“Don’t let us get sick”
Recently, I tried to bolster the analytical underpinnings of “what happened to the music business” between 2000 and 2005. Some observers think a decline in sales is attributable to piracy, while empirical analysis suggests other factors were at play.
If I’ve given you reason to think again about the impact of piracy on the music business – great! Understanding that you may remain unmoved, I’m tackling a second question: Is the book business like the music business?
In some ways, it is. Both industries rely on independent creators whose work is edited, packaged and distributed by companies with a portfolio of front-list and backlist products. Both try to maximize profitable “hits” and avoid less-profitable or unprofitable “misses”.
The differences are larger, though. In the music business, the building block is small: a song. While there are some book publishing analogues (recipes in cookbooks, or city profiles in travel guides, for example), most book content is not packaged or sold as components.
Recombinant content may be on the way for categories like travel, but a song stands on its own in a way that the a chapter or illustration seldom does. While new forms of content could change that reality, those forms don’t exist today, and the pirated form remains “the book”.
This raises the second difference. Independent of the content source, Digital music can be consumed on a common platform. You don’t need to buy a new or separate device to make that pirated content “work” for you.
By comparison, books taken from pirate sources must be printed (try that at home!) or read digitally. Despite what you’ve heard, e-reading is not yet everywhere. In our experience, the most common format for pirate files is the less-than-reader-friendly PDF. Cozy up to a PDF for 15 hours and tell me you’re satisfied.
I’ll offer one more, perhaps defining distinction. Most people read a book once. They may share it with others, keep the print copy on their bookshelf for comfort or (on occasion) re-read a portion, but they don’t spend another day or two re-reading even the classic titles.
Songs are likely to be played many times (for some teens, good music appears to be defined as “play it again and again without stopping”). Someone inclined to do the work required to steal music is rewarded with multiple moments of pleasure over time. The book thief? Any investment made must be amortized over a single reading.
I’m not arguing that piracy doesn’t matter, but calls for enforcement need to be informed by more solid assessments of similarities and differences of the industries we use as benchmark. “Don’t let us get sick” is a natural refrain but (in this case) not an actionable one.
Comments
Brian, Given:
“Inependent of the content source, Digital music can be consumed on a common platform..."vs. “Despite what you’ve heard, e-reading is not yet everywhere.”
Isn’t a likely conclusion: “Just wait till ereaders are everywhere, then piracy will go through the roof and our world will be over” ?
I’m not suggesting that’s a god conclusion, but it’s a fair one, absent other data.
One other thing I’ve been thinking about, and I wonder if it has been looked at in this light: one of the reasons for the collapse in music price is just a massive glut in supply that comes with digital.
Pre-digital we had the radio and MTV and the local record shops to choose from to meet our demand; post-digital we have everything in the universe. Yet we probably spend as many hours now listening to music as we did last year. I realize that music & books are not fungible commodities, but it seems to me that when you multiply the supply by a couple of orders of magnitude, the obvious result is a collapse in prices.
Curious about your thoughts on that.
Posted by
Hugh McGuire on 02/11 at 04:06 PM
Admittedly, I had to practice a bit of cognitive dissonance to write the post. The Oberhozer - Strumpf research resonates with me, and I think their conclusion (that piracy was not the issue that affected sales) is the most data-driven I have seen.
I think there are two ways to look at the future impact of what is currently a small amount of book reading that takes place on e-readers. The first: if the installed base of readers is small today, then we have time to begin to develop more effective business models before any piracy losses become significant. Rather than “fight” piracy, I’d rather we spend time and resources elsewhere.
The second: if digital reading becomes the norm, and we think that widespread consumption of pirated digital content could occur, we should be measuring the impact now and on an ongoing basis to help inform where and when we make the most significant anti-piracy pushes. That’s an argument I have made in every presentation of the research we do in this area.
(Parenthetically, I don’t believe digital reading will becomes as much a given as digital music has. But I really don’t know that; this is just a gut belief.)
Your following question echos a comment made in the initial post ("what happened to the music business?") about the impact of video games on music sales. I wholly agree that our competitive landscape needs to be drawn much more broadly. To my eye, the real threat is not piracy; it’s competitive options that are “not reading”.
Posted by
Brian O'Leary on 02/11 at 04:47 PM
Or, competition might be “the huge assortment of easily accessible ebook content that isn’t yours.”
I agree that the availability of other ways to spend leisure time is the biggest threat to the book biz, but I am very curious about the economic effects of multiplying by 1,000 the choice of books I can get access to by pushing a button.
My hunch is that that will be the real pressure on digital pricing, rather than piracy.
Posted by
Hugh on 02/12 at 11:45 AM
I agree.. around the same time that you were adding your latest comment, I posted a brief assessment of DRM that suggests its impact may be to lower price more than to prevent deliberate or even inadvertant piracy.
Posted by
Brian O'Leary on 02/13 at 10:58 AM
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