What Can I Do About Book Pirates? 987
peterwayner writes "Six of the top ten links on a Google search for one of my books point to a pirate site when I type in 'wayner data compression textbook.' Others search strings actually locate pages that are selling legit copies including digital editions for the Kindle. I've started looking around for suggestions. Any thoughts from the Slashdot crowd? The free copies aren't boosting sales for my books. Do I (1) get another job, (2) sue people, or (3) invent some magic spell? Is society going to be able to support people who synthesize knowledge or will we need to rely on the Wikipedia for everything? I'm open to suggestions."
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:5, Informative)
I do this with my book Free for All [wayner.org]. It's a great success if you measure success by the number of people who read my work. But it's contributed zero to my income since I released it in electronic form. No one asks if they can buy printed versions.
There is a slight way to measure the effect. Used versions trade on Amazon and they've stayed at roughly the same price.
BTW, I've read the electronic version on a Palm and it's very easy to read. This may have been a viable strategy during the TRS-80 years, but not during the iPhone years. I wouldn't be surprised if the iPhone has better resolution than some of the sketchy laser printers I've seen.
Re:Have You Noticed Any Personal Income Loss? (Score:3, Informative)
If you got sent to Catholic school you automatically got a better education than you would have in public screwal.
I don't think your lawsuit would go anywhere.
I didn't know what "holocaust" meant until I was a Freshmen in a public high school. I had never heard of the Spanish conquistadors in the new world from the point of view of a Native American. I didn't know what Hindu or Buddhist meant and the worst part was I didn't wanna. The list goes on.
... aside from that I was a righteous asshole with the moral high ground in everything. It took me several years to unlearn a lot of things and to learn a whole lot more after kindergarten through eighth grade. Take it from someone who's been on both sides: acceptance, tolerance and culture are goddamn important.
Oh yeah, my math was top notch
Re:Have You Noticed Any Personal Income Loss? (Score:3, Informative)
The GPL is a license, violating a license is not the same as violating copyright. You aren't suing over money, you are suing to have the source code released. There are so many differences between your analogy and what's going on here I don't know where to start.
You clearly don't understand the GPL. The GPL is a license to a copyrighted work. It conditionally grants the licensee the right to do certain things that are reserved exclusively to the copyright owner under copyright law. It purports to rely solely on copyright law for its enforceability (I asked RMS point blank at a public appearance about a month ago whether he thought it had any contractual provisions, and he said "No. It's strictly a license"). That means that if you violate the GPL, the only legal claim that the FSF would pursue against you is copyright violation. It would not be interested in asserting any contract claims.
So the only real difference is the copyright on GPL software gives you a warm fuzzy, but the copyright on books doesn't.
Re:Have You Noticed Any Personal Income Loss? (Score:5, Informative)
Umm are you blind, he ISN'T PUBLISHED BY O'REILLY, the book he's referring to:
http://books.google.com/books?id=mnPeNQ0ZCsUC&pg=PA187&lpg=PA187&dq=data+compression+peter+wayner&source=bl&ots=ADJFApRA6Q&sig=9vqTz19uyk4WjFh5TwT5HY6zzZU&hl=en&ei=HJIMSoTzFITAMq_SzbMG&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#PPA179,M1 [google.com]
is the top result to the string he gives, and is published by Morgan Kaufmann.
DMCA (Score:4, Informative)
Send Google a 512(c) takedown [google.com] letter. duh!
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:5, Informative)
> Synthesizing information isn't cheap. It took me a long time to write that book.
I published a book some years ago, and there were a lot of other people involved, too: copy editors, reviewers, typesetters, artists. All of whom require management, secretaries, paper clips, etc etc etc. The publisher spent a lot of time and money marketing that book.
You are probably receiving only $8-$10 of that $41 in Kindle sales. The publisher's overhead probably only accounts for another $10-$15, leaving a pretty considerable overhead. Much of that is making up for projects that didn't happen, books that failed to turn a profit, etc.
So you can't sell that book for $2 online and expect to have that mean anything. The author and the host of people assisting him or her put in a lot of hours. It could probably be less than $40 and still turn a profit for the publisher, but it's still going to be pricey ($20-$30).
Re:Fortunately, this problem is easily solved. (Score:3, Informative)
This is why, at my university, many active textbooks are limited in quantity, have a two hour checkout limit, and you can't take them off library premises.
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:5, Informative)
It's a nice dream to make your living from your art but only a small fraction of creative people ever achieve that. It's been like that from the start and will continue that way. It's the golden carrot offered to the contestants on shows like Pop Idol "it CAN be you but in all likelihood, it won't be you.....or it may be you for a short while so make the best of it before you're dumped back to reality."
Trying to fight against the internet is futile too, unless you want to waste your time and money following the RIAA / MPAA model of suing your customers. The internet has steamrolled many business models which were previously very lucrative, your best option would be to look for ways to adapt to it and use it.
Offer something of added value like signed copies of your dead tree versions and cheap (or even free) ebook versions. Go for the Creative Commons approach and allow your customers to adapt your characters and stories with their own fan fiction. Stories, regardless of their medium are about connecting with the audience, some of that audience are creative too, in fact most of them are probably more creative than they realize but would never act on any impulses. By allowing your customers the freedom to live with the characters they've connected with, it will win you more loyalty, with more of them likely to want to reward you by buying a signed dead tree copy even if they never open it, just to support you. Let them build a community around the world you've created, or set a website / forum up yourself and encourage participation of art work etc.
In short...engage your audience, allow them to get involved in the world they've connected with. You will reap what you sow; if that's DRM and lawsuits your rewards will be that many of your audience who would like you, will have no compunction NOT to pirate your stuff feeling that you deserve to be ripped off. Engage them, encourage them and reward them and they will reward you in return.
The choice is yours, all it needs is some thought, attention and enthusiasm. For a creative person this should be second nature.
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:5, Informative)
It's freely available online, from the author. And here comes the shocking bit: It's fun to read.
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:3, Informative)
The answer to this is to embrace the new technology an be creative. Make the electronic copy valuable. One of my Prof's developed something called XamPREP that he uses for some of his classes. It is at http://www.xamprep.com/ [xamprep.com] but you can't see all the goodies without subscribing. I'll need to recommend he put some examples up so people can see the value.
Here is the description for the site:
XamPREP is an alternative to traditional textbooks. It contains all the contents of your textbook plus the ability to performs self-help quizzes, search the text, work with animations, write in margins and ask questions of clarification.
Students pay a fee (right now $44 or $75) and for the semester they get access to text book online and all the bonuses. The students love it because it is cheaper than buying the book and they are getting more out of it. Plus their grades have improved. The online content can be customized according to the Prof that is teaching the class or the school it is being taught at.
Get your book on something like this or roll your own. Make the subscription based content truly useful. Provide 1 free subscription (non-transferable) to people who buy the book new and allow people who buy it used (or steal it) subscribe for an affordable fee. As technology changes and your book gets dated part of the value is the up to date information they can only get via subscription. The added bonus is that if you are providing resources that help students learn you may even get more prof's to use your book in their classes.
Sorry about plugging a product in a post that is probably just trying to plug a product, but there are some really cool things you can do with textbooks.
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:5, Informative)
he is still expecting to get money for something that is already rendered obsolete
Actually, I'm not. I just wish that anyone who still showed an interest in my book would be shown directly to a place where they could actually pay for it. And I wish that they wouldn't be tempted with all of the Torrent sites.
I know the book is ten years old. I'm not surprised that someone may have written a better book. I would just like the book to be treated fairly.
In the end, my needs are inconsequential. The problem is that the better authors who write the newer books are going to be affected even more by piracy. And then they're going to do something else. So you can blame my book all you want, but we're all going to be hurt when the better books disappear.
I think you have a serious marketing problem (Score:3, Informative)
I decided to google "wayner data compression textbook" on google and I found some interesting results.
First, what you're talking about is no more. I could not find any links to pirated books in the top 5.
Second and most interesting is what I did find:
#1 Some (unreadable due to javascript/flash colliding with noscript) "Hot news" about your book, but no link to it.
#2 and #3 Blogs or similar about what we're talking about (not currently displayed or displaying some video I didn't care about)
#4 An amazon entry for "Introduction to Data Compression" by Khalid Sayood
#5 Kevin Wayne's Princeton homepage
#6 This slashdot article
Nowhere to be found is an entry of your book, your homepage or anything related with you (except for #2 or #3, that was not useful at all).
How come no amazon entry for your book showed up? Or even a homepage? You've beaten to first place by lots of people talking about this, when it could have been your chance to take first place. Yet the book is not in the top 5 of the list. Then comes mininova, followed by TPB.
Even more interesting is that I accidentally searched for "wayner data compression book" and found lots of amazon entries....for a book by Mark Nelson. To be fair, there was a link to "Data compression algorithms for real programmers", authored by you (or so it seems).
I checked the entry on TPB. It is for a torrent that has hundreds of science books. Your "data compression for real programers" is just one of many, and the only one by you. It seems like somebody got it into a collection of books.
Basically "data compression textbook" (if that's the title of your book) is nowhere to be found. If the book you're talking about is "Data compression algorithms for real programmers", then if you search for that, you'll find the amazon entry at the top. But if that's the case, then it's not known as the data compression book. To get a nickname like that, the book will probably have to be really famous (as in "Dragon Book" famous). If it's not DCAFRP you're talking about, then it's not known at all, so don't expect it to appear on any searches. It is not being torrented, either. You get hits on TPB because google finds DCAFRP and another books that have the word "textbook" in the title.
Anyway, most of the people downloading the torrent are probably looking for some other book than yours, but they get the torrent for the whole collection. One download = one lost sale definitely DOES NOT apply here. On a more personal note, I tend to view these collections like public libraries. I think people seed these torrents because the contents are too valuable to lose. Most just get a reference or two from a few books at most. Please don't have them taken down.
And about the poor students, you might want them to buy the books, but if it's between buying a textbook and food and rent money, the choice is obvious. Maybe if your book is good enough, in five years a future engineer or programmer is going to buy it. Don't count on that if the book is crap, though.
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:2, Informative)
Also applications: decompression on PMPs and other ASIC/SoC embedded devices, advances in lossy stream compression that make pirated movies watchable, network and distributed data/computing applications, use of compression for spam and other detection purposes, new considerations for use with encryption, compression of three dimensional objects...
Simple, Effective Solution (Score:3, Informative)
Dear Peter,
I suggest you publish your future books using a complicated, hacker-proof DRM system. One example would be using Microsoft's robust, cross-platform Silverlight content delivery system, possibly combined with military-grade RSA-56 encryption technology to thwart even the most determined hackers. This will ensure easy access to your textbooks, little or no complaints, effectively kill the secondhand market, and eliminate all pirated copies all in one blow. With this system, you should be able to easily charge hundreds of dollars per copy, and without pirates killing your sales I'm sure your future books will easily break 1M copies.
It can be a little intimidating to set up an effective DRM delivery system, as well as the key authentication servers properly, so if you're looking to do it yourself on the cheap I'd suggest you actually post another "Ask Slashdot" to look for experts in the field to help you for free. I'm sure you can tell by the helpful responses in this thread that many IT Experts, software developers, and fellow authors sympathize with your situation and would like to help you eliminate those brutish pirates. Best of luck!
Re:Sorry, Peter; harsh reality time... (Score:2, Informative)
Peter Coelho would strongly disagree with you - http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080124/08563359.shtml [techdirt.com]
There is a system for handling this... (Score:3, Informative)
Have you just tried asking Google to delist them?
"Removing information from Google: Reporting copyright infringement" http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=58 [google.com]
Your exact concern appears to be directly addressed in this way.
Re:Not all jobs are the same my friend (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, as an academic I know exactly what I'm talking about. Nobody writes textbooks for money - it does not pay. And we have enough flexibility in our work to choose to write books in the first place. Try spending a large fraction of a year working on a textbook instead of normal duties in any other career than academia and come back and tell me that it is not something you get paid for.