A heavy-handed warning to book publishers comes this week from Jack Shafer of Slate, who intones that by fighting to price certain e-books higher than the $9.99 that Amazon wants to charge customers for most titles, publishers will “encourage the establishment” of an illegal file-sharing site for books. Of course, Mr. Shafer makes the usual qualifications about not actually defending such illegal practices. Still, his message is plain: if a “Bookster” crops up in the next few years, the fault will rest primarily with greedy, obtuse publishers.
Such moralizing is a classic case of blaming the victim, and ignores the blunt realities of digital piracy. (Note: Abbeville does not currently sell any titles as e-books, so we don’t yet have a dog in this fight—only opinions to spare.) The fact is that digital piracy of books and other media content will exist no matter how amicably media companies work with online retailers such as Amazon, and no matter how low they agree to set their prices. The advent of iTunes has not stopped online music theft. It has only curbed it somewhat by providing an exceptionally convenient legal alternative, while robbing all trace of a legitimate excuse from those who engage in it. In working with online retailers to offer legal e-books at a fair price, publishers can only hope, at best, to do the same.
Let’s be clear, however: even if they are slow to accomplish this, an unchecked spree of digital book piracy will be a failure of law enforcement, not of business innovation. Customers do not have the right to steal goods that they can’t obtain as cheaply or conveniently as they might prefer. Writers like Shafer know this, but struggle to rationalize piracy nonetheless: “Basically, before iTunes arrived, if you wanted portable tracks, you had to rip your own, borrow collections from friends, or grab ‘free’ tunes from the ‘pirates’ at Napster or other file-sharing sites.” Nonsense. You could also have invested in a portable CD player and suffered the inconvenience of carrying a little extra weight, because that was the legal option. You didn’t have to steal music any more than we have to go shoplift from Gristedes right now because their prices aren’t as low as we might like, or because they won’t offer the convenience of, say, delivering groceries to our office this minute.
If publishers who won’t budge on their e-book prices find themselves losing customers to other publishers who will, or to other media outlets, that’s capitalism. If they find themselves losing revenue to thieves, that’s crime. It would be more constructive for prominent columnists like Shafer to stigmatize that crime—which is now, after all, one of the few that otherwise law-abiding Americans commit regularly—than to rationalize it through victim-blaming. An enormous amount of time, hard work, and money goes into the production of a book (more, we suspect, than most consumers realize), and publishers—many of whom are currently hoping just to survive, not reap outlandish profits—must consider all of this in pricing their goods. For our part, we would encourage readers who love e-books to request them vocally and seek them out actively at the lowest price available, but if high prices persist, to respond by taking their money elsewhere, not stealing. Far from a righteous and effective lobbying technique, the latter behavior is the best way of sabotaging the industry’s ability to make any books available at all.
It’s illegal, it’s a failure of law enforcement, and publishers should not be blamed for this.
Also, you can’t practically stop everyone from stealing, there are a huge number of people who will steal a book that is $15 and buy the book if it is $10, and the power to affect this lies solely with the publishers.
We live in a world that is not ideal and just. But we do live in it, and choices have to be made within the realities of that world. Business decisions sometimes, often, have nothing to do with the way things should be.
Net profits will likely go down if the books cost too much. Morally it is not the publishers fault. Practically, it is the publishers fault.
If I’m grateful for the eggs, I’m grateful to the hen: I mean the publisher. I’ve had e-books in the past and don’t like them, and in addition I cannot read them any more because the Adobe reader thing won’t let me read them any more when I changed computers. Nor would I like the other alternatives: Kindle readers, print-on-demand and so on.
But I cannot afford books! Fortunately, Amazon.co.uk comes to my rescue. Yesterday I went into Waterstone’s in the local mall, found a book I desired (the Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus), went home and ordered a new copy for a ninth of the published price from one of those shops which does this kind of thing (through Amazon), plus an inflated postage price.
I had a momentary twinge of guilt about betraying Waterstone’s in this way. But they are the predatory grey squirrels in this Darwinian struggle, who have all but wiped out the native red. Before Waterstone’s we had real bookshops, not efficient retail outlets run on scientific principles – the same scientific principles that from my point have view have all but destroyed our public library.
I hold capitalism to be less of a crime than crime itself, but abhor, eschew and abjure both, If the Abbeville Manual of Style upholds the old values, as it would appear, then you are in my shelf of heroes, if not, alas! physically so.
[...] do ebooks I always check the Abbeville Manual of Style blog because I enjoy the content so much. They just did this posting which is right on point given some of the stuff we’ve reported on recently. Especially so [...]
An important post! I’ve taken the liberty of reposting it over on TeleRead, as it deserves a wider audience.
Paul Biba
Co-Editor, TeleRead.org
Thanks Paul! We appreciate the kind words and the link.
[...] The “Bookster” Threat, from The Abbeville Manual of Style (via TeleRead) and very interesting comment thread, too. [...]
the Australia government is looking at legislation to create a dumping ground for US overruns in Australia. If enacted this will result in authors of books in the US not receiving any royalties for overruns of their books sold to large book publishers in Australia, such as Dymmocks and Borders etc, and will result in the death nell of Australia authors who cannot compete.
So piracy and Amazon are not the only areas to look at.