalled in a vendor's machine. A kindle copy of Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective costs ₹10135 - almost twice the price of the Kindle itself.

[0] https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59e...

>Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition was pirated around August or September of 2012. Not sure how still, probably an insider from Amazon.

Was there a digital version available? If so, it could almost certainly have been pirated by people outside of Amazon.

For sure correlation between piracy and sales, but causation? I'm not convinced.

I've always been a strong proponent of, "piracy is theft" with the caveat of, "theft is bad, but there are lots of worse things". I think we should stop building justifications and just call it what it is, theft, and admit society is probably more okay with theft than we're willing to admit to one another.

Pirating content shouldn't fundamentally alter the "am I a good person?" equation, but it does sit with a negative sign next to it.

I started at "piracy is theft", eventually switched to "piracy is too complicated an issue to be labeled as black or white", and now I've settled in "actually, I'm okay with most of it".

The typical example: the music industry says "copying a CD is stealing from the artist", but plenty of small artists would counter-argur that a. the music industry is the one getting the money, not them, and b. they would prefer you to pirate their songs and make them popular so they can actually make money with more concerts.

In my opinion, piracy is bad when it hurts small producers (which tends to be the case with books) and actually good when it benefits society in detriment of some giant corporation. And if said giant corporation invested millions into laws that restrict people's access to their own culture (with Disney at the top of that list), I will actually encourage it.

I see this as siding with society instead of corporations. I know that this is not an universally accepted view, but I just bring it up to point out that there is more to piracy than "yes, it's theft" or "no, it isn't".

My point was, can't it both be "it's theft" and "I'm probably okay with most of it"? We treat "bad" as this absolute, "all bad is Bad!" but really no, there are all kinds of degrees of bad. Theft is bad, but IP theft is probably a lot less bad than armed robbery, for example.

I just don't get the conflict. I entirely agree with you otherwise.

> In my opinion, piracy is bad when it hurts small producers (which tends to be the case with books) and actually good when it benefits society in detriment of some giant corporation.

the problem with this line of thinking is that it's got a built-in personal bias against the monied and wealthy. Just because a corporation is rich, doesn't mean they can suffer detriment. The issue of corporate overreach in copyright law is a separate issue that should be solved using law and democracy, not a backhanded application of robinhood morals.

If piracy is benefitial to society, then it's just as beneficial if it was pirating an indie artist's content as well as content produced by a corporate.

My initial reply was unconstructive because I couldn't think of coherent response at the moment so I threw absurdity at absurdity.

Here is a hopefully more constructive critique.

If piracy is theft. Then I have a linguistic problem.

If a thief steals my bike I lost my bike. If, in your view, it is also okay to say "a thief stole my content" then I suddenly lack the vocabulary to differentiate between the two.

Even though the consequences in the first case are physical, measurable, immediate. And in the latter they are hypothetical, not measurable, and spread out over an indeterminate amount of time.

So before a discussion can even take place, we need more words.

Imaginary property is imaginary.

Effort isn't imaginary, however.

The effort of making a physical object and a digital object can be reasoned to be quite similar. Yet the digital object has the potential to be worth literally billions because it's easily and infintely replicateable. Physical objects made once, available to one person means the price is dictated by economy/market. Digital objects made once, available to everyone everywhere should mean it's price is practically zero if you want to treat it like a physical object. And surprise surprise many businesses do want to treat digital objects like physical objects. They often artificially limit the "supply" side. Digital things don't work like physical things. Sitting around in a world where 100% of people (who have access to the internet) can have a digital creation for practical use and entertainment is like being on the brink of a utopia. Yet we're all trying to argue about a fundamental aspect of a digital object as being "unethical". Intellectual property should only give one right - the right to claim authorship. We need to come up with a better way to give those that make digital objects money that isn't artificial limiting or unethical advertisements.

Indeed... I have downloaded a lot of movies, TV show, music, software, and books over the years. But I’ve never felt it necessary to subscribe to this insane justification of it, or to glorify it as some sort of political statement with “information wants to be free”.

I was simply to cheap to pay for these things. To be sure: I would have only bought a small fraction of what I pirated if that wasn’t possible. And I continue to believe that the lack of Spotify-style licensing is leaving a lot of money for creators on the table (journalism being the clear leader in that regard right now).

This is usually what I am amazed by. The need for righteously justify things.

Doesn't it feel righteous to say "fuck you" to someone who's been fucking you over for years though? A whole host of industries have well documented anti-consumer practices which make it so people who pay are noticeably worse off than people who don't. From disappearing digital goods, to ads shoved in your face in paid products, to anti-piracy measures that are glorified malware, to harvesting and selling your data, I could go on...

Meh, no. Still trying to find justification.

Among other things, “the industry” isn’t a thing. The people you are punishing are entirely different ones from those that supposedly wronged you.

Then, there’s the whole rule-of-law thing. If you don’t like them, lobby for changes.

well, I want to play a movie I've paid for without anyone destroying my hardware (!) (which effectively is what the AACS-key update mechanism is) nor spying on me (commercial players with regular internet connectivity). I don't think this is particularly righteous, I just don't think corporations have the right to strip me of my rights because they think I'm a pirate.

That’s pretty righteously fine to me. The amount of people who pay for the content then pirate it has to be a tiny fraction though.

Google has calculated my attention time to be worth around 10cents.

You are a thief because this comment has annoyed me so much that it has taken my attention.

Please add a negative sign to your karma equation.

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There's a fairly common misconception that if the people couldn't have pirated a book (song, film), they would have bought it, as if there's some sort of guarantee that a book will necessarily be purchased simply because it's been published, disregarding that people need to (1) be convinced they want it and (2) consider the price worthwhile.

Sure, a X number of people have downloaded it for free simply because they could, but this doesn't automatically means that they would have bought it in the first place.

It's likelier that some five thousand people in developing countries who couldn't afford a £30 Java study book would find other means to learn Java (other ebooks based on it, Youtube tutorials, Stack Overflow, forums etc.) if that book simply cannot be pirated for whatever reason, than the fact that those people would suddenly start to buy that £30 book.

> "It was at this time that my then girlfriend's father heavily questioned if I had the ability to support his daughter, since I asked him right around the time OG2 was released."

None of the culture in that sentence should still exist in 2015, and yet it treated as normal.

What’s wrong with a parent wanting their son/daughter to be partnered with someone who is financially stable?

The idea that parents decide to "give away" their daughters to a person they deem "suitable" comes from a very outdated culture of forced marriages.

The second problematic culture aspect is the enforcement of gender role where men are expected to support the woman while she take care of the house and children. A father asking the guy if he is able to support his daughter is no less sexist than if he asked his daughter to quit her job when she got pregnant.

Neither should be treated as normal coming from 5 years ago.

Flipped it - how's it read now?

> It was at this time that my then boyfriend's father heavily questioned if I had the ability to support his son, since I asked him right around the time OG2 was released."

I appreciate women bear the brunt of child rearing but I find this patriarchal attitude a bit of an anachronism too.

If it was his partner asking that question it would be different, their relationship is their problem.

Coming from the parent it’s a another can of worm, including the very notion they have a say in their adult children’s basic life choices.

No culture is better than another.

That is demonstrably false. As long as we agree that a behaviour (like murder, for example) are absolutely not OK across the majority of human population, then cultures that display more of this behaviour are objectively worse.

But what if the culture that thinks murder is okay in some cases dominates (think the us, japan, the united emirates etc)? In that case your own culture condemning it would be "objectively worse". If you measure objectivity by the major population, is it objective? I think not.

Might doesn't make right on moral issues, unless you subscribe to moral relativism (which I don't). I specified "majority of humanity" there because majority consensus is the best proxy for the "morality" that we've got when looking purely at the material world.

Honestly if a product anyone has made becomes a worldwide hit amongst pirates, you can be sure it is of great quality. As such he should be proud and keep on working as he is now onto a path which will make him rich and famous if he wants. It is a monumental achievement.

The world is gigantic and I am sure he hasn't even translated his book into Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and Hindu which will open up more markets.

I have admiration for this guy for what he has achieved. Regarding piracy, live with it! Information wants to be free.

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