Abbeville Manual of Style on The “Bookster” Threat
By Paul Biba
Even though they don’t do ebooks I always check the Abbeville Manual of Style blog because I enjoy the content so much. They just did this posting which is right on point given some of the stuff we’ve reported on recently. Especially so since Abbeville is a publisher.
A heavy-handed warning to book publishers comes this week from Jack Shafer of Slate, who intones that by fighting to price certain e-books higher than the $9.99 that Amazon wants to charge customers for most titles, publishers will “encourage the establishment” of an illegal file-sharing site for books. Of course, Mr. Shafer makes the usual qualifications about not actually defending such illegal practices. Still, his message is plain: if a “Bookster” crops up in the next few years, the fault will rest primarily with greedy, obtuse publishers.
Such moralizing is a classic case of blaming the victim, and ignores the blunt realities of digital piracy. (Note: Abbeville does not currently sell any titles as e-books, so we don’t yet have a dog in this fight—only opinions to spare.) The fact is that digital piracy of books and other media content will exist no matter how amicably media companies work with online retailers such as Amazon, and no matter how low they agree to set their prices. The advent of iTunes has not stopped online music theft. It has only curbed it somewhat by providing an exceptionally convenient legal alternative, while robbing all trace of a legitimate excuse from those who engage in it. In working with online retailers to offer legal e-books at a fair price, publishers can only hope, at best, to do the same.
Let’s be clear, however: even if they are slow to accomplish this, an unchecked spree of digital book piracy will be a failure of law enforcement, not of business innovation. Customers do not have the right to steal goods that they can’t obtain as cheaply or conveniently as they might prefer. Writers like Shafer know this, but struggle to rationalize piracy nonetheless: “Basically, before iTunes arrived, if you wanted portable tracks, you had to rip your own, borrow collections from friends, or grab ‘free’ tunes from the ‘pirates’ at Napster or other file-sharing sites.” Nonsense. You could also have invested in a portable CD player and suffered the inconvenience of carrying a little extra weight, because that was the legal option. You didn’t have to steal music any more than we have to go shoplift from Gristedes right now because their prices aren’t as low as we might like, or because they won’t offer the convenience of, say, delivering groceries to our office this minute.If publishers who won’t budge on their e-book prices find themselves losing customers to other publishers who will, or to other media outlets, that’s capitalism. If they find themselves losing revenue to thieves, that’s crime. It would be more constructive for prominent columnists like Shafer to stigmatize that crime—which is now, after all, one of the few that otherwise law-abiding Americans commit regularly—than to rationalize it through victim-blaming. An enormous amount of time, hard work, and money goes into the production of a book (more, we suspect, than most consumers realize), and publishers—many of whom are currently hoping just to survive, not reap outlandish profits—must consider all of this in pricing their goods. For our part, we would encourage readers who love e-books to request them vocally and seek them out actively at the lowest price available, but if high prices persist, to respond by taking their money elsewhere, not stealing. Far from a righteous and effective lobbying technique, the latter behavior is the best way of sabotaging the industry’s ability to make any books available at all.
July 17th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Thanks for the kind words and the posting, Paul, and we’d love to hear some of your readers’ thoughts on the subject.
Austin
The Abbeville Manual of Style
July 17th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Well, I agree that Shafer is indulging in some rhetorical hyperbole. But I daresay that this piece has indulged in some moralistic thinking as well.
July 17th, 2009 at 11:10 am
i agree with the position stated in this piece. it is important that content creators and providers be compensated for their efforts. but keep your costs down, guys. and don’t fantasize that you can cut your costs and not pass any of the savings to us, the consumers. i would *never* pirate a text i believed was too expensive.
i would not read it at all.
ok? i won’t go all drooling and begging for the content. there are more free classics out there than i can hope to read in the rest of my time here on earth. and a heap of content i paid for in print, sitting on my bookcases — some of which i really *might* re-buy in electronic form. and i’m a long-time library user, as well. so it’s not like i will ever be high & dry w/r/t reading matter.
even so. if you compete for my eyes, you could win. but only if the price is right.
July 17th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
I agree with a lot of what they say and they say it quite well. I thought the most poignant point was the following:
“an exceptionally convenient legal alternative”
This will be the only thing that really curbs piracy. Piracy exists because of many factors including but not limited to:
-price
-availability
-content quality (may be better than legal ebook)
-content format/DRM issues
-ease of use
You can never completely stamp out piracy, but if you address the above issues, then you can minimize the piracy and those that still pirate would never be customers anyways so try not to loose sleep over them and just accept that they exist.
July 17th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
I certainly encourage people not to buy books at all from HarperCollins or anyone else that wants to charge close to 200% the price of their paperbacks or identical to hardback prices, most definitely.
Of course, if publishers continue using language like piracy, stealing and theft they are guaranteed to antagonise more and more people into doing so. Want to take the righteous position? Then call a spade a spade, not a loaded gun.
If we are getting into name-calling, and speaking of criminal actions, how about some recent copyright extension grabs?
When 3-D printing and other technological innovations are available and affordable usable, we will hear similar complaining about shop scenarios such as you suggest. Maybe we won’t live to see them all, of course.
Those commercial book printing in shop machines - if they prove successful, guess what could happen with those? Not to mention the commercial grade scanning equipment getting cheaper.
People copied music, and even recorded the radio before there even were CD players, so that argument is silly. Portable CD players were extremely expensive at that time, too, as were CDs.
We care about publishing in general abstractly large terms surviving about as much as publishing cares about any other industry. That is, not very much. As Michael Stackpole pointed out the other day, when it comes down to it, it is the authors that matter.
The implication that it all might suddenly disappear is absolute rubbish. As far as books go, that is. If every single publisher on the whole planet vanished tonight, there would be authors selling work directly the next day. Not as many, but there would still be some, and a new scenario would shake out. So that sort of ‘apocalyptic’ scenario fearmongering is just silly. Most of the publishers that I remember being around when I was a kid are gone. Amazingly enough, stuff is being shovelled out in the millions.
People, being people, not robots or sheep will do what they do. As Cory Doctorow keeps saying, stuff will not get harder to copy, barring some sort of technological collapse (and publishing is toast then, anyway). You don’t produce in a timely and sensible manner, whatever the media, whether books, tv, music, whatever, then guess what?
I don’t know about you, but I do not know one single person who has never copied anything. That even goes for my long departed great-grandparents, and law-enforcement officials.
So, a fair chunk of the publishing people making these arguments are of course hypocritical, given they will have done this themselves, and will certainly be engaging in such activities with other media, or software, even if not books. So ‘thieves’ telling other ‘thieves’ what to do is hardly credible, speaking of righteousness.
Keeping that in mind :
Publisher : “Don’t copy”
Reader : “Ok, sell me a copy.”
Publisher : “No. Never going make one. We refuse.”
Reader : “Thefore, I make a copy as I don’t want a paper version, and will never, ever buy such a thing. You aren’t losing any money.”
Publisher : “Don’t care. Don’t want you to. Wah.”
Reader : “You are kidding, right?”
–
Publisher : “Don’t copy”
Reader : “Ok, sell me a copy.”
Publisher : “No. Never going to, you live in the wrong place.”
Reader : “You are kidding, right?”
–
Publisher : “Don’t copy”
Reader : “Ok, sell me a copy”
Publisher : “Only if you use Equipment X”
Reader : “You are kidding, right?”
–
Publisher : “Don’t copy”
Reader : “Ok, sell me a copy”
Publisher : “Sure, that’ll be $26.95″
Reader : “You do know we know simple arithmetic? That is, you are kidding, right?”
–
July 17th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
I think that massive file sharing of ebooks is inevitable, but I don’t think the “piracy” will come first and foremost in the realm of novels or popular non-fiction titles. The file-sharing will come in the textbook market, where publishers have for decades been ripping off students. Why spend $149 for that biology textbook when you can just download a PDF copy for free?
And young people won’t even think twice about it. The younger generation already believes that information content should be freely available. They won’t think twice about sharing the ebook files of their textbooks with their friends. DRM schemes won’t stop them; there will never be a DRM scheme made that won’t be cracked within a week of its release. Most professors will look the other way because they, for the most part, sympathize with the students.
It’s inevitable.
July 17th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Ethics and morality aside–which is increasingly common these days, no?–piracy is, like everything else a cost/benefit issue. The cost of toeing the line vs the benefit of ignoring it.
Scanning-ocr’ing-proofing a book is hard work.
Given a halfway decent alternative, most folks would rather *not* waste time doing it. Given a choice, most folks would buy a reasonably-priced ebook than pirate it.
The good news–and what the SLATE article is warning about–is that ebook reading and ebook piracy are not *yet* “mainstream” activities the way music piracy was earlier in the decade; so far “everybody” doesn’t do it. Mostly, because books are not top 40 music and ebook buyers are a different demographic than the HS and college age music fans that made music piracy an everyday thing.
The bad news is that, as ereaders become ever more popular and affordable, the younger demographic *is* going to get involved. (Especially once e-textbooks become the norm).
At that point, like it or not, publishers will survive at the sufferance of the readers and:
1- Some readers will only buy books on their terms and pass on the others–we are *drowning* in content. If an author doesn’t want to sell his book on reasonable terms, some other author will. Publishing is a marketplace and competition will rule.
2- Some readers will take what they’re offered like mana from the heavens and be grateful to have it at all, regardless of the pricing.
3- Some readers will pirate anything, regardless of the price and quality
4- Some readers will only pirate out of spite and disrespect for the publishers that think they belong in the second category.
Openly *bragging* about their intent to force higher prices, as some publishers are doing today, is going to produce a lot more “pirates as rebels” and cost the entire industry a lot more than a rational pricing model ever would. In fact, a rational business model built on the understanding that 21st century publishing is about content and value and not print would likely result in higher margins *and* higher volumes as well as less piracy than the current assumption that readers are a fixed resource to be mined solely for a maximum per capita profit.
Publishers need to understand they they are not in control. The market is in control. The more they fight the market the worse it will be for everybody.
Publishers need to understand that ebooks are *not* just massless print books or a stand-in for print.
Publishers need to understand that if they want to charge premium pricing for an ebook they need to deliver a premium product. Instead of holding back the electronic edition of a book until they’ve milked the market for all those willing to pay a premium for the smell of ink on dead tree pulp, how about offering up a deluxe ebook edition on an advanced timetable? There’s at least one publisher who gets this and manages to charge triple for early-access ebook versions of upcoming releases. Its all about the added value. Instead of looking for ways to maximize their take off the unwary, they should be looking to increase the quality of the product they distribute; looking for new talent through increase slush-pile mining, not abolishing it; improving the inhouse editing capabilities, not cutting back; improving marketing and direct sales, not relying on retailers to do all the heavy lifting.They might start by learning some economic basics about frictionless transactions, disintermediation, and demand elasticity. If they can’t get the basics right they can’t properly serve their authors *or* their customers and they *will* be deposed.
Authors are indispensable.
Readers are indispensable.
Publishers are not; given enough incentive, they can be and will be replaced. Publishers are nothing more and nothing less than middlemen; lately it seems they’ve forgotten this.
They don’t create books.
They don’t consume them.
They only help distribute them.
Once upon a time, that made them gatekeepers of an industry.
No more.
Those days are gone.
Publishers need to start making themselves actually useful to authors and useful to buyers. Or else they will be bypassed by authors or by retailers or by the customers (through piracy).
There are few things more pathetic than deposed dictators and a lot of the big publishing houses are headed exactly that way…
Make war on your customers–through obnoxious, intrusive DRM and absurd pricing schemes; and brag about it–and they will make war on you.
July 17th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Writers like Shafer know this, but struggle to rationalize piracy nonetheless: “Basically, before iTunes arrived, if you wanted portable tracks, you had to rip your own,
Let me get this straight: this writer for the Abbeville Manual of Style thinks that ripping CDs I bought fair and square to mp3s so I can carry them conveniently is piracy?
Well, so much for the Abbeville Manual of Style.
Next!
July 17th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Cat - You’re right, that isn’t piracy, but it’s only fair to finish the sentence we quoted.
“…borrow collections from friends, or grab ‘free’ tunes from the ‘pirates’ at Napster or other file-sharing sites.”
The latter is most definitely piracy–not “piracy” in scare quotes, as the article would have it. Even “borrowing” collections from friends, in the digital age, usually means obtaining a free, permanent, duplicate version–not at all like “borrowing” a lawn mower and certainly another way of taking an end run around the market.
For the record, as aspiring authors ourselves, we’re at least as concerned here for authors as for publishers. It’s easy enough to rationalize piracy by shaking your fist at evil, faceless media companies–publishers, record labels, etc. But if in the Internet age all the middlemen were to disappear and artists could sell their work directly to buyers on a large scale, ten bucks says you’d see pirates turning their convenient anger on those greedy, obtuse artists.
Austin
The Abbeville Manual of Style
July 17th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Austin: The point that Mr Shafer was making (heavy-handedly or not) was that the reason the music business got “Napstered” was because they lost sight of where the market was going and thought they could eternally ride the CD gravy train. They failed to manage their business properly and properly serve their customers needs, most especially when it came to the top 40 singles business.
Don’t know if you’re old enough to remember, but once upon a time, people could legally buy individual hit singles for a buck or so and not have to buy a full album if they didn’t want to. They could even buy anthology albums with hit song mixes from different artists and different labels. The studios killed both options with the migration from vynil to CD.
They ignored the emergence of MP3 tech and instead focused on killing DAT by making sure consumers couldn’t even cut digital “mix” tapes.
Then when MP3 players first came out, their gut reaction was to sue the hardware vendors to again block users ability to control what they listened to wherever they wanted to. Then, when they couldn’t get the hardware off the market, they turned to ultra-draconian DRM that killed off any legal music sales.
Essentially they *made* napster viable.
(And then, so afraid were they of napster, that they turned control of their industry over to Apple.)
The publishing business is now approaching the same crossroads the music industry reached ten years ago; they must choose to serve their customers (authors *and* readers) or go to war against them.
No middle ground here.
Just bear in mind that the computer industry is strongly infested by “might is right” thinking that believes that anything that is technically feasible is allowed and that anything non-tangible is essentially worthless.
Ebooks as a technology is something that is not going away and ebook buyers/readers are by definition literate and educated folks that understand fair value. And they understand they are in control now; if not treated with respect they just might decide that the techies and open sourcerors are in fact right.
In which case we *all* lose, not just the publishers.
If in doubt, just look to Detroit and the bankrupt auto companies that for so long ignored their customers’ needs and the changing marketplace.
July 18th, 2009 at 10:02 am
Jack Shafer has a point. One of the reasons why iTunes is so successful is because it is an alternative to piracy. The fact is, piracy takes a lot of work. You have to deal with dodgy sites, oddball formats, the risk of virii and who knows what else? When the alternative is $1, the alternative is cheaper. The real issue is that book publishers are a book delivery system. Amazon is a book delivery system. Why have two? There still is a need for editors, but in time publishers will disappear.