Confessions of a Book Pirate

Conversations about ebook piracy being the death of the industry should be prefaced by the fact that many big players in the industry saw their best years ever this year. Random House gave every single employee, from editors to janitors, a $5,000 bonus this year because the company made so much money. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/12/50-shades-succe...

Just like the music and film industries, the publishing industry is gripped by an irrational fear so great that thinking goes out the window. Indie authors are railing that piracy is taking their sales, when the truth is that often their books or marketing efforts are so bad that they wouldn't have had any sales anyway. Believe me, I know--I run a web site for writers! "Piracy" is the giant slobbering boogeyman that everyone can blame their problems on, but that doesn't really exist.

Personally I never buy ebooks for three reasons:

1. DRM. I've bought a handful of DRM'd ebooks in my life and I never will again, not even for a penny. DRM is crime against freedom of information and consumer rights.

2. The quality of many ebooks is just atrocious. Any ebook version of a book written before, say, 2000 is guaranteed to be riddled with typos and errors so bad as to be unreadable. And publishers still ask north of $10 for such an ebook. They OCR a dog-eared paperback from the CEO's personal library, don't bother to proofread it, and slap it on Amazon for $10 and pray for the money to roll in. Such practices are disgusting to a bibliophile like me and I refuse to support that.

3. Price. Paying $10 for a perfect ebook is really stretching it, considering it's often cheaper to have a paper copy shipped to your door by Amazon. Throw in the shameful quality of many ebooks I mentioned above and it becomes an outright scam.

If you want a good example of both #2 and #3, check out Amazon's Kindle edition of Frank Herbert's Dune. Use the preview feature and try reading through the first few pages. The ebook is unreadably bad--embarrasingly so for the publisher--and the Kindle edition costs $14.99 (!!!), 3x the price of a new paperback! How outrageous is that?

I'm going to need a source for the claim " As the music industry was ravaged by file sharing" That seems to contradict the facts. As a person that feels morally obligated to pay for the bits I consume (via Netflix and Hulu Plus) I just read this morning that the movie industry has realized record profits... once again. Is their math based on theoretical maximums? That's not sane. One can not build a model on "if everyone whom has seen a movie were to pay up". That negates group viewings and many other random displays. In my field (maybe "our" field) I try to pay for EVERY book I read. Often the authors make themselves available via email or right here in HN comments. Also, these guys are typically writing about moving targets. I'd HATE to be writing a book about something like Node.js or Scala right now. The landscape is moving just rapidly enough as to make your book out of date in a year's time. But I'm just not so sure piracy should be blamed. Sure, I could hit a torrent site and look for a book. I could also get a membership to my public library. And in the end, I WANT to support they gal/guy whom is going to write the next great book on Dojo/Clojure/Backbon.js/Play Framework etc. My point being. Consider the public library, the radio, and network television. Not everyone that is willing to consume free materials, is a pirate. Not every industry that has a price on a consumable resource is losing money if people find a free way to consume said resource.

I pay for most of the books I read, but occasionally I will pirate if I'm not sure if the book is something I'll really enjoy.

Sometimes I feel like I'm being fleeced though, and I'll resort to pirating. When I bought my Kindle, I figured I would at least save a little bit over the cost of a physical book, since they cost next to nothing to produce and distribute. But it's been just the opposite. Most kindle books are actually more expensive, some by 40% or more. This combined with the fact that I still don't even own my book makes for a painful purchasing experience.

They should be giving incentives to people for purchasing legitimate digital copies, not punishing them. In my mind, $4 would feel like a slightly high "premium" price to pay for a digital version of a $9.99 paperback, and I'd feel a lot better about paying it.

I'll probably still keep paying the money, but I hope we see some radical changes in the future to the pricing structure of digital books.

Edit: I will say that I've been pleasantly surprised by the return policy on my Kindle books the last couple of times I've returned books. There was no hassle and no questions. Couldn't have asked for a better experience.

As an author, I believe that everyone who pirates my book is helping me spread the word. PDFs are nice and all, but for a science textbook I find that nothing beats the printed book: you can flip though pages quickly and find the information you are looking for.

Obligatory product plug: [ High school math, mechanics and calculus for busy adults ]: http://minireference.com [ eg. Calculus I fully explained in just 25 pages ]

Previous discussion, from the time the article was published:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078652

I have my second Kindle and the first thing I did after receiving it -- the first one was stolen, amusingly-- was download several thousand books from torrent sites.

Of those, I cherry picked several dozen, many of which I bought physical copies of over the years but long since liquidated.

Many though I had never heard of and loaded anyway.

I have also bought quite a few ebooks out of convenience and feel 0 qualms. If anything my actions have increased revenue as I have avidly recommended a number of books I never would have discovered otherwise.

Of the 5k or so books I have downloaded, I have read .5% or so. Maybe two of those books I would have bought. Sorry Tim Ferris.

nb first published January 2010