I thought about writing books (technical stuff) but then realized there is nothing I can do about piracy, pdf/epub/etc are just a few clicks away. unlike music and movies that you have some leagues to enforce IP laws once a while, for books there is essentially none. It's hard to get motivations considering writing books are so demanding.
I won't say piracy is a non-issue. OK, it's a non-issue. The issue is if no one knows or cares that you wrote a book on a tech topic. To the degree people do, the far bigger deal in general is that you have now written a book on tech-related topic that can be career-enhancing in many other ways. This is not universally the case perhaps, but it's the way to bet.
TBH, I find a downside of publishing through a traditional publisher is that I can't just freely distribute in digital form.
I'm the author of the said book. I spent one year and a half writing full-time to complete the book. Now, most of the copies sold on Amazon are pirated copies. I have filed copyright claims many times and Amazon does nothing. It’s a very sad story. It makes writing books almost an impossible career choice.
A book I wrote was pirated a few years ago. I didn't do anything and let the publisher deal with it. I have no clue if they really tried to do anything about it.
I didn't write the book for the money so missing out on the royalties didn't upset me that much, I just took it as a compliment and moved on :)
Does it bother anyone else that piracy would force an arbitrary low price point for books?
Books are actually a great example of this problem.
Authorship is much less of a lifestyle decision than musicianship (commercial musicians have to practice and gig, for instance). That means authors don't have to commit themselves to a career of writing; they have more of an option to write or not write.
Meanwhile, books are a notoriously bad deal for authors, most of whom apparently earn sustenance wages for their efforts. So there's already little incentive to create them.
Search back through the archives of HN for the comments asking 'patio11 to write up his marketing-engineering insights, and pay close attention to his "are you nuts why would I waste my time doing that" responses for a vivid example of this.
Piracy is preventing the market from establishing a real clearing price for books; it's creating whole categories of books that simply can't be sold effectively, because once priced correctly, the incentive to steal the book is too high.
(Meanwhile, Neko Case is going to keep putting albums out whether they're pirated or not, because she's pot-committed to being a musician.)
Most authors of anything other than best selling trash don't make anything worth caring about. Almost all the money goes to publishing, including ebooks. Does piracy still suck?
One of the main problems for books, and particularly technical books, is breaking out and getting word of mouth, not avoiding piracy. There are a lot of technical books out there, and a limited amount of time to find the good ones.
Author here. One of my books was pirated and wide spread some time ago within the community I'm in. My income dropped almost immediately, I am loosing $Xk worth of sales every month. Not motivated to write another book.
The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my work_ for free? I spent almost 2 years on writing the book. I hope you have a good answer.
I am quite surprised the pirating of eBooks has not taken off. The infrastructure certainly exists, but I'm not aware of any exclusive, prolific communities in a similar vein to music and tv shows/movies.
I've been pirating all I can since the first time I got my hands on a computer: from Windows to AutoCAD,etc. Fast forward some years, and I'm the one in the company who decides that we need more and more from Microsoft,so the bills just keep going up. I often download an ebook, read a few pages,if it's any good,I buy it from Amazon. I can't recall really reading any pirated book for more than a few pages, as I either delete it or just get a hard copy.
I'm totally, 100% with you on piracy. Your work should not be stolen.
However, if your goal is a business as a full-time technical author, piracy is not your major enemy. Can I strongly suggest looking at the self-published ebook versus traditional published book choice as if you were offered it for the first time today? The first gets you on Amazon, puts you in full control of your marketing, let's you experiment with pricing and message, gives you post-launch opportunities for improvement, and bumps your "royalty" to 70 ~ 95%. The second gets wee little advances. If you look at those advances as buying equity in your book, they're the equity equivalent of a personal loan from CapOne.
I have a close friend who published an engineering text book. He worked a couple of years on it and it was well received in his particular field. The book was pirated within months and is freely available on PDF. It's unfair that his hard work is being used globally for free.
So yes, having books shut off sucks but so does piracy.
I hope the publishers realize that they must tread lightly here. Even by the ridiculously low standards of music and movies, books are reaaally easy to pirate. The DRM is a joke and most of them comprise fewer bytes than a moderately complex webpage.
If we learned one thing from the music industry over the last 15 years, it's that the internet gives your customers the power to destroy you if you treat them with contempt for long enough.
I love to read and I happily buy many Kindle books at $9.99+ a pop on Amazon. I want to live in a world where authors can make a living by writing. But bogus restrictions on book sharing, complete lack of a resale market, etc. are already starting to rub me the wrong way. At some point, if pushed too far, I'm not going to feel much remorse about flouting the system.
For movies? Netflix. For books? Piracy is irrelevant. (See far too many articles from Konrath, who at one point uploaded all his books on a torrent site AND advertised that on his blog... to no effect on his sales.)
From my experience as an author of a tech book, the ebook is pirated even before the official publication date, the authors only have access to the ebooks fees days after the publication date. That’s why I’ll never write a book again.
> Books need to be written, edited, typeset, 'printed' / 'put into ebook format', distributed, etc.
The author writes the book. Typesetting and "putting into ebook format" are a copy-and-paste affair, taking at most a day. Pirated books don't need to be printed or distributed.
I've written four books. Each book is the result of thousands of hours of experience and hundreds of hours of work. My books are all over these sites, and have been used to train AI. Without my consent.
I didn't write books to make money - I've made the national bestseller list and still get paid < minimum wage for my writing time. But it is disrepectful to my time and expertise to use such pirated sites. You probably make money with your mind and your fingers and your creativity. Why wouldn't you take some tiny part of the money you make and use it to allow me to do the same.
And for those who say "its the same as a library" - libraries buy books. And lend them on a limited basis. Sites like this are just simple theft.
i pirated my first book on programming. circumstances forced me to: not affordable for a young african surviving on ~$50/mo, no debit/credit card (these payment instruments won’t become popular until mid 2010s), thee general availability of resources via torrent sites. now i don’t pirate my books anymore, or i haven’t found it necessary to. but sometimes piracy agrees with the intentions of the author of the work, disagrees with the distribution mechanism. as distribution becomes worse, as demonstrated in the article, the elegant simplicity of piracy can only become more and more attractive.
reply