For AG: A Solution to Book Piracy

Chris, I have heard you before say that there is going to be no way to prevent the priacy of books the way music was hijaked by Napster, or words to that effect. Also, you have said that the way musicians got around this to still make money is to improve their talent to make people want to see them live, and that there is no such platform for authors to do the same thing. Well, what about (in the future when this is a problem) simply serializing novels online, then when they are finished print books for people who are old fashioned and don't like their eyes to bleed when they read. You could make up for the lost revenue in book sales with advertising on the website. I know this plan isn't perfect, and I admit that I am a publishing neophyte. I know that publishers want exlusivity and they balk at the idea of printing something everybody has already seen for free, but if and when book priacy becomes a major problem, wouldn't this be at least a starting point for the solution?

It might be. Who knows? I don't think I would read a book that way. (Serialized). The people who are really waiting for a book from an author, like, say, you guys, will buy the book anyway.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be something to try, but whether it could make up for the loss of revenue might be tough. I suppose you could do a subscription model. Where you pay a buck a chapter as the book comes out, or something. But again, people would just wait a week or a month and download the pirated version.

I don't know.

that buck a chapter model didn't work for Stephen King. I'd still love for him to finish The Plant - he only did 6 installments.
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To Learn is to Know
To Know is to Love
To Love is our aim

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Why should we bother with immortality when we are eternal?

Lawrence Watt-Evans has been doing some interesting experiments. He had been writing a series which the publisher was no longer interested in, but in which there was a significant amount of fan interest. The problem was that the fan interest wasn't high enough that a publisher could make a profit on it. So L W-E decided to cut out the middleman.

But it wasn't like King's serial; L W-E decided as long as donations came in at $100 per week, he'd keep writing. He published chapters on the net as they finished, but once the book was done found a publisher and pulled the electronic copies. It worked well enough that he's now done several novels by this process.

Has he gotten rich? No. But he's learned a lot, and is blazing an interesting trail. You can see his process at The Spriggan Experiment.

The way I see it, nothing will replace the physical book entirely. The closest we may come is electronic paper, and that will be the only thing that can truly threaten the printed book, but it will still be physical because we like to thumb through, we like quickly flicking back and forth, we like the ease of using a book.

That said, the digital age has and will continue to dilute the sales of physical printed media (as opposed to physical electronic media) and that is sad. However, I do believe there are ways to create revenue streams through a digital approach to books - the important task is making legitimate use seem a better option than piracy.

Now, there will always be those pre-disposed to piracy, who will go out of their way to get their hands on something for nothing. There always has been. The key is to create an appropriate bicycle lock - a protection system that deters the honest thief from just taking the bicycle (they need bolt cutters and some effort to take it). DRM attempted this approach for digital media, but it failed because it prevented people from using the media in a way that made sense to them; digital media does not follow the same rules as physical items. Therefore, a digital "bicycle lock" cannot behave the same way - you don't want your digital book or album chained to the digital equivalent of a lamp post (i.e. iPod).

So far, outside of selling, the popular way to monetize any digital content has been advertising. For authored material like essays and short stories (often just blog entries, these days), this appears to work well as long as you can give people a reason to come back day after day. This may not work so well for novels. That said, the selling approach won't work without some kind of DRM as otherwise, piracy is too easy. Bespoke file formats won't work, they'll just exacerbate people (why doesn't this work on my X book reader when it works on my Y book reader?), and DRM that limits the hardware that can be used will have the same effect.

So, how can this work? Well, I think a system much like XBOx Live is a good model. I can log-in to my XBOX Live account from anywhere - my XBOX, someone else's XBOX, my PC, your Mac, my mobile phone - and I can view my friends, send them messages etc. If my e-books were DRM'd to an account like that, I can see it being acceptable. As it is becoming the norm for devices to be connected to the Internet, e-book readers could easily access your e-book account to verify the content you want to read and even access your online library, you could even carry a locally unlocked version that IS tied to the device should you head to an area without connectivity. This system would give you the freedom to read the e-book on whatever device you want but still allows the authors and publishers to have a reasonable control over the revenue.
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Twitter: jefftunes

Well, funny you should say that.
I _did_ download, for free, via IRC the first three or four books by one guy by the name of Christopher Moore.
And guess what? I laughed my ass off at them, and then couldn't wait for the next ones to be scanned and uploaded, so all the rest I bought in hardcover the week they came out. Also bought a few as presents for others (TSA makes a nice chrissie prezzle, btw). But I still download them (many others) just because it's so damn convenient to have hundreds of books in your jeans pocket.
Think of e-books as the 21st century library. I loved to go to the library, but now I'd have to drive a few miles (rather than walk 3 blocks) to one, it's filled with frumpy crap that would be sold from the rotating shelf at the flea market, poor & smelly people using the computer, and audio books on freaking cassette tapes. Browsing around to find new stuff that might be interesting? Ahahaha. Nope.
E-books, I can browse, download and read while sitting on the fucking crapper, ferfuxake! Nothing beats THAT convenience.
It is of course the respective author's right to determine how his books are distributed. But it e-books _is_ a channel that deserves attention.
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It finally happened. My conscience stopped working. I've never felt so free.

Ginjg wrote:

that buck a chapter model didn't work for Stephen King. I'd still love for him to finish The Plant - he only did 6 installments.

I may be misremembreing, Gingj, but I think when I read "The Plant" a few years back, it was the entire version... my room-mate at the time subscribed to Cemetary Dance and had downloaded the (I thought) complete story...
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"Jesus... is NOT a zombie... I shouldn't have to tell you that."

- "Bones"

I didn't even know you could pirate a book...
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And God said: 'Let there be Satan, so people don't blame everything on me. And let there be lawyers, so people don't blame everything on Satan.'

Me neither.

But if it means you have to sit at your computer to read the book, I'll pass. I have to be able to take it with me and I don't have an electronic book reader thingy.
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Mark it 8, Dude.

These days you could probably read a book on an iPod (in .txt or .rtf format, at least). But I wouldn't know, 'cause I don't have a cat.

And I thought that "pirating" a book means that you take an existing story, change the protagonists to pirates, and then do slight rewriting for adjustment. So, for instance, if someone were to "pirate" Anne of Green Gables...
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"If you allow yourself to be offended, then you're a bit of [a] nitwit."
(Christopher Moore)

Skippykelly wrote:

I didn't even know you could pirate a book...

Cut spine off book.
Feed pages into sheet-feed scanner.
Pick up scanned pages, feed them through the scanner again for the other sides.
Let OCR and spell-checking software deal with it.
Proof-read.
Distribute file to readers who also proof-read it.
Format it.
Version 5.0 is usually a perfect facsimile of the book. Except you can store hundreds of them into a PDA that fits in your pockets.
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It finally happened. My conscience stopped working. I've never felt so free.

Sounds like you've done this before...
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And God said: 'Let there be Satan, so people don't blame everything on me. And let there be lawyers, so people don't blame everything on Satan.'

Kar98 wrote:

Skippykelly wrote: I didn't even know you could pirate a book... Cut spine off book. . . .

Easier methods:

* Have an inside guy at the publisher who gets you a copy of the electronic manuscript just submitted by your favorite author. You then give a copy to a friend. The fourth or fifth friend in the chain puts it on the internet.

* Rely on the fact that most commercial ebook protection schemes can be cracked in minutes. Within a day of release of the commercial electronic version, it's on the internet.

Skippykelly wrote:

Sounds like you've done this before...

Check with the Russians. They've got online book piracy -- including Russian editions of the AG's books -- down to a science.

kar98 wrote:

Rely on the fact that most commercial ebook protection schemes can be cracked in minutes.

Doesn't one of the methods consist of marking the outside edge with a magic marker? Oh, wait -- that was for those protected audio CDs a few years ago...

(By the way, this morning I saw a parked car with the Maryland license plate reading just "KAR." A coincidence?)
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"If you allow yourself to be offended, then you're a bit of [a] nitwit."
(Christopher Moore)

Last edited by mllefifi on Wed Dec 17, 2008 12:37 pm; edited 1 time in total

There is a plate in California that reads "DEV CAR." It's an obscure joke, but Ken will get it.