NOT YOUR GRANDFATHER’S PIRACY, Part II: How the e-book will regenerate revenue for the author
When a used book is sold, not one dime from that transaction makes it back to the publisher or copyright holder. Next fall and spring, consider how many high school and college students, across this great land of ours, will read Catcher in the Rye. Then consider that a majority of those copies will be festooned with bright yellow USED stickers. In your face, Salinger!
Well, it’s payback time. There’s a new reading medium in town and it promises to capture all that lost revenue and redirect it to the rightful recipients. How? Back to the dinner party. The host simply can’t lend you the one e-book. To do so, she’d have to hand over the e-reader itself which means handing over all her e-books, perhaps even her entire library. You could ask her to suspend her hosting pleasures so she can burn a copy, but that would be very rude of you. And the e-book is priced to make you weigh the cost of the book against the cost of being rude. After all, you would like to be invited back.
Isn’t that how iTunes broke the wave of music piracy? By forcing the average law-abiding citizen to weigh committing a crime against paying less than a buck for a song? It helped that the recording industry had already begun suing little girls for piracy, as if someone in Legal had taken a page from Sun Tzu.
Your only real option is to go buy your own e-copy for $9.99. And wow, look at that! Revenue where before there would have been none.
Thanks, e-book!
How much will e-book piracy cost the industry? That’s a misleading question. But it’s equally misleading to ask how much lost revenue the e-book will recapture for the publishing industry and the copyright holders.
Anyway, isn’t this good news for writers? Maybe. One could argue that even if readers buy used, they’re still perpetuating the author’s work and reputation, which may have a much greater monetary payoff further down the road. For example, the work may remain viable for many generations simply because so many people have already read it. Then again, not all works are destined to join the canon, not even junior varsity, so it behooves the publisher and copyright holder to cash in as soon and as often as possible.
That the blogosphere is rampant with such debate is evidence of the havoc e-books are wreaking in the collective mind. Because the closer we look, the more we realize that e-books aren’t like physical books. The content is being divorced from the container. In the past, the buyer had the right to resell, trade, or give away the object. The copyright remained distinct from the object; buying a copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises didn’t include ownership of the film rights.
The e-book is already being understood more as something leased indefinitely. Or licensed like software, which one can buy but never really own. But the real limitation is the e-reader itself. When Grandpa died, his physical books were divvied up by his heirs. Some were kept, some were sold, and the rest donated. As physical objects, they endured in the physical world, ready for a new generation of readers.
But in the future, what will happen to all the e-books on Grandpa’s e-reader? Unless the device is relatively new, it’s likely to be stacked up with the rest of his outdated gadgets. If you don’t agree, just consider what happens today when one is bequeathed an old laptop that has too little memory and still runs Windows2000, if it still runs at all.
Hello, electronic waste recycler. Good-bye books.
By Andrew Dugas
July 30th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
I read your piece and remembered reading years ago about the clock of the long now. One small piece of this philosophy concerns the expanding black hole in our narrative as more of our information, personal and cultural, is digitized. Committing our cultural heritage to electronic formats certainly raises the caution flag, especially as they become the main means of deployment. I have read theories that in time a printed book will be a rarity and available primarily to the elite due to the production cost alone. Much of the less popular material will certainly become lost to us as our process of digitizing material and the tools we use to access it today become obsolete tomorrow. Who will make the decision as to what is of enough value to justify the expense of updating it? We have only to look at the landfill full of our 8 tracks or early zip disks to understand how quickly a technology and the materials that depend on it become obsolete. I would say that your questions are the beginning of a cautionary tale.
July 30th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I doubt that additional re-sale revenue will offset the revenue lost due to piracy. Apple’s iTunes store shows that some consumers are willing to do the right thing and pay for content, but online sales have in no way made up for lost sales of conventional CDs. Even including online sales, total music sales have been shrinking by 20% (or more) per year since 2000.
As a writer, do I really want publishing industry revenue to shrink every year by 20%? But that’s what seems to happen when things go digital and unlicensed. It’s happening in music. It’s happening in journalism (goodbye Boston Globe, Seattle P-I, and a dozen other venerable newspapers).
Fiction is next. Let’s say Joe Hardback reads the eBook version of my book and loves it. He loves it so much he emails it to all 200 guys at the Moose Lodge. His son finds it (along with more salacious content) on the family media server and reads it, maybe emails it to a few of his cooler friends. Sooner or later it ends up on an open download service like BitTorrent, available to anyone.
So what’s on my royalty statement at the end of the month after all this enthusiastic multi-generational reading? What do I get for my three years of hard labor in the literary salt mines? Zero.
July 31st, 2009 at 10:15 am
The piracy on the level of the Joe Hardback example should be rare, but also we should be so lucky. While I take note of Gladwell’s critique of Chris Anderson’s assertions in his new book, FREE, generalized piracy benefits the author in non-monetary ways that may parlayed into monetary rewards down the road. If your book becomes popular at the Moose Lodge (ahem) and through the techie son, while no dollars have been made, an audience most definitely has been.
Seth Harwood used this approach, giving away tens of thousands of PDFs of his novel JACK WAKES UP. Those freebies haven’t kept the trade paperback from making the best sellers list (#9 on the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association, May 2009).
So if you see those pirated PDFs at the Lodge as lost revenue, sure, but the other side of things is that you’ve now got an audience. Which, if properly exploited (in a good way), can drive real sales. And maybe get Hollywood to take notice.
Of course, that depends on where the author is in their career. If you’re starting out, the audience-building argument is solid. If you’re JD Salinger, maybe not so much.
As for recaptured revenues from e-books off-setting losses due to piracy, I think you’re underestimating the size of the used book market and its impact on new book sales, there’s also the immeasurable losses due to book sharing. A friend of mine recently lent me his copy of “The Road.” Cormac and his publisher got nothing, but you know, now I’m more likely to go see the movie.
August 2nd, 2009 at 3:24 pm
When Joe Mooselodge copies a bunch of ebooks off a free download site, is he going to pick the books by some shmuck small-time author he’s never heard of? Or Tom Clancy and James Patterson? Clearly the latter.
As a shmuck small-time author myself, piracy puts me at a disadvantage, even if I want to offer my work for free. Why would someone download and read my work for free when they can read best-selling established authors for free?
Lost revenue due to loans and re-sales of conventional books is also something of a non-issue. Publishers already bundle in a loan surcharge into the price of hardcover books, which have a longer loan-life than paperbacks. Libraries buy hardcover books that they may loan to thousands of people, but they pay for it.
I believe that piracy cheapens the value of intellectual property for all writers. While musicians can reclaim some lost pirated revenue with the money they make on live performances, writer can not.
Piracy, by definition steals value. It can only add value to valueless things. By creating easily pirated works, we are de-valuing what we ourselves, as authors and readers, care so much about.