The ethics of "free" e-books

[Wilf]

[quote name='Happy Ent' post='1452787' date='Jul 23 2008, 19.33']Explain [i]reasonable[/i]. Say, how many cafe lattes should a song of music cost? (Takes the same time to consume initially, can be re-listened.)

Do you mean reasonable from the consumer’s point of view, or from the producer’s? (For example, should a [i]Prince[/i] album be a lot cheaper than Schütz’s Easter Oriatorium simply because many, many more people will buy it, so the content provider’s interests are satisfied by paying much less?)

I’m [i]really[/i] curious. Really. Please define [i]reasonable[/i].[/quote]

When I say reasonable I mean reasonable by my standards (are there any other?). Everbody has their own idea of what reasonable is, so the only definition you can go by is your own, which goes for almost anything in life.

For me an mp3 should not cost more than 10-15 cents for a song, especially since you can get the same thing for free if you put in a little more effort.

[Wilf]

[quote name='Tom the Merciful' post='1454142' date='Jul 24 2008, 12.26']That said, let's see into the problem. Copyright infringement is a criminal act in my country and probably in most countries of the World. This means that by making, dealing, using or storing copies of a copyrighted work of art, you are in theory becoming a criminal.[/quote]

To clarify why most Dutch have no problem with pirating content. In The Netherlands downloading is not illegal. Uploading or offering copyrighted material is illegal, but downloading and using it is not.

[Shevchyk]

[quote]Yes, there will have to be a shift in perception. At the moment people attach value to the physical item, they will have to be convinced that what they are actually buying is access to the content between the covers. If they can't be convinced of this then getting them to pay for eBooks will be difficult.[/quote]

There is a very good book about just this subject that merits reading, called 'The Book Is Dead: Long Live the Book' by Sherman Young, a professor at The University of New South Wales. He also [url="http://shermanfyoung.wordpress.com/"]keeps a blog[/url] that's fairly interesting. He makes some interesting arguments concerning the the future of print and e-books and how humans interact with books as physical objects.

[Tom the Merciful]

[quote name='Mister Manticore' post='1454236' date='Jul 24 2008, 14.13']You mean it hasn't already?

However, you neglected one aspect, regarding the third point, namely that some authors (and their publishers) believe that sharing causes them no real economic harm. In fact, they actively endorse it.

Also, your conclusion isn't well supported. Comes a bit out of left field.[/quote]

Authors practically do not have a say, here. The moment they signed a contract (OK, this depends on actual contract), they in most cases transfer their rights to the publisher, so it gets out of their hands. Endorsing it is nice, but I bet that none of them would just be publishing it on net for free. And of course they endorse sharing, once they put checks into their pockets. So, I would be careful, here. Not everything is what it seems on the surface.

If by "left" you mean communist, it may be. I am sometimes pissed at how capitalism works. Especially with so much marketing in the public media. It's magical how they find money everywhere, but it always comes out of our pockets. And, you know, there are always limits to resources, growth and wealth. I am afraid our society is reaching those limits. Some economists called it "damnation of wealth" and it has been claimed that many empires were brought down by degeneration created by excessive wealth. But let's not get too philosophic here.

My point was, many of us work in industries which are as "virtual" as publishing. It's like feeding chain - destroy one link and it may all come down.

Finally, I found it to be just as my grandpa said: "Keep it low and everything will be fine."

@Wilf
Can I get a visa? ;)

[Intercept]

[quote name='Happy Ent' post='1451873' date='Jul 23 2008, 01.26']Not clear what you’re saying here. The library [i]pays[/i] the author. When you “freely” copy an electronic text the author doesn’t get paid, which is the topic of this thread. (But maybe I misunderstand you and you were comparing different things.)[/quote]

I'm saying to me securing an eBook from a "trusted source" is the same to me as going to the library.

To explain myself, I understand that the means are not totally agreeable to publishing companies, and the author is not getting any cash for it... But I would've gone to the library to get that book anyway, and as far as I know, authors don't get paid by how many times their book is checked out in a library.

[Tom the Merciful]

[quote name='Mister Manticore' post='1454332' date='Jul 24 2008, 15.40']Check out Baen and Tor, both publishers which have plenty of free books available. Is it everything? Not always, but then, that's not the exact point I was making by giving them as examples, but rather, saying how some publishers are getting behind the sharing idea, because they've found it benefits, or at least, doesn't hurt them.

So perhaps you might want to dig beneath the surface?



No, that is not the meaning of the phrase. It means something like an idea coming out of nowhere, or in other words, you didn't lead up to your final conclusion sufficiently. I'd work on it a bit more.[/quote]

No disagreement regarding sharing. You said "found benefits" and I thing it's a keyword. It demands a deeper analysis, but I bet it's all out of print titles being offered there. And the assessment showed that the costs of print would not be covered by sales. Unfortunately, I have no time to analyze it, but few months ago it would have been a good topic for my thesis.

As for the other part, sorry, my post needed to be finished, so it may be rushed. What I wanted to point out is that everybody who is doing it and is aware of the nature of the act (illegal!) needs to have moral justification. What I have heard many times is that publishers are basically ripping us and that only a small portion ends up with the authors. Then I analyzed the economy of publishing a bit, but there's not much to analyze, TBH. It works just like any other industry.
But as I said, we can go on for pages...

[Larry.]

I highly doubt Tobias Buckell or John Scalzi have any books that are out of print, but each did note some form of sales increase, not just on the offered books, but on the other books in their catalogs as well. Neil Gaiman noted a similar effect with [i]American Gods[/i] when it was made available as a free e-book on his website for a few weeks earlier this year.

[The Anti-Targ]

You all are familiar with Richard Stallman's lecture on the history of copyright, right? I haven't trolled this thread to see if Stallman has been mentioned.

Today digital media should free artists from the shackles of publishers/studios. The advent of e-books should allow people to download for free and for them to pay the artist directly whatever the reader thinks the book is worth. How much of the price of a book does the writer currently get? a buck or 3? How much did Radiohead make from their "pay what you want" album download, I bet they made plenty.

How much would you pay a writer for a book that you really enjoyed reading if you could choose your price and pay them directly? How much would you pay GRRM for a digital version of ADWD? I've gained many hours of pleasure from GRRMs writing, so there is no way I'd pay him nothing.

Not everyone wants digital, personally I like paper and ink and I can pretty much guarantee that paper and ink is how I'll be reading nearly every novel cover to cover from here until I die. But I might download e-books because they are easier to search / research.

I bet in a world where all books come in an e-book version, and all e-books are free to download, but you can easily choose to pay the writer directly if you so choose, writers would make as much or more money from their work than they make today by being paid indirectly through the publisher.

Movie downloads should be free too, pay what you think a movie is worth. Voluntary payment means no pirates to rip off your work and make money while doing so. Any website that makes money off your movie downloads must, according to copyright laws as they should be, pay you a proportion of the money they make (e.g. selling advertising space on the movie download page).

Make doing the right thing easy and cheap and people will do what's right. The criminals will be out of business: since they can only compete on price, when price is no longer a point of difference they can't compete.

That's why I say screw the publishers and studios getting all precious about piracy, they are the authors of their own loss, and they are cheating the artists into the bargain by chaining them to the copyright laws that protect the publishers and studios rather than the artists. When you pay nothing for a book, or some music or a movie you are not ripping off the artists who created the work because on a per unit basis the artist gets paid very little. Don't let that bother you. I want freedom for the artists and freedom for those who are entertained by the art: freedom from the middleman who makes all the money off the artists back and controlling access to the audience.

I don't buy pirated stuff because I don't want to line the pockets of criminals, but there is nothing unethical about free e-books in an absolute sense. The ethics comes into the question of whether it is ethical to break an unethical law. The law does not define what is ethical and unethical, it defines what is legal and illegal, there's a big difference.

[Joe Abercrombie]

[quote name='The Anti-Targ' post='1455872' date='Jul 25 2008, 12.00']Today digital media should free artists from the shackles of publishers/studios.[/quote]
You seem to be assuming that all publishers prey on their writers like hyenas on a carcass. Maybe some are like that, but my own experience is the exact opposite, to the point where I find your rhetoric about freeing me from my oppressors a bit ridiculous. Without my publisher, no one would have read my books. I wouldn't have made a penny from them and no reader would have enjoyed them (or hated them). Period, pretty much. I'd completely agree that studios have been shitting the bed on the whole issue of piracy and downloads for years and that publishers and authors need very much to find a better way of handling it that gives everyone a fair cut. I'd also agree that giving e-books away can be hugely effective marketing if it's done right, not unlike zero-profit promotions in a book shop where a book is sold for cost price. But the situation is nothing like as simple as the revolutionary rhetoric would imply.

[quote name='The Anti-Targ' post='1455872' date='Jul 25 2008, 12.00']The advent of e-books should allow people to download for free and for them to pay the artist directly whatever the reader thinks the book is worth. How much of the price of a book does the writer currently get? a buck or 3? How much did Radiohead make from their "pay what you want" album download, I bet they made plenty.[/quote]
Big acts and big writers will always do fine. Radiohead can do what they like, they've a massive fanbase (plus musicians, like Prince, can effectively give away their recordings as a loss-leading promotion for hugely lucrative live performance, which writers can't, really). For smaller acts, whose overheads in producing the product may not be much less but whose turnover certainly will be, it becomes far more difficult. It's even worse for new acts or writers, for whom studios and publishers serve vital functions of promotion and marketing. I believe Scott Lynch had some of his writing available on the web years ago, how many had read it before he had the support of a publisher? Maybe you get your homegrown successes via facebook and whatnot, but that's still the exception rather than the rule, and in the case of writers would tend to favour those with great skill at self-promotion rather than writing. Quite apart from all the writing time they'd lose trying to get people interested.

[quote name='The Anti-Targ' post='1455872' date='Jul 25 2008, 12.00']I bet in a world where all books come in an e-book version, and all e-books are free to download, but you can easily choose to pay the writer directly if you so choose, writers would make as much or more money from their work than they make today by being paid indirectly through the publisher.[/quote]
Again, you seem to be assuming that the publisher does nothing but cash the cheques, and that making a book involves no costs beyond the writing. The publisher pays all kinds of highly skilled and useful professionals - editors, designers, publicists, proof-readers, reps - who in your model would be either out of a job (reducing the quality of the books) or paid for by the writer (reducing his profits - fine for your GRRM for whom they might represent a paltry cost, much more of a problem for a new or midlist writer).

Self-publishing as a paradigm has been available for ever if an author wanted to take on all those responsibilities themselves, the fact that very few well known authors do, and that others have dabbled in one way or another and generally got their fingers burned and come back to mainstream publishing, does seem to imply that a publisher provides a service the writer generally requires. I don't see that e-books change this all that much. You don't have printing, but you still need editing, still need design (covers on amazon are a vital selling tool), still need distribution (perhaps it's amazon people go to instead of borders, but you still need a way to interact with the retailers or taste-makers who funnel potential buyers in your direction, the job reps and marketing do now), still need accountants to collect your money and make sure you get paid. Pretty much everyone you need with a print book you still need with an e-book.

[quote name='The Anti-Targ' post='1455872' date='Jul 25 2008, 12.00']That's why I say screw the publishers and studios getting all precious about piracy, they are the authors of their own loss, and they are cheating the artists into the bargain by chaining them to the copyright laws that protect the publishers and studios rather than the artists. When you pay nothing for a book, or some music or a movie you are not ripping off the artists who created the work because on a per unit basis the artist gets paid very little. Don't let that bother you. I want freedom for the artists and freedom for those who are entertained by the art: freedom from the middleman who makes all the money off the artists back and controlling access to the audience.[/quote]
Eh? Even if we agree that all publishers totally exploit their writers (which I don't at all) it's obvious that by ripping off the book without permission you're denying the creator even the pittance the publisher would pay them. You're basically saying, "I will strike a blow for Nike's oppressed workers in the Phillipines by stealing trainers from my local footlocker." That doesn't strike a blow for anyone except you, and dressing it up in the language of revolution is weird.

[Ran]

It is indeed weird, but I'm afraid it's endemic to pro-piracy arguments. :P I'll never understand it.

[Willie McBride]

I regularly download and read pirated ebooks, and I've got a rule of thumb, that, incidentally, is the same I adopted some 10 years ago for the books I was reading through the library: if I want to read a book a second time I buy it. I did it, for example, for the ASOAIF books: I downloaded them and then I bought online the four US mass-market paperbacks.
Just a couple hours ago I received my almost monthly books' order (~50€), and it included three books I had previously downloaded and three "new" books by authors I discovered through downloaded ebooks. Having discovered Baen through the Free Library and BaenCD I'm also an happy Webscription customer (though I usually wait for the 6$ regular releases instead of buying the E-ARCs).
Most of what I spent in the last 2½ years in books (and believe me, books are my major unnecessary expense) was directly driven by the availability of official or "unofficial" free ebooks, from Peter Watts to GRRM, to Scalzi, Rothfuss, Stephenson, Lynch, McMaster Bujold, Peter F. Hamilton, Richard K. Morgan, Stross, Kushner, Flint, Weber, Novik, Abercrombie. Many of them are still unpublished in this country.

[Tom the Merciful]

Joe, that was exactly my point. However, I was very clumsy in explaining it.
As much as the corporate world pisses me sometimes, it's a reality that should not be taken so lightly. All revolutionary thinking people should keep in mind that to gain one step through revolution, you usually make two steps back.
Simply, let the media take care of it "evolutionary way".

Radiohead story is not comparable, I think. I remember their start. If Parlophone didn't push them through NME and MTV back in 1993, "Creep" would have remained a big hit only in Thom's garage or wherever they were practicing.

[Happy Ent]

[quote name='The Anti-Targ' post='1455872' date='Jul 25 2008, 14.00']Make doing the right thing easy and cheap and people will do what's right.[/quote]
Well... they’ll do what’s [i]cheap[/i].

To see your fallacy: “Make doing the wrong thing easy and cheap and people will do what’s wrong.” Ethics isn’t parameter of the decision, money is.

Problem is in the current situation you can choose between (a) not paying somebody and (B) paying somebody. “People” will choose (a). Your fantasy of an industry built on people giving away money lacks precedence; nothing has [i]ever[/i] worked like that. (Or has it? I’d be curious. Please enlighten me.)

Or, more precisely: you advocate a return to the time where the creative class was living off the mercy of wealthy benefactors or were independently rich. Then it’s exactly what I’m saying. A return to amateurism. I claim that’s the only possible outcome (barring governmental intervention that leads to completely different payment structures for digital media), and it doesn’t have to be a problem. A lot of the Western canon was produced under those conditions.

We can count ourselves lucky that Joe Abercrombie has become very, very rich already from his first three books so that we can count on his continued output also [i]after[/i] he will only be paid “reasonable” amounts for his work.

[john]

Subcriptions. That's the way to deal with digital media piracy. Not many people are going to bother with fiddly piracy when you can download the same content from your provider for a reasonable monthly fee. I look forward to the day when i can download the new book by my favourite author as part of my phone, broadband and TV package. Add in advertising and it would probably be a better deal for the authors.

Also, I think it would be a great idea to make a digital book[sup][size=1]TM[/size][/sup]. How far away are paper thin screens? 300 of them, e-ink, usb cable and voila.

[Max the Mostly Mediocre]

[quote](a). Your fantasy of an industry built on people giving away money lacks precedence; nothing has ever worked like that. (Or has it? I’d be curious. Please enlighten me.)[/quote]

MP3 sales come to mind.

[Joe Abercrombie]

[quote name='Happy Ent' post='1459514' date='Jul 28 2008, 21.15']We can count ourselves lucky that Joe Abercrombie has become very, very rich already from his first three books so that we can count on his continued output also [i]after[/i] he will only be paid “reasonable” amounts for his work.[/quote]
Oh, I've hardly made anything from my books.

I told my publisher to pay me what they thought they were worth.

[Zoë Sumra]

[url="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/28/internet.musicindustry"]The Guardian[/url] on the music piracy thing.

What do you all think about the issue that if people have to pay for music, they simply will choose something else that's free?

If ebooks were on the same level as MP3s, which they currently aren't, do you think that anti-piracy measures would also hit reading?

[cseresz]

[quote name='The Anti-Targ' post='1455872' date='Jul 25 2008, 14.00']How much of the price of a book does the writer currently get? a buck or 3?[/quote]

a few selections from Why we publish Hardbacks by Brandon Sanderson
[url="http://www.brandonsanderson.com/blog/403/Essay--Why-We-Like-Hardback-Books"]BS[/url]

So, let's address the questions people have asked me and hope that leads to better organization. First off, "How much do you earn off of a book?" That one is both hard and easy to answer. Hard, because it depends on the book and the number off sales. Easy, because I can throw some hard numbers at you.

From what I've been able to see, most authors get between 6% and 8% on a paperback sale. Usually, the percentage is scaled--authors earn 6% off of the first group of paperbacks sold, 7% off of the next group, then 8% off the next group. These 'break points' tend to be rather high, in my experience. For instance, on Elantris, my break point is 75,000 books. (Meaning I get 6% off the first 75k, 7% off the next 75k, and 8% after that.) But, since the print run for Elantris was well below 75k, it will be a long, long time before I hit a break point. (However, I'm sure other authors have lower break points--and other others sell far more paperbacks than I do.)

Anyway, if an author's book sells for eight bucks (average for a big fantasy paperback) and they get 6%, That gives them around 48 cents per copy sold. Let's say that author does fairly well with the paperback and sells around 20,000 copies in the first couple years of release. That makes them a 10,000 dollars. (That's not bad, actually. Sure, 10k isn't enough to live on, but these sales will continue over years and years. Paperbacks have a long shelf life, and people buy them for a long time. The author will make residuals over quite a long time.)

Hardback royalties are much better than paperback ones. I've seen an average royalty being 10% on the first five thousand hardbacks, 12.5% on the next five, and 15% there after. And, since the book costs far more, those percentages deliver a lot more in return. So, a hardback of $25 will earn $2.50 on the first 5k, around $3.15 on the next 5k, and $3.75 per book after that. It's not uncommon for a book in the mid-lists to sell around 10k copies in hardcover for an epic fantasy. At those numbers, you begin to ear around $30,000 for the run.

Perhaps you can see the beginnings of why we publish hardcovers. The first answer is very simple. They earn us more money. In epic fantasy using the Tor model (which focuses on the hardcover sales) it's the way we stay afloat in the mid-lists.

Let us assume a hardback, like Elantris, that cost 25 bucks. First off, roughly half goes to the bookstores. (Little bit less, but it depends on the book.) So, let's say there's around 14 bucks going to the publisher out of every sale. Three of that (on average, with the break points) goes to the author. 11 bucks left.
The publisher has to pay shipping on the book when they send it to the bookstores, and they also have to print the book. That eleven bucks is shrinking to something more like seven. From that seven, they pay the editor, the typesetters, the proofreaders and copyeditor, the cover artist, the interior artist, the designer, and a fleet of assistant editors and office staff, not to mention publicists, accountants, sales reps, and a legal department. Cut out the costs, and I'll bet the publisher nets less than the author does on a given sale of a given copy of the book.

There are a lot of different models for making money in this business. Some people print a ton of paperbacks and get them into venues like supermarkets and airports where they can sell a lot of copies. Other people write in a format where they can produce a book every two or three months, then publish a large number of books, all earning them a small chunk of money.

[Peadar]

Thanks for the link, Cseresz. I enjoyed the article.

[Tom the Merciful]

[quote name='Eloisa' post='1459653' date='Jul 29 2008, 00.28'][url="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/28/internet.musicindustry"]The Guardian[/url] on the music piracy thing.

What do you all think about the issue that if people have to pay for music, they simply will choose something else that's free?

If ebooks were on the same level as MP3s, which they currently aren't, do you think that anti-piracy measures would also hit reading?[/quote]


I used to say that music industry brought this problems upon itself. Honestly, I do not know what's the practice today, but in the beginning of 90's, every single was issued in 2-3 versions, not to mention vinyl and MC which were also different. This difference was in B-sides - whether it was a new song or two live recordings or whatever, each version had something "special". Thus, music industry kept skinning the most loyal fan base, as the regular guy will definitely not buy more than one version. Comes internet and fans got their revenge. Now they were able to download everything they wanted for free.
That said, I think I do not have any "sympathy for record industry". As per your question, maybe radio is the answer. There are many Internet radio stations and people will listen to them instead of composing own giant playlists out of their illegal mp3 portfolio.

In regard to ebooks, I saw a lot of those shared on p2p and torrent. I collected a few of those, but I could never bring myself to read them. Printing them can be as expensive as buying them and reading off screen is out of question, as I do not feel comfortable. After all, I have one set of eyes in my life and I'd like them to last.

And one thing mentioned in the article made me laugh - a mentioned possibility that users who download will be cut off from internet. No way providers will do it without a strict order from government or some agency. Even then, I think they will put up a good fight in court. That's their money. After all, imagine controlling sales of screwdrivers because some burglars use them. It doesn't pay off. I think music industry will have to back up a bit. Radiohead may be a good example here.