Comments On: Interview With a Book Pirate by Paul Constant

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01/25/10--16:41: Re: Interview With a Book Pirate (chan 1832243)

Information just wants to be free.

Besides, paperbacks are a lot more fun.
Posted by Will in Seattle


01/25/10--16:53: Re: Interview With a Book Pirate (chan 1832243)

Sigh.
Posted by Fnarf


01/25/10--17:18: Re: Interview With a Book Pirate (chan 1832243)

I pay for netflix then feel fine downloading movie torrents. I don't have to go to the trouble of remember to mail my movies back, I save netflix some money and cut my carbon footprint, and its not like I watch them more than once anyways.
Posted by giffy


01/25/10--17:23: Re: Interview With a Book Pirate (chan 1832243)

The guy does hit on something that I think publishers should pay attention to: I'd like electronic copies of the paper books I own, at a small cost. Why isn't there an option to buy a paper copy + download for, say, $1-2 over the physical book cost? (I know, they assume I'd turn around and sell the paper copy while keeping the electronic one. I imagine some people would, most wouldn't bother.)

This is especially an issue with any kind of reference or cookbook.
Posted by gember


01/25/10--18:45: Re: Interview With a Book Pirate (chan 1832243)

"Perhaps if readers were more confident that the majority of the money went to the author, people would feel more guilty about depriving the author of payment."

This might've been the most insightful part of the interview.
Posted by nixontapes


01/25/10--19:52: Re: Interview With a Book Pirate (chan 1832243)

I enjoyed the fact that the interviewer kept hammering on the "broken DRM" piece of the equation. I know of more than a few law-abiding citizens who quite happily DRM-strip their purchased eBooks so they can read it on their preferred device. This, of course, is a violation of the DMCA much like ripping a DVD to your computer. I think most people, however, would liken it to ripping a CD to their iPod i.e., BFD.

A gray area, for sure.

Where he crosses the line is actively ripping them off and pirating them around. Scanning a physical book you own for so you can read it on your Kindle--that should be within one's rights. Scanning a book you bought and then uploading it for everyone else to have a free copy? Well ... maybe not so much. Although, Cory Doctorow might have something else to say about that.

I'd say those of us who break DRM for our own, DMCA-violating, fair-use are in the vanguard in a siege on the ingrained, old-media ways of the publishers (I'm an optimistic ebook reader).
Posted by thename


01/25/10--20:22: Re: Interview With a Book Pirate (chan 1832243)


If you go to Google you can read the most interesting stuff on blogs under Blog Search.

I spend hours there.

More than with any book.

Posted by Plastic Exploding Inevitable


01/25/10--20:48: Re: Interview With a Book Pirate (chan 1832243)

@5 - agreed. Apparently this guy prefers that the author gets no payment at all.
Posted by Free Lunch


01/25/10--21:42: Re: Interview With a Book Pirate (chan 1832243)

"Information just wants to be free."

Well, any information that YOU didn't create.

Will, do you get paid for your work or do you work for free?

Prick.
Posted by Daved78


01/25/10--22:51: Re: Interview With a Book Pirate (chan 1832243)

We're creating more content than is physically possible to consume. Sure, not all content should be free, I think there's a general understanding in society that other people have better ideas than you and it's totally acceptable to pay them for it. It's about who and what my money goes to, not just that I'm getting the idea they're pitching to me, because that idea isn't necessarily anything revolutionary (because if it was, they should probably be in politics or technology or something right?) and it's totally been built off others at least a little bit (although if they could somehow prove to me their idea was made without the help of anyone else I'm willing to give them another $5).

The problem really comes when denying people access to information like books can kill, if someone in the 3rd world is dying and something in a copyrighted book would save their life what possible reason does humanity have for denying them access to that information. Greed? Well, if you want to live that kind of short sited "I don't give a fuck about your life unless you give me money" sort of world you're more than welcome to do so, I am however quite grateful that the information age has rendered that train of thought completely irrelevant. If you want to sell a book you're going to put it on sale to the public, who will find a way to reproduce your idea and share it. The computer is just one more tool to help us through this process, it was not the first and I doubt it will be the last.
Posted by watchout5


01/26/10--10:01: Re: Interview With a Book Pirate (chan 1832243)

Go to library, check out book ($0).
Go to used book store, buy book ($4).
Go online download book ($0).
Borrow book from friend ($0).

In all of these cases your specific transaction results in no money for the publisher or the writer... So it hard to pick one and call it criminal where as all the other methods are perfectly legal. Not saying it is right, but it sure doesn't feel that bad.


Posted by SeattleSeven


01/26/10--10:17: Re: Interview With a Book Pirate (chan 1832243)

@11 - wrong. Option 1 results in payments to the author.
Posted by Will in Seattle


01/26/10--10:17: Re: Interview With a Book Pirate (chan 1832243)

@SeattleSeven: Yeah, that's the thing publishers seem to miss. The interviewee here hits on two related, big points: a) not every downloaded book is a lost full-price hardcover sale, and b) the publishers risk alienating their best customers.

A while back I did some math. In 2008 or somesuch, 1/7 of the books purchased were Twilight books. There are four of them, right? (I think; my purchases are in the other 6/7) That means that unless people bought multiple copies for themselves they are buying on average no more than 28 books a year. To me this is incredible - I read close to a hundred books last year and bought more than 28 books on my last trip to the NW (in December, spent caroming among Elliot Bay, Powell's, Powell's Technical, and some nice indie bookstore we found in Salem). So here's me, who's had a Kindle for a while and takes it everywhere with me and has its lilting monotone read me the newspaper as I drive...still buying waaay more paper books than the average consumer.

I don't pirate books. It'll be a while before I run out of ones that are out of copyright that I want to read, and I value my time enough not to spend 50 hours of it scanning and proofing OCRs. But probably so is the pirate's. This is a labor of love -- I bet he has a few favorite refernce works that he likes to have on the road and is trying to help out people in the same boat by making it available. I'm not saying that's OK, but I bet that's what he's thinking. He probably isn't the one causing the publishing industry to fail so badly. I doubt this sort of piracy is even making a dent in sales. Can we look at TV, crappy selection, that sort of thing maybe?

But all these moves to delay ebook releases, not release things in digital formats for fear of piracy, etc.? Well they just might make me remember that there's this awesome place, funded by my tax dollars, where I can go and read just about any book I want FOR FREE.
Posted by gember