Piraten!

More news on the e-piracy front, meine Autoren: a German court has approved an injunction filed by six academic publishers against RapidShare AG, a company that provides download services for a whole host of different files via the magic of the Interwebs. This is interesting, at least to me, for the following reasons.

First, RapidShare offers free downloads for most (if not all) the files it hosts, but makes its money by offering paid subscriptions that significantly increase the speed and number of downloads you're permitted to request. The fact that they're making money on copyrighted material (including, but certainly not limited to, books) that they did not pay for makes the whole venture suspect, and to an extent, illegal. Legal file sharing services (an imperfect, though more easily visualized, analogue is YouTube) abound; there's no reason companies like RapidShare can't filter out copyrighted material as it comes in.

Second, I've heard others express the opinion that on-line services like RapidShare (though not necessarily RapidShare themselves) are akin to electronic libraries, and since information is available for free from physical libraries, the same should hold true for their Internet equivalents. This is nonsense (again, my opinion) for two reasons: first, libraries pay for the subscriptions and books they offer their patrons, which is not the case with free download sites like RapidShare; and second, even if a website were to pay for a single e-book and then allow limitless downloads of the text (akin to lending a book from a physical library), the number of downloads per paid copy would vastly exceed the average library's number of loans per purchased physical copy. Secondary points include the fact that physical libraries can only loan out a limited number of copies at a time (equal to the number they paid for), and they periodically need to replace their books as they wear out.

Now, I'm not against the existence of e-libraries in principle; I think with proper DRM and administrative oversight, they could work out. Then again, the threat of piracy is clearly a problem for copyrighted information on the Internet. So I ask you, meine Damen und Herren: what do you think?

Full Disclosure Fridays

Friday: round up day! Eric is out, Laura is in, round up below:

Before we begin rounding up, I think we all need to address the elephant in the room: the new FTC regulations for bloggers. Although I won't do the discussion justice, the FTC has more or less said that if a blogger receives a free product for review and doesn't disclose where that product comes from, they will get slapped in the face with fines, whereas newspapers etc. don't need to adhere to those rules. Slate discusses, Janet Reid discusses, and Ron Hogan writes not one but two open letters to the FTC. When it comes down to it, I firmly agree that we're so inundated with product placement on such a regular basis that we're basically immune, so what difference will bloggers really make? And honestly, who reads blogs?

In the interest of full disclosure, I have tallied up all of the fabulous free things Eric and I have been given because of this blog. We have, collectively, received: zero presents, zero freebies, and only one offer of marriage, which wasn't for me—always a blogsmaid, never a blogs. We only have until December 1st until the new FTC rules go into effect, so hurry up, people, and make with the perks. This paragraph was brought to you by Dungeons and Dragons Spellcasting Soda, and by the contest in the last paragraph.

I don't know if you guys heard, but the literature Nobel was announced yesterday, and Herta Müller, a Romanian German, won. There are great roundups of links at Bookninja and the Atlantic Wire. Shelf Life yawns, and the Guardian says the Nobel judges should start looking outside of Europe, but the excerpts at the Book Bench are pretty cool.

You know what else is cool? After 49 years, the author and illustrator of The Phantom Tollbooth are getting back together. Just like your divorced parents! Except, you know, for real. And after 80 years the official, authorized Winnie the Pooh sequel is happening (which hopefully won't suck, but might. Read the except and decide for yourself). I hope pirates can leave WtP alone...

Wil Wheaton (who was in the movie Flubber and also Star Trek: The Next Generation) has a bone to pick with pirates. Someone jacked the audiobook he made by himself, which means that it's not fat cat, pork barrel spending, big business publishing that's suffering, but rather a single individual, which is somehow way sadder than stealing from an industry with thousands of workers and slowly rotting said industry from the inside out. Dan Brown is being pirated all over the place as well, but since he only bathes in liquid gold it hurts my soul a little less. Booksprung writes about how publishers are encouraging book piracy, and I hear we should worry about the Napsterization of books. It would probably help if we could identify the five most important moments in the formation of digital publishing, or we could take a deep breath and realize: the mass market paperback was supposed to kill the hard cover, so maybe this won't be so bad either. Publishing should take a page from zombie culture, and learn to survive.

Some things are not worth surviving for, and one of them seems to be truly terrible agent/editor meals. Also distressing is that, while And Tango Makes Three (the picture book about the gay penguins) has been racing up the charts despite being banned, most people don't realize that the penguins were broken up by a lady type penguin. In 2005. (On the plus side, they did the John and Kate Plus 8 crash-and-burn with way more class, and fewer babies.) Librarians are going to be replaced by robots, Harvard bars books (by putting bars on the shelves...get it? Ah, puns.), and people are actually making lists of the top ten most depressing books.

Let's try and salvage the optimism of the day (it is a Friday, after all, and my one day to exploit the captive blog reading population) by sharing a dream of mine: being in Sarah Vowell's shoes and having Jon Stewart tell me I am so smart. Sigh.

Speaking of authors everyone wants to be, Joyce Carol Oates wrote a really spectacular article about her lack of mentors, and how it affected her writing. Michael Chabon is writing his next book about how he became who he is today (that one's for you, Moonrat), and Wanda Clark writes about how writing in prison is easier than writing outside (that one's for all of you struggling with procrastination).

So, I was going to have a contest that involved the now defunct Christian version of Sarah Palin's memoir, but then I chanced upon the Conservative Bible Project and just... I am so pleased with America right now. So my contest for you: edit the Bible! Come up with an ideology to support, and tell me in the comments how you would edit the Bible to support your beliefs. Winner gets featured next week, and potentially stalked by those involved with the CBP who don't appreciate being mocked, thank you very much. See you next week!

Arrr Ya Worried?: E-Piracy Returns

I've mentioned this before (indeed, more than once... or twice), and though I missed International Talk Like A Pirate Day by a fair margin, it nonetheless seems that the topic of e-piracy remains timely. The New York Times reports that the incidence of stolen e-books is on the rise, with sites like RapidShare serving as cyberspace versions of the Somali coast. The article ends:

Ms. Scheid, of RapidShare, has advice for [authors and publishers] if they are unhappy that her company’s users are distributing e-books without paying the copyright holders: Learn from the band Nine Inch Nails. It marketed itself “by giving away most of their content for free.”

I will forward the suggestion along, as soon as authors can pack arenas full and pirated e-books can serve as concert fliers.

I find this interesting. On the one hand, it's true that authors don't always have the same rabid fans as musicians, so every lost sale is a higher percentage of total sales. Then again, if the audience isn't that big, the pirate audience won't be either, right? Or has the age of mega-bestsellerdom (e.g. Stephenie Meyer, J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown) ensured that some authors are that popular and will suffer that badly in terms of lost sales?

Prithee, inform me, dear readers: are you worried about e-piracy, especially now that it looks like it's at our front door? What do you think we can do to stop it, if anything?

(Fre)e Books?

First, a PSA: Book Blogger Appreciation Week will be September 14 - 18 this year, so if you blog about books, you really should consider signing up. Yours truly has already done so, and I expect to be in good company. Whether you've got your own blog or not, please consider nominating your favorites for some mega sweet awards—voting is already open. (There's a "best new blog" category. Just saying.)

Now, to business.

E-books are an interesting phenomenon; as Nathan noted yesterday, the debate over e-book availability and pricing rages on, whereas Agent Kristin recently posted about the serious possibility of e-book piracy via Our Dear Leader, Google.

I believe (perhaps unfairly) that human beings are decent to a point: we're happy to pay for something if it's not a serious inconvenience and we believe we're getting our money's worth, but when we feel like we're getting the shaft, we're all for simply taking what we can get. Remember when Radiohead let us pay whatever we wanted for "In Rainbows"? Well, six out of ten of us decided we wanted to pay $0.00, and even knowing full well we could "buy" the album from Radiohead for absolutely nothing, 2.3 million of us decided we were going to "steal" it from BitTorrent instead. Things like this make me wonder whether Kurt was too optimistic about the human race.

Anyway, I have to say I agree with Nathan about the $9.99 price point for e-books (that is, I'm in favor of it) and agree that if people are denied the option of buying, say, The Forgotten Rune in e-format and are told instead that they can pay $26.00 for the hardcover, most are just going to go ahead and buy a different e-book instead (Boy Wizard and the Arduous Quest, perhaps). I don't think the current model (charging consumers hardcover price for e-books while the print hardcover is out, then reducing it to paperback price when that comes out) is sustainable, and if publishers either limit supply or make consumers feel stiffed, consumers are going to turn to piracy more and more.

Example: before the advent of the iTunes store, I did this with music. (Don't give me that look. You did it, too.) Undoubtedly, legions of us still do this, but ever since I've been given the option of paying $0.99 for a song, I've done that. It seems like a fair price to me and the iTunes store is a convenient venue. Similarly, I believe most folks will be willing to pay $9.99 for a book, and as long as it's being sold in a convenient venue (e.g. Amazon's on-line store), people will be willing to shell out.

Now, there are alternatives to the existing structure and the Amazon Model: Peter Olson, former CEO of the big house, recently wrote an essay on e-book pricing and the future of the electronic book medium. In part, he argues that books with high initial demand (especially pent-up demand, à la Dan Brown) could be priced at nearly $40.00 per book in the initial twenty-four hours, then dropped down as low as $4.00 per book once the rush has subsided. (The article also explains the price structure for printed books—among other things, that for every copy of a $10.00 printed book sold, the author makes $1.50 and the publisher and bookstore make $0.50 apiece—so I'd definitely recommend you read the whole thing.)

What do you think? Are you partial to any of the three models I've listed (existing publisher model, $9.99 model, pay-based-on-demand model), or would you prefer something entirely different?