Ask HN: Why hasn't their been as much ebook piracy vs. music, tv, movies? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why hasn't their been as much ebook piracy vs. music, tv, movies?

6 pointscoralreef8 comments

I was reading an interview with Jeff Bezos and he says, "Publishers are having unparalleled profitability, and the book industry is in better shape than it ever has been, and it’s because of e-books. The Kindle team deserves a significant amount of credit for that, because they were early, they got ahead of it. There’s been very little piracy in e-books, unlike other digital media."

Why is this generally true? Better DRM? Timing? Lack of demand by demographics that normally pirate media?

(http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazons-jeff-bezos-on-profits-failure-succession-big-bets-2014-12)

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Two views on this issue.

Books, with rare exceptions such as that of K.J. Rowling's and Dan Brown's, are not a global phenomenon, draw less attention, making the crime of piracy less tempting or less lucrative. Books are more elitist and TV series more vulgar. That's also the reason why it's more profitable to harvest clicks on porn or pirated music than on metaphisical poets such as John Donne.

Since there are fewer book pirates it's also easier to track them vs. millions engaged in pirating movies on P2P networks.

My second guess would be that e-books are quite a new phenomenon (in terms of the recent surge in popularity of e-paper readers and tablets) compared with optical drives and tapes that were around for a couple of decades. DRM techniques were much less advanced and so piracy could flourish. The market and the music or film industries were so badly hit that they had to find a different business model to make ends meet.

Kindles and iPads are made with DRM in mind, the techniques are more advanced today, and the publishers have not been threatened by piracy so much as by the shrinking readership. Also scanning entire books could not have been done so massively and easily as copying music or films.

Finally - a word in favour of piracy - I can imagine, although it's just a guess, that it was exactly the piracy that drove evolution and innovation in film and music towards more spectacular entertainment, 3D, iMAX, 4D, live performance, stand-up shows, HD tv screens, VR goggles, 5.1 stereo, group gaming, motion sensors etc. etc., because watching flat, low res. series or films is not considered a proper fun anymore (even The X-files seems boring today, not engaging enough, from a different epoch, like ballet).

There is not much ebook piracy within Kindle ecosystem similarly as there is not much app piracy within iPhone ecosystem.

The piracy exists on both and is trivial for most readers of HN to perform, but for casual users of Kindle and iPhone it is a bit of pain.

Bezo is giving a particular viewpoint looking at the issue from Amazon Kindle window. That is, if you are a regular user of Amazon Kindle it will be very convenient for you to buy a licence to use e-books within Amazon ecosystem and relatively painful to pirate books.

If you are just a tiny bit technical you can easily strip Amazon DRM (used to be a simple Python script) for backup, in case Amazon decides to recall a particular book.

You can also pirate books on Kindle, but you will most likely need to convert books to Kindle format .mobi using Calibre unless you like reading misformatted pdfs. Again simple but for someone who is not actively searching and is happy paying Amazon, not something they would do.

On the other hand if you are using a competitor's device, it is relatively easy to find books to pirate in .epub format but the market share is much too small to matter.

I do not go out looking aggressively for pirate sites, but there are a few Russian based places(hint: library of biblical creation) where you can find pretty much any book released in the past 10 years, most books released in the past 10-20 years and some books released earlier. If you can't find it on that Russian site you can find it in Indian or Chinese forums. I am sure there is American ebook pirate scene too but I did not pursue the matter.

So it is a combination of factors: Amazon being the market leader with its closed eco-system and ease of purchasing, the lack of clear poster child for e-book piracy since the demise of library.nu 2 years ago, the fragmentation of ebook pirate market.

Disclaimer: I own multiple e-readers including a Amazon Kindle DX demo model that I reflashed into a regular one.

I think it's a combination of availability and experience, and motive. Let's take each in turn.

It seems (I've never done it) that it's fairly easy to copy music or movies into mp4 or mp3 format and strip the DRM. How would you do that with an e-book? What format would it be coming from? What would you copy it to? Is kindle the standard?

The lack of availability, means that you're more likely to find the book you want in the digital book store, and not have to hunt around for it on a torrent site or something. You also don't have to worry about the format of the book working well with the format of your device. Though this may have been an issue for music and movies at one time, I don't think it is anymore.

Lastly, what is the motive of a person who is going to copy or steal a book. First off, I've got friends in digital publishing at a major publishing house, and I've never heard of a time they are not concerned about keeping their jobs. They get paid nothing, and the idea that 'Publishers are having unparalleled profitablilty' is questionable. They have lower revenues per book, and lower costs per sale, but overall, they haven't been able to cut the overhead of editors, marketing, etc. to make the businesses more profitable. I don't think we look at stealing a book and think "the publisher and the author are making squilions of dollars, what's the difference if I get a free copy". It also appears that book publishers don't play the games that other media publishers play with respect to having the correct viewer rights in this region, delayed release dates, etc. etc.

We also spend much more time with a book than a movie, and though music may stick with us for a longer period of time, we are probably less inclined to consider an 'amortization' of the number of times a song is played version the amount of time we spend with a book.

If I'm going to dedicate time over the next 3 weeks to reading a book, I'm more willing to pay $10 for it, and I can always go back to it, vs paying $7 to rent a movie which is only available to me for the next few hours.

because reading a book takes much more time than listening to a song or watching a movie.

I don't understand how that affects the ability to pirate them. I can find almost any song, tv show, or movie on torrent. Finding ebooks is much harder.

Besides availability like you mention, what parent is saying (I think) is that you may go an pirate a movie because it's just 1.5 hrs of entertainment and then you won't see it again, and maybe it wasn't even that good, so it's harder to fork over the money. But you'll stay with an ebook for a few days (and perhaps revisit afterwards) so you feel you get more value, so you are more ready to pay.

I got a different impression.

To watch 10 hours worth of movies, one needs to pirate 5 of them.

To read 10 hours of books, one might only need to pirate 1.

Therefore less books are pirated, given you'd spend a proportionate amount of time there.

In response to OP, I think clearly not as many people read books as watch movies.

those are good points too

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