On making ebook piracy inevitable

Simon & Schus­ter have announced that they will be delay­ing the ebook releases of at least 35 of their big name releases in 2010. Doyce Tester­man has said pretty much what I have to say on the mat­ter, so why don’t you go see what he has to say.

This deci­sion, which I fully believe is grounded in noth­ing less than a toddler-​like desire to cling to the once-​profitable but entirely out­dated pub­lish­ing struc­tures of the past, actu­ally cre­ates an envi­ron­ment where, from a ebook-pirate’s per­spec­tive, it is a good idea to steal from them, because there is no legit­i­mate com­pe­ti­tion in that space.

via The Future, the Past, Will­ful Igno­rance, and Simon and Schus­ter – doyce tester­man.

Basi­cally, Simon & Schus­ter (Stephen King) and Hatch­ette (Stephanie Meyer) are forc­ing users who want – or need – to read books via ebook for­mat to either do with­out or turn to P2P net­works and down­load pirate scans. For me per­son­ally, this means noth­ing. I haven’t bought a paper book in a decade. If it’s not avail­able from Ama­zon or eReader.com, I sim­ply don’t buy it. I have hun­dreds of books that I can read instead. But the author won’t get my money, either, and that’s a shame.

I think it’s worth not­ing that I just bought a copy of Earth by David Brin on eReader, even though I’ve had a pirate scan of it for years. Why? Because the scan sucks as a read­ing expe­ri­ence. It’s badly OCRed, mean­ing the line and para­graph breaks are in the wrong places and it’s rife with typos. Even though I could get the story for free, it was worth $8 for a pro­fes­sional pre­sen­ta­tion, and clean­ing up the scan would have taken up far, far more than $8 worth of my time.

Peo­ple will buy ebooks if they’re priced to pro­vide a good value for the con­tent, but you have to give them the chance in the first place.