Digital Domain - Will Piracy Become a Problem for E-Books? | Hacker News Reader

Digital Domain - Will Piracy Become a Problem for E-Books?

nytimes.com

8 pointsnewacc22 comments

I think the publishing industry is in a much better place to encourage licensed use of their work than the music industry was. Look at the kindle and how simple and easy it is to grab a book. Imagine if an ipod could do that in 1999.

The publishing industry and the music industry is very very different. But if the publishing industry does not lead (or at least keep up) with the evolution of the market they will become marginalized. Just like the "little plastic disc" industry is today. They really need to make the e-book "market" mature before e-books become more popular than psychical books.

Will it become a problem??? It already is:

http://www.google.co.in/search?q=the%20lost%20symbol%20rapid...

Yes. Books are "barely" pirated now because it is impossible to find most books from pirate sources. Hell, it's hard to find most books from legitimate sources online.

Books have an advantage on other media in that they are traditionally physical and their quality (when they are presented in a quality form) will still help sell them.

Having said that, the day someone manages to release a way (iphone app?) of letting you scan books easily (for book authors but lets not pretend it won't get used both ways) will be pretty awesome.

You'd be surprised. The pirating scene on IRC has a far greater selection than Amazon.

Yeah, it's easy enough to find pretty much any book if you know what to search for. It's been that way for years.

Really? Heh traditional torrent/p2p sources (say everything but usenet) tend to have a lot of trouble finding particular books.

try ed2k/kad. torrents are not for old or rare stuff.

Cool. What I'd really love is to be able to go to Amazon (or something) and pay to have a PDF download. I'd even pay retail if it meant I get the PDF now and the physical in the mail (though living in AU I don't think Amazon sell us books physically but you get the idea).

This system is exactly how pragprog.com works.

You can even purchase a PDF/book combo before the book is completed and have access to a (constantly updated) beta version of the PDF. When the book is completed, the PDF is finalised and the book itself is mailed to you.

Awesome. Can't wait to see this model expand.

Perhaps you're looking in the wrong place. A lot of illegal file-sharing seems to be done through file-hostin services such as rapidshare these days. A few choice keywords on google should net you just about any book you want.

Piracy isn't a problem, it's a result - the question is so uninteresting... The more interesting question is the question of how can we make a better business model for publishers/authors

I notice that they didn't compare ebooks to movies. I'm sure the MPAA would have issued the same scary stats, but the film industry is rolling in cash despite entire criminal industries dedicated to stealing content.

That would have for a pretty boring article, though.

I don't pirate/buy e-books because I can't read books on a screen, it is okay for small articles and coding and whatnot but feeling the paper and guiding your eyes is so much better with paper. (I haven't tried e-ink or the kindle so I don't know how that compares.)

What about a system where you can download an e-book for free, read it for a month or so with the option of rolling-over that term for another month -- as long as someone else hasn't requested it? In short, where are libraries going to be in this?

What you're describing is not like a library. Libraries deal in scarce resources (physical copies of books). The point of a (public) library is to provide free information.

If you apply that principal to e-books, which cost almost nothing to copy, and therefore don't reasonably need to be checked out or returned, you have to remove all DRM, thus destroying the e-book business model.

Unfortunately, librarians have bought into the DRM mindset, and are putting into place (or planning to put into place) systems like the one you describe.

That's exactly my point (which was not meant to be a technical suggestion for implementation, I'm aware of the problems involved). My question is basically, "where do e-books and DRM leave the public library?"

In my opinion, if a business model requires there to be no public libraries or a substantially reduced public library, then so much the worse for the business model. There needs to be an analogue between the world where books are things made of paper and the world where books are made of bits.

It already is. E-books are pirated within minutes of staring their major distribution.

The difference so far though seems to be that I don't know anyone who reads pirated e-books, but I know lots of people who listen to pirated music. There is no suitable mp3 player equivalent for books yet.

Which is what the article is about I think.

The only problem I can imagine is that we won't have enough of piracy of e-books :)

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