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Comment by jbarrs | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this largely depends on the book. A novel between $10 and $20 that you may get multiple reads out of is better than a $100 university textbook that you only need for one year. The former you can bite the bullet on, the latter becomes harder to justify.

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Pirating novels also, well, should make people feel at least a little bad. I think there's this perception -- and, candidly, I think it's a perception that sites like TorrentFreak (where the linked article is on) push -- that Greedy Big Corporate Publishers take all the money and the creator doesn't get anything to speak of from an individual single sale. I can't speak to all industries, but in fiction publishing, this is absolutely, unequivocally not true.

- First, you really do get per-unit royalties, and it's not "just a few cents"; even with traditional publishers, ebook royalties are 25% or more. (With my publisher, I get 50% if you buy directly from them and 35% if you buy on other ebook stores.)

- Second, the vast, vast majority of fiction books sell in the thousands. Not millions, not even hundreds of thousands, and way more often than you think not in the tens of thousands. For a small press, a title that sells 5000 copies across its lifetime might qualify as a runaway best seller.

- And third, contracts for future books often depend on how well previous books sell. A friend of mine published a book a few years ago that sold decently and was even nominated for a Nebula Award. Its sequel was well-reviewed but didn't sell as well, and even though it was meant as a trilogy, the publisher doesn't seem interested in the third book.

So don't use the sales of J.K. Rowling or Stephen King or the like as a yardstick for how piracy affects fiction writers. A few thousand "lost sales" of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Gender Essentialism is a rounding error; a few thousand "lost sales" of my novel Kismet would literally double the title's revenue if they were converted to real sales.

How do you feel about libraries? Should I feel bad about the hundreds of unpopular fiction books that I borrowed when I was younger?

I believe that writers, video game creators and other targets of piracy should be fairly compensated for their work. However, for products that require $0 to be duplicated (by the creator or not) it doesn't make sense to charge per-unit.

Questions like "how do you feel about libraries" feel like they're saying "this is complicated," and, I mean, yes. It is! Is copying an ebook for free the same as checking it out of the library? There's some similarities, but there's also pretty clear differences, right?

> For products that require $0 to be duplicated (by the creator or not) it doesn't make sense to charge per-unit.

Well, when you buy a physical book, most of the cost is not actually in the production. The cost structure allows us to use that physical book as a proxy, but as the reader, you're probably not buying that book because you care deeply about the paper stock and typography choices -- you're buying it because of the words. It's the story, the style, the author, the subject matter, the genre. Those are the things that ultimately have value to you, right? Those are really what you're paying for... and they're identical between the physical copy and the zero marginal cost ebook.

And none of that really requires a per-unit charge, I know. But the question shifts to "okay, then what's the alternative?" There are possible answers for that, to be sure -- e.g., Patreon-style models where the most enthusiastic fans are essentially subsidizing the production of the work. Yet for every Patreon success story -- and let's loosely define that as "making more than they would if they were selling their works in a traditional fashion" rather than "making most or all of their income this way" -- there's a hundred creators who are just making enough to buy a dinner at Chili's once a month. And half of them will have to skip the Presidente Margarita.

Going back to the subtext I was reading into your question: this is complicated. :)

Libraries buy copies (and the creators get paid). And the copies (on average) circulate a lot less often than you'd think.

High volume authors would probably opt out of the library system if they could, but the average author probably gains from libraries (since they buy a bunch of copies that otherwise wouldn't be bought).

I like to borrow ebooks from the library. I could pirate them but I'd like to think that the borrowing traffic from the library is the least I could do for the author.

Questions from a mostly-legitimate-but-occasional-eBook-pirate[0]:

1) Do you believe piracy has any legitimacy in cases where the publisher simply refuses to release an eBook version in your region? Example: try finding "One Hundred Years of Solitude" for sale anywhere in the US.

2) Do you believe there is a moral/ethical way to protest perceived price gouging among eBooks from publishers?

Example: A book from a well-known British fantasy author is £2.99 in its own region, but nearly double that price on the US store:

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-eternal-champion-1

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-eternal-champion

[0] Submitted in bona fides is my catalog of legally-purchased e-books: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Aganar

I'm sort of hesitant to opine on "legitimacy"; while I believe in the abstract concept of copyright as a tool to protect the interest of creators, the actual real world implementation of copyright seems to often be a cascade of shit sandwiches. If copyright law is making it effectively impossible for you to give a creator money even if you want to, like the One Hundred Years of Solitude example, it's hard to see how it's helping anyone. (And that's without getting into the question of whether a 50-year-old work should really still be under copyright.) While I'm sure the current US publishers would disagree with me, it doesn't seem unreasonable to "pirate" the book in that case.

As for protesting perceived price gouging, uh... [shrug emoji] I really don't know what to tell you. In the case of the Moorcock book, there are two different publishers there -- the US publisher is the independent Titan Books, while the UK publisher is Gollancz's "SF Gateway" line of low-priced reprint ebooks, which notes on their web site, "we have English language rights on all titles everywhere in the world except for the USA, its dependencies, Canada, and the Philippines." The problem child in this case isn't Gollancz; it may be Titan, but it might also be Moorcock or his agent. At any rate, "this price is obviously too high so I'm just gonna pirate it" is a road I'm not entirely comfortable going down, even when it seems that, well, yeah, the price is too high. (That's stopped me from buying any of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels in ebook; they're barely longer than novellas -- about the same length as the Elric books, if I'm remembering them right! -- and should really be priced at $2.99 or $3.99 a pop.)

FWIW, the Elric books are also unavailable in the US, for some reason--I had to use some trickery to make Kobo think I was a UK citizen for a bit, which then allowed me to buy the books from their UK store. It was there that I also noticed the price disparity between the Corum/Hawkmoon/Eternal Champion books in both regions.

So that, too, might be an example of "I'd really like to support the author personally, but the publisher is doing their damnedest to make this difficult."

That's very strange. It looks like the Elric books specifically are out of print now but coming back to print (or "print," in the case of ebooks?) in a new (more expensive!) edition in September.

"Make Kobo think I am in the UK" really sounds like the right call. :)

Something I never really thought about until now is that I tend to feel okay with pirating "classics", or books by authors who have since died. At first, I felt like this was probably fine, since it's almost rent-collecting for the publisher at that point, but I suppose for more recent works, the royalties are still paid to the family of the deceased?

Otherwise, I feel like a decent rule is that if the majority of your friends haven't heard of it, you probably shouldn't be pirating it.

They might be, if the deceased has an estate. Or the estate could be a corporation. At some point, though, it really does feel like rent-collecting for somebody, doesn't it? I don't know what the "correct" length of a copyright term is, but I'm pretty sure it's shorter than what we have now.

I think I had to pay 1 USD to print 10 pages or something. "University Physics" at 1600 pages was cheaper to buy then print.

Using a laptop to read it would have been doable, but I found that distracting and cumbersome.

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