Let’s get real
At a panel convened by New York University’s M.S. in publishing program, Macmillan CEO John Sargent claimed that 90% of their front-list titles are available on file-sharing sites.
I believe him.
He went on to claim that “We are at the stage of the music industry just before file-sharing,” And on that point, I am not ready to believe him.
Of a recent lawsuit against Scribd, I wrote that it would make sense to understand the impact of pirated content on actual sales before trying to shut it down. I’m not condoning piracy, but publishers have been giving away content to promote paid sales for about as long as they have been making books. Galleys, blads, sample chapters, review copies ... who pays for that content?
The ongoing study we have done of O’Reilly titles suggests that the relationship between pirated content and paid sales is more complex that Sargent posits. It may even help increase awareness, trial and ultimately paid sales.
I’ll acknowledge that O’Reilly is not like every other publisher, and there are probably types of books that are consistently hurt by piracy. That said, we’ve been collecting data for a year to help inform the publishing business about what types of free distribution might be worth worrying about. The study may still be narrow, but it’s more than a stone’s throw better than generalizations about uploaded content and parallels to the music business.
Comments
Yes, I agree that it’s much more complex than “pirates are buyers who just don’t wanna pay.” As Mark Joyner points out, what about the viral benefits of piracy? When people who have pirated a work recommend it to other people, some who will be buyers?
Pirates often never have an intention to buy. I’ve done some informal study of this, and I’ve found that pirates are often:
- overly-cautions tire kickers who don’t trust a product to be good, but who will buy later (I’ve done this)
- ethically against supporting a company but needing industry-standard tools, such as Microsoft Office
- simply too poor to buy, such as high schoolers pirating the $1000+ Adobe Creative Suite
- not committed or interested enough to purchase, like the people who download way too much music to ever listen to, just because it looks interesting at the time.
Have you read Chris Anderson’s Free? I recommend it, even though I am uncomfortable—and don’t agree with—some of his ideas.
Posted by
Kat on 09/28 at 02:38 PM
I haven’t parsed “Free” yet, although it is on the to-read list. I did write a blog post ("Attribution malfunction") about Anderson’s defense of his use of and credit (not) given to certain sources, but that was less about the notion of free and more about what the trade book of the future may look like.
As the various reports we have written underscore, we don’t condone piracy, but we do wonder if there are instances in which it helps sell content. You’ve outlined some use cases that might help and others that might not (folks who are critical of Microsoft but need Office fall into that latter camp, but they may be evidence of a network effect, as well). We’re looking broadly at what helps sell more stuff.
Posted by
Brian F OLeary on 09/28 at 03:10 PM
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