Following on from my previous post on the rise of ebook piracy I thought I’d throw in my two cents on how I think the publishing industry can combat ebook piracy.
The strategy I’d suggest is similar to the one being adopted by the music industry now. Instead of looking to heavily control distribution with rights management the industry needs to focus on two things: availability and ease.
Firstly, ALL books must be available in ebook format. It is simply unforgiveable for a publisher not to have their entire catalogue available. The old argument that the market isn’t big enough to support a print run just doesn’t exist in the ebook world. The low cost of digitising books now means that even if only 20 people want to read a text then it’s worth making it available. If it isn’t available then people will do exactly what they’ve been doing for centuries now. They will try secondhand bookshops. They will try borrowing from friends. They will try libraries. And now in this digital age they will try the internet. The publishing industry now has a unique opportunity to reclaim the revenue it has historically lost to secondhand buying, borrowing and lending. All they need to do is make the books available.
The next thing the industry needs to do is make it easier to buy books legally than to steal them. No one should ever be more than THREE CLICKS AWAY FROM OWNING ANY PARTICULAR EBOOK. How would this work? Well at the moment if I search for “Atonement ebook” one of the top results is for an illegal BitTorrent site. I’ve just tried it and from the search results on the Google homepage it takes 4 clicks to download the book. Now the publishing industry has an opportunity here to beat the pirates by getting the book to users in less than 4 clicks. This is eminently achievable. After you’ve done the search just click through to the publisher/retailers site (1 click), click the Buy Now button (2 clicks), confirm your purchase (3 clicks). They need to eliminate all the signing up, entering credit card details and agreeing to be contacted about future offers. It should just be a raw commercial exchange like going to a market and paying $2 cash for a tatty old paperback. No names, no addresses, no receipt; just cash in return for a book.
Until the publishing industry does these two things, makes ALL books available as ebooks and makes it ridiculously easy to buy them, then they are always going to be fighting a losing battle against piracy.
How do the eBook publishers combat piracy right now ?
Do they have web crawlers that detect pirated copies on websites like rapidshare, scribd, bit-torrent etc ?? And do they send notices to these websites to remove the copy from their website?
That’s a good question and one I don’t really know the answer to properly. Certainly a lot of pirated ebooks which have been indexed by Google seem to have been subsequently removed. I suspect however that ebooks aren’t being specifically targeted but are just caught up in moves against music and video piracy.
From what I’ve read ebook piracy isn’t really that big a deal yet. The ebook market itself is still relatively small and the kind of people who have forked out for first generation ebook readers aren’t the kind to be rampantly stealing material to read on them.
I should point out as well that a lot of pirated ebooks are of dubious quality at the moment. In my experience a lot seem to originate from the Indian subcontinent, have been poorly scanned and have not been well formatted or proofread
I’ve heard anecdotally that ebook piracy is more of an issue for sci-fi, textbooks and technical manuals; users of these tend to be more tech-savvy and likely to know where to look for pirate copies.
Considering the small size of the eBooks industry – 12 million USD last quarter
[ src: http://www.openebook.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm#Additional_Global_eBook_Sales_Figures ], I feel that this is not being taken seriously by the publishers.
If I understand correctly, you don’t even want to enter your credit card number. Just click, click, click and that’s that. If car theft was rampant would you advise car dealers to compete with thieves by making it easier to buy a car than to steal one? I think I’ve already heard all the arguments people use to justify their bit-torrent downloads. I don’t buy it (pun not intended)! A large volume of books for IT prople is already available in electronic form – at the click of a mouse: Safari Books Online. But no matter how low they price their product, people still steal from bit-torrent, ’cause you can’t compete with ‘free’.
I think you *can* compete with free. Imagine. I read an online review of a book and next to the review is a link to the ebook. I click on the link. I click the buy button. And hey presto I own the book. Surely that is easier than going to a bittorrent site and searching for the book and running the risk that the text is garbled or poorly scanned or incomplete or that .
The price is obviously important. ebooks are massively overpriced at the moment. It’s a Catch 22 because until the price comes down people won’t buy them in any volume but people will only buy them in volume if they are cheap.
I completely accept that I should pay for books that are in copyright. Writing good books is enornously time-consuming and authors should be rewarded monetarily and otherwise for their efforts. Without that reward writers may not be willing to take the gamble of giving up their day jobs to write. Grudgingly I also accept that publishers should be rewarded for the effort that goes into marketing and editing books. I’d argue that most people feel the way I do.
Having said that I live in a country where books are extraordinarily expensive and ebooks are barely available at all. In this environment I think booklovers like myself can be forgiven for turning to the darkside once in a while.
I don’t disagree with your post, but I thought I’d toss out a couple of issues that I can see. First, the author (theoretically) controls digital rights. I say “theoretically” because it could’ve been bundled as part of the book’s print rights, in which case, yes, publishers should really have them in their digital catalogues. And there are some authors who refuse to permit digital editions of their books from being legally published.
My other issue is to do with your last comment. As consumers, we feel that ebooks are currently overpriced. I’m not sure what the cost model is for publishers, and I wonder if they (and Amazon) have set a bad benchmark by discounting ebooks and thus setting a consumer expectation on price point. Obviously, as a consumer I’d love it if ebooks were dirt cheap, but I keep changing my mind because I’d actually like the quality of published work to go up, not down. My argument for lower prices is the fact that, legally, I can never resell an ebook. Therefore, as an actual product, I can never recoup my initial investment in it.
I wish publishers and booksellers would experiment a little more. For example, charge in cents for chapters (I’d rather spend $1 on the first 3 chapters and decide I don’t want the book than $5 for a book that will waste my time) or sell ebooks cheaply but charge subscription prices to provide a perpetual online library so I never have to backup my books (although many booksellers are offering this free now, so it’s probably not something they can start charging for anymore).
I love your 3-click rule. Publishers/sellers also need to design their sites/URLs so it’s easy for bloggers/reviewers/readers to link to books.