Arguing Book Piracy

[jimhines]

Last week, I saw a lot of authors linking to “Free” Books Aren’t Free, a blog post by author Saundra Mitchell talking about the costs of book piracy.

Let me state up front that illegally downloading books is stealing.  If you’re doing it, at least have the guts to admit you’re committing theft instead of spouting off excuses.

With that said, I disagree with some of Mitchell’s reasoning.  She argues:

If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list. If the 800+ downloads a week of my book were only HALF converted into sales, I would earn out in one more month.

Yes, and if my dogs pooped gold, I could quit my day job.  But it ain’t going to happen.  Author Scott Nicholson guesses that 10,000 illegal downloads equates to maybe 5 lost sales.  I suspect he’s underestimating, and the true numbers are somewhere between his and Mitchell’s, but I don’t think there’s any way to say for certain.  I’m just not buying the argument that half of those downloaders would have actually bought Mitchell’s book (particularly since we’re talking about a hardcover.)

She goes on to say:

[M]y book is never going to be available in your $region, not for lack of trying. My foreign rights agent is a genius at what she does, and has actively tried to sell it everywhere- UK, AU, China, France, you name it, she tried to sell it there.  SHADOWED SUMMER will only be coming out in Italy, because that’s the only place there’s a market for it.

The implication being that piracy killed her chances at foreign sales?  I’m confused on this one.  Does the availability of a pirated English book really reduce demand for a Chinese edition of said book?  I suppose it’s possible … most countries are more multilingual than the U.S.  But it’s a stretch, and I’m not convinced.

[T]he sales figures on SHADOWED SUMMER had a seriously detrimental effect on my career. It took me almost two years to sell another book. I very nearly had to change my name and start over. And my second advance? Was exactly the same as the first because sales figures didn’t justify anything more.

The thing that makes me hesitate here is that piracy is an across-the-board problem.  Every commercially published author’s books end up on torrent sites.  Some authors are still doing quite well.  Others, not so much.  So does it make sense for struggling authors to blame book pirates for low sales when other authors are selling well despite said pirates?

Mitchell says a lot I agree with, too.  If you can’t afford books, go to the library.  Try to get review copies.  Or maybe if you can’t afford the books, you just don’t get them.  Wanting a book doesn’t give you the right to steal it.

I agree with her that, “People who illegally download books are more interested in their convenience than in supporting the authors they want to read.”

I’m NOT saying book piracy is harmless.  (To authors or to readers either, for that matter.  Laura Anne Gilman recently pointed another example of a torrent site which was installing malware with downloads.)  Bottom line, it’s a dickish thing to do.

And it does hurt authors.  How much, I don’t know.  I suspect it will hurt us more in coming years, as electronic reading becomes more widespread and book scanning technology improves.  Lost productivity alone is a serious cost for authors who try to keep up with DMCA notifications to various sites.

It pisses me off when I find people illegally sharing my books online.  And I think it’s important to educate readers.  But I don’t think it helps our cause to distort or exaggerate the problem.

Discussion welcome and appreciated.  I expect some disagreement on this one, and as always, I reserve the right to change my mind.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Comments

[beccastareyes]

I know when it comes to fansubbing anime/scanlating manga*, Japanese copyright holders are cracking down more on these, because the mild help they provide in judging interest in an English-language market** isn't as useful as having more pirated 'raw' files floating around. (Add in, that before the Internet, most fansubs were traded VHS tapes and such, which are a lot smaller scale than bit-torrent.)

At least this has lead to sites like Cruncyroll and Funinmation's online site to offer free subtitled anime far quicker than a DVD can be put together, which I heartily approve of, and might even lead to translations of titles that would normally be too marginal to sell. It cuts off one of the major appeals for pirated foreign-language material: that it's a lot quicker than waiting for international/foreign-language distribution to work through the system. When a Naruto or Fullmetal Alchemist episode can be watched streaming, in English subtitles, less than a week after if first airs in Japan and until the DVDs come out, pirating the files doesn't seem worth it.

* Fansubbing: providing a pirated copy of a series with a fan-translated subtitle file bundled with it.
Scanlating: scanning a graphic novel, removing the dialogue/text, and then substituting translated text.

** I mean, there's some stuff that gets licensed for English-language translation and distribution before it even airs in Japan, because it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the Nth season of Bleach will sell like the previous N-1 seasons. But when dealing with a new product, it's a bit trickier to figure out what it might do in another market.

[jimhines]

Interesting. I'm reading a novel right now that deals with anime fandom and fansubbing and such, and actually defends the fansubbing process, but explains that there's an honor system to stop doing so once licensed copies come out. Which is interesting, because in another part of the book, the characters go off on how other forms of piracy are so bad.

What you're saying sounds like one of the arguments I've heard for book piracy, too. "Oh, you should be happy because all of those illegal downloads are good publicity and will help build your audience." Um ... first of all, it's building my audience among people who don't want to pay for my work, which isn't terribly helpful. Second, I'm not convinced as to how much it's actually helping me build an audience.

[beccastareyes]

It does, but I've known a lot of people who don't listen to it: usually justified by either economic reasons ('Woe, for I am a poor student'), quality reasons ('I feel the fan translation is superior to the commercial one'*) or a mix ('I don't want to pay for a DVD that has an English dub, because I don't like English dubs'). Not excusing these, really, just noting the reasons given. Add in that in the early (pre-DVD) days, it was harder to find subtitled anime and/or titles with a quality dub, and many titles marketed for the preteen audience were edited to reflect the differing standards between Japanese and American TV.

And, yeah, I remember watching the fansubbing community when the fourth season of Slayers came out in Japan. The Japanese copyright holders had given the English-language distributors permission to police their copyright on English-language sites, so fansubs were quickly removed... and thousands of myths on how to make the practice legal sprung up overnight. Most seemed to neglect that the problem was not in the translations as much in the fact that the video files were recorded off of Japanese TV.

* I don't speak Japanese, so I can't offer an opinion here, but fansubbers, knowing their audience, are a lot more willing to leave Japanese cultural terms and honorifics untranslated, knowing that their audience will know the difference between X-kun and X-san.

[beccastareyes]

Ah, and to clarify, after reading the LJ thread, I don't know if the idea of 'using illegal downloads to figure which series are worth translating' is a good one or not*, but I know it's a common justification behind fansubs. Which then falls apart when dealing with sequels/franchises for which a drunk monkey could figure out would sell well in the English-language market, since there's already a market.

* Certainly not one-to-one downloads. And, like I said, it completely ignores that domestic pirates are going to use it the same as the English-language audience.

[ashenmote]

"The implication being that piracy killed her chances at foreign sales? I’m confused on this one. Does the availability of a pirated English book really reduce demand for a Chinese edition of said book?"

The way I understood it, it was meant to say that a book without high inland sales (the lack of supposedly caused by piracy) will not be considered for translation. But the post doesn't explain the connection, so it's up to everyones guess.

[jimhines]

Maybe ... and it would fit if you buy the chain of:

Pirates! --> Lower Book Sales --> No foreign reprint possibilities

Except that even if you buy that logic, what about things like the fact that I've several times sold foreign reprints of titles before they're published in the U.S., and that I sell foreign reprints when authors with much better sales aren't able to do so (have I mentioned how much I love my agent?)

I'm just not convinced on this one.