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How would you know?
Speaking of piracy: FutureBook, a digital blog associated with The Bookseller, follows up on publisher comments made Sunday that “online piracy was now a significant new cost faced by publishers”.
As ever, I ask, “How would you know?”
FutureBook focuses some of its attention on a novel aspect of the piracy claim. Apparently, the cost of piracy is so great that it limits publishers’ ability to pay higher royalty rates on digital products.
I don’t have an adequately informed perspective on what e-book royalty rates should be. Still, I am encouraged that publishers appear to be linking a business issue to the impact of piracy.
If the emerging argument is that piracy is a business expense, then we’re hopefully on the road toward quantifying that expense. That’s an outcome worth supporting.
Posted by carolyn@carolynjewel.com
Huh. Then how do they explain the success authors are having self-pubbing reverted backlist titles?
Example: I have a reverted backlist title originally published in 2002. The book is HIGHLY pirated. That file is all over the place available for free as a torrent. I put it up on Amazon and B&N;and 1 week later (eBook only), I was in the top 1000 paid Kindle books while my frontlist titles with two of the big 6 were no higher ranked than 12,000. Six weeks later, I’m in the top 700. Those frontlist titles have also been pirated, by the way. I did even better on B&N;.
It isn’t piracy. Or at least not just piracy. It’s price, DRM and geo-restrictions. Publishers are doing a great deal that hurts their eBook sales.
I’ve now made more with that 2002 book as an eBook than it ever made as a print book, and it earned out in print. I don’t mean a little more, I mean 3x more.
Posted by Brian O'Leary
Thanks for the real-world example. Your third paragraph really captures the situation fully: price, DRM and territorial restrictions must all be on the table when it comes to digital content.
I wouldn’t claim that our research or your example tells the whole story, but the “instance” of piracy is certainly not the same as its “impact” for all titles.