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."
"These free copies aren't boosting sales" (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you sure about that? What have you got in the way of data backing up that statement? I'm not saying you're wrong - but I think it would help to know how you know that is the case.
Run your own web site (Score:4, Interesting)
That should create enough links (from Wikipedia for example) over time so that you show up first. On that website, provide links to Amazon etc, and offer a download of the latest version. Mention that folks who bought the dead tree version are entitled to a free download and that other folks should send $X via whatever your preferred payment method is.
Somebody who is interested in encryption knows about P2P so there's no way you can put the bits back in the bottle.
Re:Have You Noticed Any Personal Income Loss? (Score:4, Interesting)
First, O'Reilly isn't really my publisher, although I did contribute a chapter to the book Beautiful Security.
Second, I don't think that people are out to screw me personally. At least most people that is. But I do believe that humans take the path of least resistance.
Third, I think that students are already under a great deal of financial stress. The temptation to save a few dollars by grabbing a free copy of the textbook is very understandable to me. I just wish people would look at text book authors as the good guys because I think we provide much more information per dollar than the universities. Alas, I don't think I'm going to change people's ideas on that very soon.
Fourth, at some point the search engines and the web sites need to take some responsibility for what they display. I do blog about my book and I do use clean URLs to help the search engines do the right thing.
I think there's just something plain broken about the search engine results.
Re:Have You Noticed Any Personal Income Loss? (Score:2, Interesting)
You seem to already have the negative caged-animal attitude that suing the shit out of everyone is your only option.
From the OP:
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.
As you can see, the OP mentioned other options other than "suing the shit out of everyone", and made it clear that he is looking for other suggestions.
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:5, Interesting)
I will not make a lot of money from the book - probably $5k per edition, but writing it will enable me to share my vision with a lot of people, and I regard that as a privilege. The more it is pirated, the more it will help my career.
Actually, he knows exactly what to do (Score:5, Interesting)
His strategy is to complain about it in high profile forms, thus getting highly placed google results. Results 2 and 4 when I search on his query string:
2. A Victim of Piracy Wonders How To Fight Back - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com May 14, 2009 ... The specter of piracy of my books materialized for me several weeks ago when I typed the four words âoewayner data compression textbookâ into Google. ...
bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/a-pirates-victim-wonders-how-to-fight-back/?pagemode=print
4. Slashdot | What Can I Do About Book Pirates? peterwayner writes "Six of the top ten links on a Google search for one of my books points to a pirate site when I type in 'wayner data compression textbook ...
ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/14/2037236
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:4, Interesting)
Best of luck to you! It's quite a good reason to write a text book, but it looks like it may soon be the only reason to do it.
Re:"These free copies aren't boosting sales" (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Just royalty statements that show very few sales.
2) I've watched the price of used copies of Free for All on Amazon. They've stayed more or less at the same price for the last ten years. The free copy has been out there for about 9 years.
For the record, each month I still give away about 3000 or more copies of Free for All from my web site alone. If the free copies were really generating print sales, we would have seen a bump up. They're not printing any more.
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think he's already found his solution. Now that he's been published in the NYT and on slashdot, Google presents searchers with Amazon.com, the NYT and slashdot in the top 10 search results.
Problem is solved, time to move on.
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:5, Interesting)
It might have something to do with the fact the book is $50 because the content is worth it. Printing and distribution are a very small fraction of the cost of a book and it is valid that these costs be removed from the price of an e-book. So you take the $50 book and charge $45.95 for the e-book.
Look into it some more, don't just assume that printing and distribution is extremely costly. As the author of a $50 book (http://www.amazon.com/s/&field-keywords=cd+and+dvd+forensics [amazon.com] for example), I know the costs of shipping a box of 22 books from the publisher is like $10. The printing cost is also not significant. A book like CD and DVD Forensics might cost $5 to print in relatively small quantities.
Either the content is worth it or it isn't. The physical book is essentially cost-free as far as anyone is really concerned.
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:5, Interesting)
SO, how much did you pay the people that contributed to the books? I do notice you dodge actually citing many them.
I mean, if you should get paid for your effort, shouldn't they?
Anyways:
Who is your target audience? I grabbed the PDF, read the first 20 pages, and the last 5, plus some in the middle. The part where you talk about Disney.
Who is interested in it? It seems to me at this time it is only interesting to people who where involved in some manner i the last 15 years, but since they were involved in IT during that time, they know the story. SO why would they buy?
Honestly, If Linux becomes a dominant force the book you linked to will be considered a gold mine to historians, but for people living through the time? I don't see it.
BTW, sine a downloaded the PDF to sample your works are you counting that as a lost sale like piracy? becasue if you are, rest assured I would never have bought it.
Re:Already answered, sort of... (Score:3, Interesting)
because they aren't available in high quality open digital formats without DRM,
That's actually a big one for me. I buy un-DRM'd PDFs from people like the Pragmatic Programmers, when they're available. I don't buy DRM'd ebooks, period. No way I'm booting Windows or paying for a $400 device (when I already have a $2000 laptop) just to read ebooks.
That would be my first suggestion. Clearly the DRM is doing you no good at all, so drop it. Once you've done that, you'll have to decide whether it's worth it to publish a digital copy at all, or whether to stick purely to print -- or, for that matter, whether to give the digital version away for free, and sell the print version.
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd also keep in mind your target audience. A student, without financial aid, is probably going to look askance at the $50 price tag considering the size of the book. If you have a company or a government buying books for you it's probably not that big of a deal. I'd say that you're worrying about the people who wouldn't be in a position to buy your book anyhow.
I thought the comment one reviewer made was pretty funny:
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:5, Interesting)
Cory Doctorow: "[M]y biggest threat as an author isn't piracy, it's obscurity." (http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/14/why-publishing-shoul.html)
I suppose it's a different issue if the book is required for a course, in which case we delve into questions of monopoly prices and substitutes.
Sustaining vs Disruptive Technology (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:5, Interesting)
My sympathy level dropped by several levels when I found out he's making college textbooks.
Why? Because I've been through that ugly racket. Not one of my college textbooks was under $250. All of them were written "by the professor", or co-authored by same, and then required for their courses so that they had a captive audience to "sell" to. "New editions" came out every other year, the only difference between which was the numbers inside the practice problems and the page count (altered by resizing the font). The full textbook + labbook + "labpack" (a set of components that could have been bought for 1/10 the cost at the local Fry's, but for which they "assessed" the fee without giving us a choice to look elsewhere) set for my courseload actually came out more expensive than in-state tuition my first semester.
For every "change" or "new edition" that actually included new research in the field, there were 100 more that were nothing but crap-ass "planned obsolescence" maneuvers designed to squeeze students for every penny by destroying the used-book market. One of these asstard professors actually forced people to hand in the back cover of their book with the final exam or take a zero grade, in order to make sure that there were no second-hand books on the market.
I would have loved to see a book available for $50. I'm impressed that it retails for that. I wish you well as a writer. But I have much less sympathy for you based on your line of work, having been abused by your peers.
Re:Change your business model (Score:3, Interesting)
And there's nothing you or anyone else can do about that except adapt.
Actually, I kind of like the old model. I like being able to plunk down $10 and see a movie that cost $100m to make. I like being able to pay $100 for a textbook from a leading expert who's not just doing it to advertise other services. I'm a content consumer and I like the old model. It's far from perfect, but it's better than watching videos of people's cats riding Roombas on YouTube.
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:2, Interesting)
Reputable and accredited schools don't allow professors to profit off of their own book being required for the course. many schools actually extend the policy to requirements of other professors within the same school. The money your professor would have made by requiring you to buy his book for his class was donated (often to a departmental scholarship). If it's a good text and used by other colleges he can keep that money but nothing from his school.
Fortunately, this problem is easily solved. (Score:4, Interesting)
At the beginning of your semester, go to the school library and check out all your texts. Most colleges have their current in-use textbooks available for checkout at the library.
Take the books home, and scan them with a flat bed scanner.
Take the books back to the library.
If you're feeling generous, put your PDF files up on a bittorrent site.
You're not going to get any help from Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, submitter, but Slashdotters believe absolutely everything that they didn't make should be made available to them for free. If anyone makes them feel guilty about it in any way, they'll invent bad guys to make themselves feel like good guys, such as the MPAA or RIAA. "The RIAA made me do it!" You may as well accept that the leeches of society are going to pirate your book and think nothing of it, because that's the kind of personality that the internet breeds. Just read Slashdot comments for a sampling.
Disruptive technology (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone who is in a business where the products can be reporesented by bits and bytes will just have to come to the realization that their world has changed radically. And that's just that.
The digital age has some seriously profound implications for society, one of them is, such products are now so close to free to copy as to be almost unmeasurable. Note I didn't say free to make the first edition, but this is replicator technology. The future got here, at least the first really large step towards a star trek type level of existence. The only way that such digital products can enjoy a high "per unit" cost like a tangible product forever is by strictly enforced and rather draconian laws, across the planet, that will force a tremendous amount of artificial scarcity into the market.
Now you have to ask, is this *really* the direction we want humanity to go in? How much do you really want to lock down computers and the net in order to be able to accomplish this goal? What percentage of the global population do you want to throw in prison, or deny them digital products because of excessive cost? (remember, not everyone makes real good developed nation styled wages).
And if they somehow manage to institute such a huge increase in the global policing forces, what about the next step, when gadgets can be made for next to nothing, then food replicated, then energy sources that anyone could theoretically get and use for next to free, and etc? How far exactly do you want to hold back such technology in order to lock in place "per unit" pricing on this or that?
Run it out a century or three, think about it, look at our rate of intellectual and technological advances, and think of the ramifications if we stay stuck in the 20th century with the business models and prices from then. Will that be progress, or will that be societal stagnation if true scarcity gets legally intertwined with artificial scarcity in order to maintain a century's ago "jobs"? How far do we go once down that path? Would you be willing to keep paying whatever 15 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity once there is some mr. fusion and we know that electricity costs could now be .000000000015 cents a kilowatt hour, but that older price got carved in stone by laws? What's the point of eliminating want and scarcity if it gets legislated against and it becomes a crime to actually use really radical new technology?
Ya, it sucks to think about having to find something else to do, but like we kept getting told, time marches on, this is a global society and business world now, some jobs are just going to fall by the way side as technology advances. How many whalers are left, a few dozen (most of them masquerading as "research scientists"), when there used to be tens of thousands of them maybe? Should society have just taken the whaling industry, shut it down but kept making everyone else shell out as much as they used to to them, even though they had switched to kerosene for their lamps or electricity?
My thoughts on this are, feel lucky you live in such an age and can enjoy the benefits "in kind" from others who also can offer really cheap and free digital bits, and try to work towards getting the tangibles next. Who knows, if we don't blow it, eventually everyone could be taken care of, cheap or free, for all their wants, and we could all just enjoy..whatever the hell we wanted to! Imagine an end to scarcity, don't be afraid of it or try to perpetuate it.
I'm in food production, tangibles, to make copies of this stuff still takes some serious work all the time, and each copy is still expensive to produce, you can't just do all the work once and get paid a thousand or a million times over and over again for it..but..when and if such a time as we can replicate food like we can replicate digital bits, fat city! I will *gladly* go find something else to do if that means we can eliminate starvation across the planet, I mean jump up and down from joy that has been developed. In the me
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, the book is ten years old. Seeing how the book is in the tech field, the author shouldn't expect to see that much income from it ten years out. There are exceptions, sure, but in general, I get your point. What I'm interested in is the rest of your statement:
isn't this exactly what is the problem with copyright? People sitting on their asses, demanding to get paid, while blaming piracy for not getting money for some work created ages ago.
Does this apply to, say, works of fiction, too? If you were to write the Great Gatsby for our time -- a book that wasn't particularly well received when it first came out but whose appreciation grew over the years -- would you feel you had the right to get paid for it 10 or 20 years later when your book finally starts getting the recognition (and sales) it deserved?
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:2, Interesting)
So it is society's fault for a author who doesn't know how to market his works?
The problem is not piracy, its the revenue model (Score:2, Interesting)
Piracy has been around forever. Where there is any distributable media whether that is software, music, movies, what have you, there will be pirates. Grrr...
But that's not the problem...
Fundamentally, the Internet coupled with digital media has eliminated the need for the overhead costs incurred by conventional brick-and-mortar distribution models.
The way media is distributed directly effects the revenue model:
If I have to create a plastic case and a small metallic like circle and ship it across the country to stores in order to share poka classics that is going to cost more than just offering it as a digital download.
Newspapers are dying for this exact same reason, distributing just news is not enough to bring in readership that attracts advertising revenue (its all online).
I will reiterate: The Internet has changed the way distribution of media occurs thereby directly effecting the revenue models of all the major industries. Get with the program.
Mr Wayne should not be fighting piracy, he should be working with his publisher to discover new ways to get his books in distribution chains that make sense in this new economy.
In classical Slashdot fashion, "I for one welcome our new Kindle overlords."
Stop writing "books" (Score:3, Interesting)
Despite how much we like the tactile experience of holding an actual printed book, it's a medium that is starting to loose its relevance in most modernized cultures. If people have access to the internet, they'll often seek out the most convenient source of information they can find to resolve an immediate problem. Books, which are static and never changing, lack much of this ease of use and quickly go out of date.
What's needed, is a new way of handling such content which allows the user to pay for it, without it being an inconvenient hassle. This means no DRM in a way that prevents the content from being used in a manner common to the user's particular needs. It should be seamless, and inexpensive.
One possibility... allow the user to buy the content as they need it. Instead of selling them the entire "book", sell them the info they need by the paragraph, page or chapter for a fraction of the cost. But, at least allow them to browse the content first, to verify it has the info they need.
Depends on the Quality of the Book (Score:2, Interesting)
So to prevent theft, I would make sure your book is jam-packed with as much relevant information as possible. Make it more reference-like; full of code snippets and tables of commonly used functions, and strategically place this information: eg in the appendixes [that way we don't have to go looking for them].
I think most people that will actually a buy book, but also sometimes download pirated ebooks, will reward you for your efforts if the book was worth it. Take it from me, I have.
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps this is your experience, but that says something about you and the people you associate with... not everyone else.
I could see how "searching" would be nice, but all that does for you is enable you to skip things you probably should read. I would recommend reading the whole book and highlighting/bookmarking the relevant parts on your own. You will absorb a lot more. Also, think of how pathetic you would be reading a story to your child from something like a Kindle. A child's book is a perfect example where this works great. Offer up the book electronically so that you can see what it is, then buy a nice pretty illustrated book to read to your child.
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:2, Interesting)
Trust me. I won't make any more money from my book about data compression. It's ten years old. But I do have a stake in this society. As a reader and a movie goer, I like the old model. I like when content creators risk their own time and effort and let me decide at the last minute whether it's worth purchasing. I like that freedom. I don't want the government to tax me and then give out grants. I don't want to wait for some communal textbook to emerge. I like the free market and I like people competing for my business. Piracy destroys that.
If I may offer a suggestion... (Score:1, Interesting)
I'd like to quote from another textbook author, Ross Anderson who wrote Security Engineering, now in its second edition.
So we see that an enticement model can work. You can use your past works to garner credibility, encouraging purchases of your new works. Making previous copies of your work freely available also floods the market. Remember that pirate distributors are lazy people too. They won't bother with scanning in the second edition, if the first one is so easy to obtain. Though I tried to pirate the second edition of Security Engineering, I was only able to find the first edition, and was forced to wait for the second edition on interlibrary loan. My perusal of the freely available first edition gave me good reason to believe that the additional work in the second edition was going to be of similar utility.
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not surprised that someone may have written a better book. I would just like the book to be treated fairly.
The book that's being cited in this thread is being given away for free. This gives you a reasonable estimate of the fair value for your book.
I do a little writing myself, and am slowly coming to terms with the idea that authorship as a viable career is very nearly dead.
There have always been good people able to write good books who haven't been able to afford to live on what an author makes. That figure has just about dropped to zero, meaning that in future most non-fiction will be written by people being paid for other things (university lecturers, think tankers, etc.) or hobbyists. Fiction will be written by the well-off or well-patronized or hobbyists.
It's the new reality authors are facing. Musicians are facing it too.
Music and fiction and non-fiction were all produced before the age of commercial publishing. They will continue to be produced in the age of electronic publishing an ubiquitous copying.
The reality is that equilibrium market price of a good whose marginal cost of production is zero... is zero. That's fact, and what's fact is by definition fair, if the term has any meaning at all.
Set up Google Alerts (Score:1, Interesting)
I know you said O'Reilly isn't your publisher, but they are mine. (They're great to work with, BTW. Hi Mike... :)
I have a Google Alert for my name, the books name and ISBN. When I get an alert I check it out, if it looks shady I send email to O'Reilly's infringement folks and they go after it.
Done. If Google doesn't know about it or I don't get an alert I just can't be bothered. That's my balance between due diligence in protecting the work that we put in to our book and protecting my own time and sanity.
-JP
co-author, _bash Cookbook_
Re:Have You Noticed Any Personal Income Loss? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure what I was doing wrong earlier today but I just got home, did the same exact thing I was doing earlier today the search results are different. I don't know if this has to do with Google's outage or what but I seriously Googled for five minutes shortly after five o'clock looking for his book's site and could not find it. Heck, I couldn't even find the illegal copies he was talking about.
Regardless, I am never 'trolling' or intend to troll. I stand by all my other statements and still find nothing [l3s.de] about this book when I search for his name on Morgan Kaufmann's search site! For the love of god, how can you expect Google to get it right if your publisher can't? Here are the only search returns his last name (not even the search string or book title) gave on that link:
Mr. Wayner, I am profusely sorry I do not understand your business but suspect that may be a problem inherent to it. You should really get a new publisher for that book if you can and if not, be more careful with you who you allow to publish your works that you depend on for income a decade after they are published! I would like you to know that I do not gain any more money than what I get when I initially sell my code ... and you don't see me on Slashdot asking uninformed people like myself how I can make that produce fruit until 75 years after I die.
Aside from that, I still stand by all my prior statements!
And lastly, for the record, I have violated no copyright law since college! Not for five years!
(3) (Score:3, Interesting)
The good news is pirates never intended to pay for anything anyway, and usually just pirate crap because they can, it's there and it's easy, it'll likely sit in a downloads folder, never be read, and eventually be deleted. So you haven't really lost real world sales, at least 90% of the time.
If you feel you need to send out takedown notices, do so, but you have to accept it's going to do very little.
If I may suggest, give away your content for free on the web.
Watch revenue roll in and piracy dry up.
Ok I skipped a step in the middle there: Put the content of your book online as a interactive reference site (where it can be expanded and include interactive content and down loadable things) and slap some advertising and sponsored links on it to pay the bills. Oh and a link to the book version on Amazon.
People will always buy books, there are always scenarios where it's indispensable to have a physical book, and these people will always be paying customers.
The free online content will appease those who won't pay. Basically this business model is pretty much the only way you'll ever get any revenue from freeloaders outside the courtroom. Oh and you'll sell a load of books too.
How I view payment (Score:3, Interesting)
I admit it; I've pirated stuff before. However, I also pay for things too.
For me, piracy is about three things. Either:-
a) What I'm pirating is sufficiently rare and/or old now that I can't find it in stores. This is also a hint that if you were selling it, I'd be willing to pay for it, because old stuff isn't always easy to find, even online. The Terminator novels would be a good example of this.
b) Evaluation. Sometimes I'll come across a particular musical artist who I haven't heard before. If I'm sufficiently curious, I'll download an mp3 or two, and see what they're like.
c) I'm grazing/browsing in a transitory sense and I don't really care about the stuff I'm downloading. In that instance, a downloaded mp3 can be considered the equivalent of a radio track; it's transitory. If you're worried about losing money from me doing that, then put current mp3s on a site with ads, and I will quite happily watch a few second ad in order to download a file. I don't like greed, but bills need paying and I understand that.
Unlike apparently a lot of FOSS users, I'm not a Communist, although payment for me represents an acknowledgement of genuine merit. I don't have a lot of money, so if you get some from me, it means two things:-
a) I'm happy with your pricing model. Because, as I said, I don't have much money, this is important. I'm not going to pay for something I can't afford, no matter how good it is. Make it affordable, and you'll get a sale from me and others like me, and make more money in the end on volume.
b) Your product has genuinely impressed and/or otherwise made a positive impact with me. I downloaded a cam of The Dark Knight when it initially came out, but then went and saw the movie twice in a cinema, and now also own a copy of the DVD. The cam has also now been deleted. So did Warner Bros lose money from me downloading that cam? I think not.
It is sufficiently rare now that Hollywood brings out truly good movies, that when they do, I make very sure to go and see them in the cinema, (also partly simply because I still genuinely enjoy that experience more than sitting at home) and if they're really good (although this is very rare for me) I will then buy a DVD as well.
Other examples of products I've bought that I could have pirated include The Sims 2, and every game in the Unreal series up to and including UT2k4, as well as multiple copies of the original UT, due to some of them having been lost. Epic are very intelligent and creative people, who have brought me nearly a decade of pleasure from their games now, and they deserve to get paid for that.
Music I haven't bought, but would, includes anything by Guns'n'Roses, probably anything by Nine Inch Nails after I'd heard it, and anything by Shpongle, 1200 Micrograms, or Infected Mushroom as well.
Make good stuff, and you will be paid.
Be original, creative, non-corp - be OSS (Score:2, Interesting)
Take a look around web cartoon community, for example. Some of these guys (notably sluggy.com) have what looks like efficient models where people can pay some small money per month/year/whatever for access to privileged areas of their sites. People will get to know you through downloaded works (like me - I've never saw your book except in PDF form) and in "defender" (sluggy term) area they can get access to things like your work in progress, articles you write on random or not so random themes, discuss things with you in your forums.... And whatever you have people can find worthy and you choose to be semi-public.
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score:3, Interesting)
What percentage would have bought the item had there been no free alternative?
Honestly... (Score:3, Interesting)
If I were going to buy a ten year old technical book, I'd buy it used. You wouldn't make any royalties off of me because of or in spite of ebook piracy.
Re:"Junk" Is A Matter of Opinion (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad steak analogy. You didn't consume the steak.
Just for the sake of argument....
He may not have consumed the steak, but the restaurant has lost steak. They've lost something tangible because it didn't meet the standards of the customer.
If you don't sell a book because the guy read through any or all of it and it was utter crap, you've lost only a potential sale because it didn't meet the standards of the customer. You never had that money. You never had a physical good which is now unfit for consumption.
So yeah, the analogy is imperfect. The point is, though, that almost every good that is sold can be returned if the customer decides that they don't like it (even in cases where it has been used or partially used)--except for goods which are copyrighted. You can't return software, you can't return movies or CDs, and you can rarely return books.
I'm not making a judgment on whether or not the behavior is just or right; rather I'm clarifying that despite the fact that the analogy is imperfect, it's sound.
An opinion from another author (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking as someone who has four books published and a fifth hitting shelves in the next month or two (http://www.zammetti.com/) I certainly have an opinion on the matter. Before I give that opinion I'll state the one qualification to my comments, which is that writing books is not my primary source of income. I have a regular, full-time job, I write books on the side. It's nice supplemental income to be sure, but I couldn't live off of it, and if I lost the income it wouldn't hurt my family terribly (maybe a few less trips to Applebees is all!)
Anyway, I for one don't get all up in arms over piracy. My books are out there and easy for anyone to get, I've looked. I don't think there's much of anything I could do to stop it. I have to admit I even felt a certain amount of pride when I first saw them pirated because at least someone thought they were worth the time and effort to pirate in the first place :) I had the same feeling the first time I found out my Windows Mobile software was pirated too. Of course, that feeling goes away pretty quickly :)
I believe most people still like a good, physical book in their hands. I'm about as tech-savvy as anyone, and I read a lot of books in digital form, but I still greatly prefer a stack of bound paper in my hand, and I don't think I'm alone in that. So, I don't suspect piracy is really hurting anyone in a really significant way (I also suspect my publisher would beg to differ quite strenuously!).
What can you do about it? Probably not a whole lot, just as with software, music and movies. Probably the best you can do is produce the best product you can and make people WANT to buy it. At the end of the day, I believe most people are good and honest and are willing to pay reasonable amounts for good products.
So, make great movies that are best experienced on a huge screen with great sound and with a crowd. Make music that is actually good and not the boilerplate crap most groups churn out these days and cell the CDs for a lot less than they go for now. Write software that is truly useful and solid and then don't charge ridiculous amounts for it. Write books that are useful, entertaining and that look really good. That's how you curb piracy: make people want the real, original item and make them not feeling like you're asking for a kidney in return for the privilege!
A big theme here is price. Many entities simply charge too much for a given product. You know, I actually like Windows, and I would have been more than willing to buy Vista, whatever warts it may have, but when I saw a $200 price tag attached I said "nah, XP will continue to be just fine, thank you very much". Had Vista been, say, $59 or so , I'd have bought it in a heartbeat. When I see a book for $49.99, I hesitate a bit and make sure I really feel like I'm getting my money's worth. Often times I don't reach that conclusion and I'll look for a cheaper book. And let's not even get started on CDs, which are probably on average $10 more than they should ever be!
Granted, as an author there's only so much I can do... my publisher sets the price and they, by and large, are responsible for how the book ultimately looks. Fortunately, my publisher does a really good job on the later (and the former is I think debatable, although I find their prices to generally be reasonable). I do what I can to make the material as engaging and useful as I can, but that's about as far as I can take it. I think however that's the best solution available to us anyway.
And at the end of the day, don't go nuts about piracy. Like I said, I'm not trying to make a living as an author, and maybe my opinion would differ a bit if I was, but intellectually I hope not because the facts would really change, just my stake in them... I think the sales you lose are likely sales you weren't going to have in the first place and the majority of people will buy legitimately. That's my hunch anyway. In the end, people have been trying to beat piracy for