Oh, there’s some come here to see me hanged; and some to buy my fiddle

[rolanni]

Well, so.

My intention was to get the rest of the. . .junk. . .off the floor of my office and into its proper place, be it another room, or the trash can.

Didn’t get there.  Instead, I filled out some more forms, did some laundry, put all the 99 cent electronic books back up to $2.99 and the $2.99 book back up to $4.99, was cranky in silence about outstanding emails to Various that haven’t been answered yet and it would really be nice if any one of these three things would get resolved, argh, and will shortly go off and do the dishes before sitting on the sofa and starting to read Necessity’s Child.

Well, at least the taxes are done.

I guess I’ll move “clean up office” over to tomorrow’s to-do list.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about off and on is the responses to the issues of copyright and piracy.  A couple commenters mentioned — sapiently — that publishers are shooting themselves in both feet by operating under the default assumption that their customers — or at least the greater number of their customers — would rather steal a copy of a book than buy a legitimate copy.  And so we have DRM, and boneheaded proposals like SOPA.

One idea put forth was that publishers should ally themselves with their customers to fight piracy.  This sounds like exactly what should happen, but — I’m having a hard time envisioning how that would work.

Does anybody have a Plan, a Vision, an Idea about what this collaboration would look like?

 

Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I really liked the suggestion somewhere that people should view ebooks as a service, not a commodity. The whole problem here is that bits are so easy to move around and copy that people wonder why they're being prohibited from moving or copying those bits. The solution, IMO, is to go Netflix-style. Don't try to package those bits in physical object style. Give customers a monthly fee for which they have access to your entire backstock. Every. Last. Book.

How do you figure out paying authors? Every time someone downloads a book, rack up a share for the author. Every month, split the take across shares, minus overhead and expenses driving new acquisitions.

The customer benefit is, suddenly they no longer need a physical library as long as they're subscribed. Books stream to their eReader in minutes, and they can download a new one every few hours if they want to just read... And the heavy readers balance out the light readers.

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I think that idea removes the ability of books (content?) to be more or less valuable, to be repackaged, and it assumes that authors are like hoses, spouting a regulatable stream of similar stuff. Thus we get the mustard-jar comparison with novels...

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

There's innate value in books, otherwise no one would be paying for them/access to them!

People rarely reread books whereas they are prone to desire the same brand of mustard they bought before, so I would base the sales model off of Netflix rather than Safeway's or Walmart. (Except that Netflix licenses content from publishers.)

Books tend to standardized prices as well, you don't have author X's book being twice as expensive as author Y despite being in the same format, for the most part. Where you do have higher prices is in early access to new books-- the switch from hardback to mass market paperback, when it's really the same story being sold.

Which argues for a similar methodology in 'Netboox', let's call it-- a higher fee gives you immediate access to all content still being released in hardcover plus access to a 'VIP lounge' set of forums for discussion of new releases, let's say. A lower fee gives you access to the mass market paperback content.

From the author's point of view, you're getting paid per-reader of your books, which seems pretty fair. You could finetune this: the bigger the book, the more 'shares' you earn per reader. That way you could have novellas, short stories, etc.

I would draw the line at trying to segment the market so people have to pay more to gain access to 'premium authors' or different genres, etc. though. The whole point is to revolutionize the customer's reading experience, and make them love what you (the publisher) do so much they want to give you money, not to alienate them by nickel-and-diming them.

[readinggeek451]

People rarely reread books

I *beg* your pardon! I re-read books all the time. Otherwise I wouldn't bother to own any, instead of having 1500+ in my personal collection. Many of which I have read 10, 15, 20 times, or more.

Some people are re-readers, and some people are not, but DON'T generalize me out of existence.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

True that!

I reread some books; for instance I reread George R. R. Martin's Tuf Voyaging just the other day for about the fourth or fifth time.

I like having the option to reread a book whenever I want to. I think publishers should recognize this instead of implementing some kind of lame 'we are licensing this book/movie/music to you for one reading only' scheme.

It was not my intention to say 'no one rereads books so the publisher model of the future should not incorporate this'.

[suesponies.livejournal.com]

What you and Steve do, create a 'personal relationship' with your readers may be the best thing to prevent piracy. Most people won't steal from someone they know. Or maybe my opinion of people is too optimistic?

[adriannem.livejournal.com]

You might find _What Would Google Do?_ interesting. Among other things, Jeff Jarvis talks about piracy and the lessons learned from the music industry. I think those lessons are valid for books as well.

Many of us object to DRM. I lost my first digital library to DRM when I moved to Mac, and Embiid did not. I doubt I'll ever get over that lesson. However, most of us are honest people who want to support musicians, authors, and artists. If it's affordable enough, the vast majority will prefer to purchase their entertainment from legitimate sources rather than going to pirate sites. If nothing else, it's *easier* to hunt for and download a legitimate book from B&N or Amazon.

And as for the thieves? I think Jim Baen and Eric Flint made good points about how even readers who don't pay for books increase word of mouth sales, and how that's a good thing.

I can tell you that when I want a book from a BigNameAuthor I often check it out via OverDrive. Why? Because $13 is out of my price range. But when I want one of your books? I hop over to baenebooks.com and buy it on the spot - because $6 and DRM-free is a good deal.

[grassrose.livejournal.com]

That helps. In fact, I've tipped off authors I knew (by correspondence, if not by actual meeting) when I saw their stuff in the wild.

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

I think you already know one answer -- Baen books. Where the customers feel as if they get the books at a reasonable price, and they know the authors and publisher. So it's relatively common to see notes to Toni saying "there seems to be a pirate copy of X over here" so she can send the lawyers after them. Incidentally, some us fans even set up Google alerts for books that we're interested in -- and let Toni know when the pirate copies turn up.

I guess the other thing that goes on is adding value to the book by discussions, etc. I mean, I know that when I get the Baen version, I'm helping to support the community, the authors, all of that. Which is probably why people even buy copies of books in the free library -- they are "voting" with their pocketbook, letting the author and publisher know in a very concrete way that they liked this book.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Baen is an answer for people who want to feel invested in the company; they have the warm, fuzzy feeling of being insiders and being able to help "their publisher" materially. This isn't a bad thing, but...

Most people who read books? Want to read books. They don't want to have to invest anything other than the price of the book in the publisher, they're likely not to remember publisher names.* It's like people who go to conventions, and people who don't go to conventions.

We were talking to a colleague at ChattaCon about why we chose to go to WorldCon over DragonCon, and one of the reasons we gave is that we could connect with more of our fans at WorldCon. The reply was that our colleague saw more business contacts at DragonCon, which certainly matters, and that said colleague had "readers" not "fans" -- that is, people who seek their work out and buy it, but see no reason to seek out the author and tell them about it.

I see it as being very difficult to mobilize those folks who just want to read. They're honest; they'll pay for a legitimate copy of their book; they're frustrated, maybe, with DRM, but they don't want to particularly Adopt A Cause. Any outreach, or change in how books are offered -- like Tuftear's idea, above -- is going to have to come from within the industry. The most of which (Baen of course excluded) is so wedded to the Old Ways that they can't see anything except that they're All Going To Die.

IMHO, as always.

---------------
*Case in point -- years ago we wrote two books and handed them in at almost the same time: Crystal Dragon, to Meisha Merlin, and Sword of Orion, to Phobos. Because of the schedules at the two publishers, SOO came out before Dragon. And we got yelled at by readers who wanted us to know that they were very disturbed by this because we had to KNOW that they wanted Dragon immediately and could care less about the side book, AND the authors were cheating them by having allowed this to happen, AND the authors were playing games with reader affection, AND they would never buy &c...

I pointed out that the books were from two different publishers; different editors; different schedules. And the answer was uniformly, "Oh. Um. Er. Hadn't noticed the publisher. Never do, you know."

[charlie russel (from livejournal.com)]

In this context, I consider myself a reader, not a Baen fan, in that I bought your books from Baen because I wanted to read them, not because of any investment in the publisher, per se. OTOH, I really appreciate the Baen model - reasonably priced books available without DRM in any format I want. Makes sense to me, and leads to more books bought.

[readinggeek451]

Thank you.

And I'm sorry I jumped all over you. Yesterday was a bad day, but I shouldn't have taken it out on you.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

S'all right. ^_^ We are fellow readers!

I just wanted to note that books aren't mustard, in the sense that we may be happy to have just one brand of mustard, but we would not be happy to have just one book, or just one author.

But, I may have misinterpreted what kinzel meant by the metaphor!

dragon ship

[cheetahsteve.livejournal.com]

wow, Baen now has 1st 22 chapters of Dragon ship up for reading. Can't wait for the book to publish.
reread Fledgling thru Ghost Ship last month.
Love the Theo Waitley character!