e-Pirates    

e-Pirates: The Scourge of the Rising Tide of e-Publishing

by Rob Preece

Imagine you see a brand new pizza place offering a free slice of pizza for stopping in and checking out their menu. It's a perfectly reasonable promotion and, if you're feeling hungry, you might just want to stop in and try it.

Suppose, though, that you're not hungry for pizza. You decide to go to the steak place across the street, but refuse to pay. After all, you're helping the steak guy. Free food is good marketing and you're just giving the steak guy a chance to offer the marketing he should have been doing all along. It isn't your fault the steak guy didn't catch on to the brilliant approach taken by the pizza guy.

If this logic seems a bit shaky to you, you're right. Yet it is exactly the logic offered by the pirates of the new millennium, people who first steal e-books and other electronic content and then try to tell the authors and publishers that they are really helping them; they're fans, not thieves. This kind of logic doesn't work for steak restaurants, it doesn't work for sneaking into Rolling Stones concerts, and it doesn't work for e-books either.

I'm not going to belabor the law here except to say that the law is extremely clear. E-book customers are not allowed to copy books they purchase (or steal) and sell them, give them away for free, trade them, or edit them into Fanfiction for their favorite television series. For more information on the legalities, check out Brenna Lyons' excellent article, e-Books and the Law.

I'm not even going to talk about how getting sued for piracy could ruin your day...and get you fired. Instead, I'm going to focus on who gets hurt by pirates, how to recognize when a book is being offered by pirates rather than legitimate sources, and what readers and authors can do together to limit piracy.

There's a common myth that about piracy, the myth that it doesn't really hurt anyone...or maybe that they're just hurting some huge corporation. So, how does it impact an author if her book is pirated?

Actually, authors are hurt in a number of ways. I'll list just some of them:

1. Authors are paid based on sales. Every sold book trickles a few pennies (or even dollars) to the author. Every lost sale takes that money from her pocket.



2. Book sales sites like Amazon and Fictionwise.com provide best-seller lists which offer exposure to new readers who often feel comfortable buying what other people have enjoyed. A few sales one way or the other can make a big difference in bagging the all-important top ten position on the best-seller lists.



3. Publishers determine whether to offer new contracts to authors, how to promote books, and whether to offer additional editions (e.g., audio or print in addition to e-book versions) based on sales. Sales lost to piracy can damage not only the author's current income, but her future income as well.



4. Unlike musicians, who make money from concerts as well as recordings, authors typically earn writer-income only from book sales. Book sales are the only way authors receive compensation.

What about those greedy publishers, though? Isn't stealing a fair way to punish them for their exorbitant prices? Unfortunately, publishing is an expensive business. Producing a book costs money for editing, producing the actual books, cover art, storage and bandwidth, reseller discounts, marketing, and...oh, yes...paying the authors. Every year, electronic publishers go out of business because of losses. Even big New York publishers are consolidating and cutting costs.

The prices offered by one publisher may be more than you chose to pay, just as the prices at any given restaurant may be higher than you can afford. The solution is not to steal the food (or the book) but to buy where you can afford.

I will note one important difference; many publishers do offer at least some of their books for free, unlike most restaurants. And, you can read practically an unlimited number of public domain books at sites like Gutenberg.org.

Some people just don't care, of course. If they can save money getting pirated books, they feel free to do so, without regard to the law, the starving authors, or the bankrupt publishers. Is this one of those cases where immoral thieves have an advantage over the rest of us? Actually, it turns out, this isn't the case.

Through careful search on the web, it's possible to find sites that offer deals too good to be true. Imagine being able to get all of the latest best-sellers for a flat ten dollar lifetime membership, for example. Wouldn't that be worth starving a few authors to get? One word of warning here-remember who you're dealing with.

e-Book pirates may claim to be the Robin Hoods of the industry, but they're lawbreakers. What do you suppose happens when you enter your credit card information in a site run by professional lawbreakers? Hundreds of readers have discovered that they not only didn't get the e-books they thought they were buying, they also had turned their credit cards over to people who drained their accounts. Like the notorious spam/phishers always wanting to transfer huge amounts of money to credulous e-mail users, e-book pirates scam the gullible for their bank and credit card information. That ten dollar membership fee may be the smallest part of your cost. Remember, pirates don't just hurt authors and publishers, they'd be happy to hurt you (and since authors and publishers tend not to have much money, hurting you might be better business). Pirated e-books serve as Trojan Horses, letting pirates insert malware (viruses etc.) into your computer, stealing passwords and other information.

Okay, let's say you're convinced. Being a pirate means you're stealing from hardworking authors rather than from nameless billionaires, and putting yourself at risk for identity theft. You resolve not to send books you've purchased around willy-nilly, but still, everyone likes a bargain. So, how do you distinguish between a pirate site and a site that just offers bargains (or even free books)? After all, nobody comes out and says they're breaking the law. Many sites claim to be perfectly legal, authorized by publishers, or to hold certain special rights. If you're not a lawyer, what can you do?

The most basic rule is to doubt anyone who offers a deal too good to be true. Can you get unlimited supplies of the latest best-sellers for practically nothing? It's a pirate. Do they claim they're legal but offer what look like scanned in cover art and neglect to include the publication date and publisher? They're a pirate. Do they claim rights under "fair use" or "Freedom of Information?" They're definitely a pirate! Do they want your credit card information before you can see their (wonderful and extensive) download choices? They're a pirate. Do they offer to find any book you request? Yep, a pirate again. As a rule, brand new sites should be viewed with caution, and Yahoo groups offering e-books for trade and sale are almost certainly pirates.

One thing to do (rather than to avoid) is to buy directly from publishers or from authorized distributors like Amazon and Fictionwise. EPIC, the industry association of electronically published authors and electronic publishers, includes most reputable electronic publishers as members and lists them on the EPIC website (www.epicauthors.com). EPIC members also work together to identify and shut down pirate sites, meaning that your lifetime membership might not last as long as an afternoon.

In the early days of the ePublishing business, many publishers attempted to deal with piracy through encryption and digital rights management. This approach left some legitimate customers without access to their e-books when they changed computers and made it difficult to provide content for the rich array of reading platforms (e.g., Windows PCs, Macintosh, Palm and Windows PDAs, cell phones, and dedicated e-book readers). For customer convenience, therefore, many e-books are offered without encryption. But if piracy continues to grow, encryption may become more common, inconveniencing legitimate customers.

Piracy is the scourge of the new millennium. By stealing books, pirates defraud authors of fair pay for all of their work, bankrupt publishers, open themselves to identity theft and computer malware, and violate the law. Yet, ample sources of perfectly legal e-books can be found that offer affordable or even free electronic literature. Pirates may spin stories of their "rights" to steal, of their philanthropic wish to make e-books available to the masses, of the "marketing benefits" they offer to authors by spreading e-book content more widely. In fact, like most pirates of an earlier day, the only beneficiaries of their philanthropy are the pirates themselves-and even then, only for the short period of time before they are hunted down and eliminated. The victims aren't just authors and publishers, they're the readers and legitimate customers themselves.

Rob Preece is publisher of BooksForABuck.com, a source of affordable electronic fiction specializing in romance, science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. He is also an award-winning and best-selling author, and has written extensively on electronic publishing, computer security, and the future of literacy in an increasingly post-literate society. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics and lives and works in Dallas Texas. His website is www.BooksForABuck.com and he can be reached at publisher@booksforabuck.com.

Reprinted with permission of the author.