Author John Birmingham on eBook Piracy
brisbanetimes.com.au
brisbanetimes.com.au
I can understand some of these players being hell bent on having control of their product even after they sell it to someone else, but it seems inevitable that it will not last.
If you sell me a painting, you can't expect to stop me from taking photos and copying it. Or if I'm a painter, I may even modify it and resell it as a fork of your initial design.
Seriously, who (within a certain age bracket) has never copied a friend's audio cassette?
For the record, I've tried my hand (and failed) on software to do just this. It's a Hard problem, Hard in the CS and engineering sense, and sufficiently hard that I don't see it happening reliably in the first years, and there is to the best of my knowledge no software available that even comes close. To anyone who is going to suggest Calibre, please don't, lest you make yourself look like you know nothing about the issues I'm talking about.
Can you please elaborate on this. I've never tried, but I thought Calibre could strip the DRM from kindle ebooks. Or do you mean that Calibre can't handle the general case of arbitrary DRM (via OCR methods)?
Converting a pdf into an ebook (by ebook I mean: epub or similar formats, I recognize that that is a fairly narrow definition of ebook; some people call scanned jpg's an 'ebook'), even without accounting for DRM or OCR, is Very Hard. PDF is only page layout, it doesn't have any semantics; ebooks are build around semantic markup (otherwise you can't make an automatic ToC, or reflow pages when the user increases font size, for example).
My point is: there is no software (to the best of my knowledge, and I've looked) that can convert bitmaps into their equivalent 'ebooks'. So, it's not quite as easy (actually it's so much harder so as to approach impossible, save from manual conversion) as the GP would make it seem.
I do wonder how far Google has got with their internal software - and if they care at all about formatting, or just the text.
I've done it, it was not a one-step process, the results were not pretty but it was readable.
It's not a Hard problem (unless you mean Hard to do automatically and get good results, in which case I agree).
I've got the tools at home, but I took the steps from the Mobileread forums.
One possibility I just read there is, if you have a scanned PDF, PDF text extractor, then Use OpenOffice to save as epub.
Also, you can just skip all that and just read the PDF from the ebook reader.
For ebooks? Yes, yes it is.
My girlfriend and her family all share their kindle books another way though, by using the same account.(legal) A bit easier I guess.
I own perhaps a dozen books I've bought from amazon, and it vexes me continuously that they come drm locked and I can't do simple things like, swap them to a different device. I've regretted it every single time.
These days I get the free sample off of amazon, and if I like the book I go out of my way to find a way to get it DRM free, or buy a physical copy.
Unfortunately for Birmingham, Weapons of Choice just didn't convince me he was a great author, or at least not one that I want to spend more money on right now. Of course, I haven't pirated his books either, but the only reason I've ever done that is if the book isn't legally available electronically.
One of the things which hasn't been talked about as much is that the vendors who providing DRM (i.e., Apple, Adobe, B&N, etc.) have at best a mixed incentive towards improving their DRM to protect against its being breakage. On the one hand, they know it's technologically impossible to provide a truly secure DRM, and "fixing" DRM to protect against the latest hole costs time in development, QA and deployment costs. They also know that there are people (perhaps only a small minority, but growing) that will only buy digital content if they can break the DRM. So when upgrade their DRM, they lose customers. So from Amazon's perspective, whose main goal it is to increase market share and minimize costs, there is minimal reason to fix their DRM, even though they must know it's been broken. (Perhaps not in a legal sense, since there are probably contractual obligations, but the technological surfs employed by Amazon weren't chosen for their stupidity; quite the reverse, actually.)
The flip side of the picture is that if you want to keep the digital content publishers on your side, and if you want them to agree to new forms of content and distribution, and especially if you want all of the members of the oligopoly which is, say, Hollywood, to sign a contract all at the roughly the same time, you need to keep your DRM secure. Unlike Amazon, B&N, and Adobe, who pretty much have a stable situation with respect to the markets they want to service, and/or who aren't willing to play the long game, I hypothesize that Apple is trying to do new things with TV shows and Movies --- and while the Book Publishers may be at best ambivalent to DRM, Hollywood hasn't had their lunch eaten by Amazon or Apple (yet). So Apple needs to stay on the good side of the MPAA.
This explains why the ebook-only DRM schemes haven't changed in a while, even though they've all been broken, while Apple is still religiously patching iTunes and IOS with modified versions of Fairplay, trying to stay a step ahead of Requiem. It's also why I rarely buy digital content from Apple; it's too much of a hassle to determine whether or not Fairplay's DRM is broken this week.
The bottom line is that with the possible exception of the most book publishers, who are acting like deer stuck in headlights, most of the rest of the economic vendors (i.e., the DRM vendors, Apple, et. al.) are acting completely rationally, even though on the surface the way the DRM game has been played seems to be quite the opposite.
I assume this author is trying to have it both ways, letting amazon sell their stuff cheap and get some volume while trying to make a far better margin off the Australian market.
The Internet selling model is here to stay and as long as the artist or author gets their fair cut for creating the work, the model is fine by me. The fact this author is tied to his publisher is between him and the publisher and not my problem.
I've read some rubbish by established authors with ridiculous e-book prices and some fine stuff for $0.99 by authors quite happy with the e-book format, Amazon does not need to apologise to anyone IMHO in fact I'm preparing my first book for publication with them later this year, I doubt I will make much but I have a day job and the Karma value will be immense, I suspect this is the feeling of a lot of authors (yes there is a lot of shit ebooks to wade through but its worth it when you find a gem!)
If there isnt an ebook and the price is too high I go to the library or dont read it (seriously how many people would seriously read a photocopied book)
I've been working with an author-run e-publishing group for the past few months, and this is an attitude I see a lot. I understand where it comes from, but it's not really good for readers or the literary ecosystem. Amazon has no real stake in any of the books they publish. They own the platform that sells all of the content, so as long as they're selling something, they're fine. There are no publishers giving books the criticism and support they need, and no passionate booksellers to promote them to readers. If even the authors don't care if a book sells, where does that leave us? I don't know. But I'm going to keep buying traditionally published books until someone figures it out.
And Amazon lets the author/publisher choose DRM or not on KDP, though you can't change it without losing all sales rank etc.
I was entirely on the author's side up until he said this. He deserves to be paid for what he does, but if he isn't willing to do it for free if that's the only way, then he probably shouldn't bother.
By your logic, I would be condemned to waiting tables for the entirety of my life whilst providing every line of code I write for free.
I don't think this is fair to people that want to pursue a creative path in life.