Internet Book Piracy by Gini Graham Scott

Author:Gini Graham Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Allworth Press
Published: 2016-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

The Growing Call for Alternatives to Piracy

Since 2014, it seems like some of the debate about what to do about book piracy has changed to reflect its pervasiveness and the difficulty of fighting pirates to the need to find new models of getting consumers to buy legal books inexpensively, which will cause piracy to decline. After all, if the pirates are making less money, the reasoning goes, there will be less piracy and fewer pirates. It’s a matter of economic supply and demand. While some of the same tired pro-piracy arguments—that pirates help new writers get discovered, and that not everyone who steals your book would buy it if piracy weren’t an option—still exist, the hope is for a shift to providing individuals with another way to get the material they want in a less costly way, thereby undermining the economic model that helps piracy flourish.

In a February 2014 article, “The Pointlessness of Fighting E-Book Piracy,” Matt Forney argues exactly that. After pointing out that DRM and other anti-piracy measures don’t work well—since they punish people who legally buy books by restricting how they can use them—he asserts: “The simple reality is that if you want to sell anything today, you have no choice but to put up with piracy.”154 He suggests that piracy can be an indicator that people like your work, and the vast majority of customers will buy your books to support you and see you succeed, even if it is on pirate sites like The Pirate Bay, as long as they can buy your book for a reasonable price and see value in it. For example, Matt puts out a lot of quality work for free and finds that people are then willing to buy his books because they figure they are worth the money, after seeing value in his free material.155

While noting the major threats pirated books pose to consumers, writers, and publishers, in an April 2014 column, Naturi Thomas-Millard makes a similar argument in an April 2014 column. He believes that the industry needs to adjust its pricing to make the purchase price more reasonable given the technology changes of the digital age. As he points out, with the rise of e-readers and digital bookstores, it’s easy to strip the DRM protections or digital locks from files, so pirates can mass distribute books—not like the old days when pirated books had to be manually scanned before being uploaded or sold in a counterfeit edition. But there are strategies writers can use to sell books, such as offering free material as a loss leader or making ebooks more inexpensive, given the much lower costs of publishing digital books.156

Thomas-Millard describes how Neil Gaiman noticed that his work was being pirated around the globe, but sales went up in the countries where his work was illegally distributed. So he tried an experiment with his publisher’s approval. He made his entire novel free for a month as a way of “beating the pirates at their own game,”157 and

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