You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop - Scalzi on Writing by John Scalzi

Author:John Scalzi
Language: eng
Format: epub

The Stupidity of Worrying About Piracy

(May 13, 2005)

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, to which I belong, recently e-mailed its members a poll about Amazon's "look within the book" feature, about how they felt about it and whether they'd want to let Amazon browsers check out their books online—and how much of the book they'd want to let people read. It's a perfectly legitimate question, and I think that it should be up to the writers and publishers to make that decision. But whomever it is that wrote the poll (I assume Andrew Burt, as it's hosted on his site) is apparently so paranoid about piracy that they've felt it was perfectly fine to add editorial comment in the poll itself warning about the dangers of Amazon-borne piracy.

For example, one question asking how much of a work one would want to have accessible to Amazon browsers is phrased this way: "What percent would you want blocked of your work to prevent piracy?" I'm not a professional pollster, but I know a push poll question when I see it, and I don't like it any more when it comes from SFWA than when it comes from a political party.

My response to the poll, incidentally, was that I wanted all of the book available for Amazon shoppers to browse. I want this for many reasons, not the least of which is simply parity of shopping experience to bookstores, where one can go up to the bookshelves, crack open a book, and read as much of it as one wants to see if one is interested in making a purchase. As it happens, I don't buy very many books online because I can't open the book and see the text, and with new writers especially, I'm not going to buy without checking out the book first.

Now, flip this over: I'm a new writer and I know for a fact that a rather substantial percentage of my sales have been online sales, thanks to the fact that so many purchases of Old Man's War have been driven by bloggers, and because for various reasons the book has been damned hard to find in actual bookstores (there's never been a single copy in my local bookstore, for example). Why would I shoot my sales in the foot by not letting readers browse my book, just as much as they'd like to browse, just like they would be able to do in a brick and mortar store?

The quick and obvious answer to this—if one is paranoid about piracy—is that in a brick and mortar store, someone can't take a screen capture of your book, run it through software and make a readable text file of your book that they then post on KaZaa, arrrrrr, for all their scurvy friends to read for free. And the answer to this is: Well, jeez, people. As if that very same would-be pirate couldn't check out my book from the library and do the same damn thing with a scanner.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.