Ebook Piracy: Some Pros and Cons
OK, I confess: I am a pirate. No black eye patch, foul-mouthed parrot perched on one shoulder, black tricorn hat bearing an ostentatious skull and crossbones logo … no, none of that. And the treasure I seek isn’t gold or precious jewels: it’s books, ebooks to be precise. I visit illegal download sites — their servers often based in Russia or India where copyright is not enforced rigorously, if indeed at all — and nab the ebooks that interest me. That done, I convert the downloaded Epub files [standard format throughout the publishing industry] to AZW3s [Kindle format] and drop them into Amazon’s dedicated reader. I don’t pay a sou for these ebooks, and I have no remorse.
Why’s that?
Those of you who know me well know what a fine, upstanding citizen I am. I’m kind to animals — though a little less so to my fellow human beings, especially if their politics are right of centre. I’m amiable and polite. I’ve been taken to court only once, for breaking a pub window while drunk. (Actually, in exculpation, I wasn’t the one who broke it, the person I was with was the culprit, but he was so drunk he thought I’d done it and that’s what he told the police, whereas I kept mum, so they charged me with the offense: hmph!) But anyway, that was forty years ago; since then, apart from a couple of minor speeding and parking offenses, I’ve led a so-called exemplary life. Pirating ebooks is the one thing I do that places me on the wrong side of the law.
According to a 2019 survey by the UK Intellectual Property Office, 17% of all ebooks are consumed illegally. Ditto for the U.S. One can only assume that because of Covid (people spending less time outdoors and more time at their computer) the percentage will have risen. A 2017 Nielsen consumer survey in the U.S. found that $315 million in book sales was lost to ebook piracy in one year alone. And loss of sales means loss of income for publishers and, as a knock-on, loss of income for authors. As I’m both an author and a publisher you’d think I would — indeed, should — stand shoulder to shoulder with my colleagues in denouncing ebook piracy. But I don’t, and here’s why.
To begin with, one has to question whether the scale of loss claimed by the Intellectual Property Office on behalf of publishers is accurate. Does one illegal download always mean one sale less? I think not. In the first place, I suspect that most downloaders would never have bought the book they ended up downloading. Moreover, it seems that many downloaders accrue books merely as a tick-box exercise, akin to trainspotting or stamp collecting or. . . you name it. They’re collectors, and the thrill for the ebook collector comes primarily from building up a formidable hoard, the largest possible one of its kind, unmatched in size by any of their fellow collectors. It’s competitive, something to flaunt and brag about. Whether any of these pirated ebooks actually get read is beside the point, the point being that I don’t think they materially affect book sales.
But, to be fair, the collector/hoarder is not typical of illegal ebook downloaders. From what I gather (chatroom comments and PMs), most other downloaders do pretty much as I do. I’m what’s known in common parlance as a leech, i.e. I download an occasional ebook but never share ebooks on download sites for others to download. If I enjoy the book I’ve downloaded and think I’m likely to want to read it again, or even just browse a few pages from time to time, I buy a hard copy — paper, glue and board, traditional style — and delete the ebook. A sale rather than a loss, in other words.
There are a couple of good reasons for favoring a paper book over its ebook equivalent, the first being that although ebook readers such as Kindle and Kobo are practical in many ways, browsing an ebook can be a bit of a faff — you can’t, for example, hold two or more pages open simultaneously for swift cross-checking. The second and more important reason, to my mind, is aesthetic. In look and feel, ebooks fall short: illustrations are monochrome only, small, and of low resolution, rendering image-heavy volumes — art, cookery books, biographies, etc. — distinctly unappealing. Plain old text is what they do best. In 2015, Kobo company president Michael Tamblyn said the company wouldn’t release a reader with a color display until authors “start writing books in color.” (With H(A)PPY, Nicola Barker has done just that, of course, but one swallow, or even a gulp of them, doth not. . . etc.) Although the gap between a book and its ebook equivalent has narrowed somewhat in the last decade or so, innovation in ebook readers has now stalled, and in both aesthetic and practical terms the ebook remains much the less satisfactory format of the two.
But let’s go back to to the theme of piracy. Unlike paper books, electronic books can be duplicated at virtually no cost and disseminated with just a few clicks of a mouse. And once an ePub has been stripped of its DRM [Digital Rights Management] security software, something that I gather is incredibly easy to do, and the ebook has been posted on an illegal download site, dozens if not hundreds of copies of it may end up being downloaded. Unfortunately, publishers have no ready solution to this problem, except perhaps to stop publishing ebooks, which seems a bit drastic.
Despite all their grumbling about illegal downloads, I suspect that very little income is lost to this trend. Even if a particular ebook is downloaded, let’s say, three-hundred-and-sixty-five times before the download link times out (as they do, often in as little as a day or two), it simply does not follow that three-hundred-and-sixty-five sales have been lost, and to insist that this is the case is willfully misleading. Yes, a few sales will be lost; but perhaps these inadvertent freebies serve another purpose and should be viewed in a different, more positive light — as a promotional tool, a form of viral marketing. Publishers should think seriously about what may be gained from illegal downloads rather than what may have been lost.
Brian Marley's most recent book is The Shenanigans (Grand Iota, 2020)