Here’s how it goes. You buy an ebook.  You lend it to a friend.  You don’t have access to it for 14 days, but they can read it.  Then it comes back to you! Voila! They no longer have access to it, but you do. Forever, since this is a one time deal, from what I can tell.

Why is this not file sharing?

Because the lender loses access to the file for the lending duration.  This has always been the crux of why downloading ebooks is not like borrowing a book from a friend.  If Donna buys a copy of Great New Book and decides that I simply must read it, she can hand her physical print copy of Great New Book to me.  Legal, simple borrowing.  Only for the duration of time that I have the book, she can’t read Great New Book unless she’s hanging over my shoulder. (And, contrary to rumor, we’re not that close.)

There’s also the secondary point that if she lends Great New Book to me, my cats will sit on it.  I’ll bend the spine a little.  I’ll probably spill Pepsi Max on my desk and narrowly rescue Great New Book from swimming in it.  Print books suffer gradual but noticeable degradation, even if they’re not sent to a mass market death trap house like mine.

Ebook files suffer no such restrictions or decrease in quality.  Donna can e-mail me Great New Book as a PDF, and keep her copy.  And I could e-mail it to my mom, and to my aunt, and to everyone I went to college with, and we’d all be reading Great New Book but we wouldn’t all be crushed into one room in a scary tangle of limbs trying to see the same page.  And no one will spill pepsi on the ebook. No cats will chew on it, no children will draw on it.  It might get deleted, but another pristine copy can appear.

Now, you either think this is okay or you don’t.  But the truth is that it’s different, and you have to acknowledge that sending 5,000 copies of an ebook to 5,000 friends is not the same as 5,000 people sitting on a waiting list at a library to check out the same copy of a book.  It’s just not.

But File Lending Promotes a Culture of Piracy!

Anyone who is sitting around waiting for someone to legitimately lend them a book?  Treasure that reader, folks, because they could have had their instant gratification one google search ago.  You’re not teaching the people who lend and borrow that file sharing is okay. You’re rewarding them for not participating in it. Because if they were prone to? They wouldn’t need to borrow a book. They’d have their free copy already.

Besides, illegal downloading is really not the same thing as piracy.  And fighting it does nothing to stop the real pirates.

Wait, the real pirates?

Yeah. The ones who resell ebooks on sites like iOffer for a profit.  The ones who are engaging in the true, unwatered-down piracy, the kind where you make illegal reproductions of a product and sell it. To make money. The kind who are absolutely, 100% costing me sales, because you can’t really make a, “they weren’t going to buy it anyway” argument about someone who just bought your ebook from a pirate.

The worst part is that many innocent purchasers don’t realize they’re buying an illegal copy.  Perhaps they imagine it’s no different than buying a used book, or a collection of used books.  But used book sellers need to replenish their stock.  They can’t sell a copy of Great Used Book and have a new copy magically appear.  If someone else wants to order a copy of Great Used Book from them, they’ll have to find a physical copy–one for which the author has at least been paid once.

A pirate selling illegal ebooks is under no such restriction.  They don’t need to acquire stock, like a used bookseller would.  They get one copy (which they could illegally download to begin with) and sell it. Over. And over. And over.  It’s a morally bankrupt sort of way to profit on everyone–readers who were trying to support an author by paying and authors who may never see a cent but have to know that other people are getting paid.

It’s hard to know which ebook retailers are legitimate.  The only advice I have to offer–if the deal looks too good to be true, and you’re not at a major retailer known for offering deals…it’s probably not legit.

Lending, Downloading, Pirating

Lending can build word-of-mouth.  It gives ebook readers back one of the advantages that they gave up with print books–the chance to share a book they loved with a friend, who might well go out and buy more of the authors’ titles.  The restrictions (14 days, lend once) are a compromise, but they’re a step forward.

Downloading can build word-of-mouth too.  Unfortunately, it mostly builds word-of-mouth to people who aren’t currently looking to buy your book.  However, things change.  I feel a lot differently about file-sharing at 30 than I did at 20, but I can tell you one thing…I’ll never forget finding Metallica to be the jerkiest jerks that ever jerked.  I don’t want someone looking back in ten years and remembering the time Moira Rogers called them a scum-sucking lowlife and deciding that the money they now have to spend should go anywhere but to me. Ever.

Piracy sucks.  Just say no.

However, since the Confessions of a Book Pirate post hit the web, I am having the hardest time keeping my mouth shut. So just this once, in our blog, I’m going to have my say. It’s the say of an under-30 programmer/author who loves open source and struggles daily with her mixed feelings about copyright reform, however, so if you’re looking for a, “The pirates are ruining my career!” post, you are probably not going to like this one. (Not that you’re getting a YAY PIRACY post either…I am so not YAYpiracy.)

Everything I have to say comes back to the one belief I hold firmly:

You can’t fight book piracy.

That’s right. I don’t believe in fighting piracy, not with any of the currently popular methods. I don’t believe in restrictive DRM, I don’t believe in educating readers and I don’t believe in delaying digital releases or absurd pricing. I don’t think there’s any way to stop piracy at all. I think you can’t put that genie back in the bottle any more than you can go back to a time when no one wanted mp3s.

DRM: I hate DRM. I loathe it. I want to stab it a hundred thousand times with a rusty spork. When they started putting DRM on CDs, I stopped buying them. I can still remember the first time I bought a CD with DRM…I didn’t even have a CD player. I played everything on my computer, but this DRM made it so you couldn’t see the disc on a computer…the better to prevent someone from ripping it, I guess? Except it made it useless to me, and I never bought another CD again. (Ever. To this day.)

Luckily, even back then, stripping DRM was easy. I stripped the DRM because it was the only way I could listen to the CD I had paid for in good faith. DRM is even easier to crack today. There will never be a DRM scheme invented that won’t be crackable within a week or two. Ever. The only people DRM inconveniences are the readers who bought your book and don’t want to break the law. Anything that punishes people for respecting your work seems like a pretty stupid tactic.

Educating Readers: Really, who are we educating? The people who don’t know about piracy? Why? There are three types of readers, pretty much. Those who will never pirate your work, those who will do it but feel guilty, and those that don’t give a shit.

The first group is sick and tired of having people yell at them for something they’re not doing. The third group doesn’t care and never will. As for the guilty ones…well, you’ll probably guilt some of them out of pirating. And you’ll probably annoy some of them so much they’ll pirate your next book guilt free. In the long run, I can’t see we’re making a lot of progress…but we are teaching a lot of people who might not have known otherwise that they can get books for free. I’m actually okay not educating them on that topic.

Hinky Pricing and Release Dates: It’s not going to stop pirates. They will scan print books and release them, and with publishers telling digital readers so clearly that they don’t matter, I’m almost sympathetic to those who don’t feel guilty about pirating the book they would have purchased if they’d been given the option. (I say almost because man, that sucks for the author. A lot. And I still don’t approve of piracy, even if I do think it’s an unavoidable fact of life.)

So what do you do? I believe firmly that the only solution for piracy is the iTunes solution. Make it easy, affordable, and more convenient than piracy. No, that won’t stop piracy. Nothing will stop piracy. But it’s the first step in regaining some control of the situation. Lazy people will pay, and I’m speaking as a lazy person.

For now? I ignore piracy. (Mostly: I will discuss my exceptions later.) At this point I have no proof that piracy is hurting me. My sales are not going down–but they are slowly shifting to 3rd party venues. I believe that some epublished authors are not giving the growing 3rd party market enough consideration when they look at their first month’s sales totals and scream Oh no, piracy has ended my career!

The 3rd Party Factor

Ebooks are going mainstream fast, and while the upside of all these new ebook readers are the thousands of new potential clients, the downside is that the mainstream is not interested in jumping through the same hoops that a niche reader might. Fictionwise, All Romance Ebooks, Books on Board, Amazon…there are going to be a lot of new readers who are not going to want to go from publisher to publisher when they can get all of their books in one place.

As recently as a couple years ago, judging a book’s release month numbers was pretty easy. Lots of epubs pay monthly, so you wait for the next month, check the total and know roughly how you did. Now, it’s a lot more complicated, and it’s the 3rd Party factor. Now you have to wait.

For example, our recent release Sanctuary’s Price came out in October. I’ve only just gotten the Amazon numbers for October, and I won’t have 4th quarter numbers for Fictionwise & ARe for 1-3 months. I can’t make an educated assessment of whether or not the availability of the book on pirate sites hurt sales until I’ve seen all the numbers.

To be fair, though, I can’t really scientifically say whether it had an effect either way, because there are too many uncontrolled variables and I hate uncontrolled variables. The only thing I can say for sure is that piracy is either having no effect, helping us grow, or making us grow less quickly than we otherwise would have. In the end we’re selling more every month in spite of the abundance of pirated versions of our work available pretty much everywhere. (We are small potatoes, though, and I do think piracy hurts the big names a lot.)

And yes, for those who think no one can have this opinion unless they’ve never been pirated…I’m saying this as someone who is downloaded a lot.  Yes, I can go to pirate sites and see hundreds and, sometimes, thousands of downloads of our book.  However, I would be surprised if 10% of that number represented truly lost sales, though I have no scientific facts on which to base that claim. Don’t even get me started on people who multiply that by their royalty rate and use that figure to cite lost sales.   I truly believe that people will take something for free that they would never, ever buy.  Lots of people.  Just because it’s there.

Losing sleep over it isn’t going to do me any good.

And yet, I’m still an author…

Having said all of that, I am so frustrated with quite a few of today’s pirates. I’m talking about the ones who can’t seem to hide what they’re doing, end up in your google alerts, and then whine when you send take-downs. Watching them gripe because I told mediafire to take down a file makes me want to smack them on the nose with a newspaper and tell them to hide the file better next time. I don’t spend my time hunting down pirates to C&D, but if they can’t keep their links out of my google alerts…sorry, guys. You have it coming.

Pirates aren’t freedom fighters. They’re not battling the evil empire. The only people they’re really screwing with are authors, and I’m not even just talking financially. I’m talking the frustration when we wrote a story, made a cover, laboriously converted it to four different formats so that I could give it away in file formats convenient to as many people as possible and uploaded it–for free–to our website, only to find it uploaded to a pirate site with this message:

*This is a free read from her site thus shouldn’t have to be removed for “abuse”.

It is not “abuse” my dear. It is abuse, sans inappropriate quotes. I’m not calling you names, or wishing terrible harm on you, I’m not slinging histrionic threats or wishing you’d get a computer virus or arrested. I am simply telling you, now, that it is abuse.

You are breaking the law, and I’m not talking about the morality of it, I’m simply stating a fact. You take every one of our books, you upload them, and you complain when I have them taken down too quickly. You don’t have the right to be upset that I won’t let you commit copyright infringement without inconvenience. That’s taking entitlement just a little bit too far, isn’t it?

But you’re welcome for the free book.  And thank you for testing my commitment to Creative Commons Share Alike Copyrighting. I won’t let you make me a hypocrite by having the file removed, but at least I can sleep tonight knowing I stuck to my beliefs.  Beliefs don’t mean much if they’re never tested.

EDIT: I would like to clarify something in regards to my free reads.  I love it when people link to them.  And e-mail them to friends.  And even upload them to Scribd or forums or their own websites.  I’m fine with that, and it’s awesome.  What I don’t love is when someone who also uploads every other thing my publishers put out does so with a catty note indicating this time the mean bully author can’t do anything about it.

Really, I’m pretty nice when people aren’t actually spitting in my face.  I swear.