Book Piracy: The End of Everything?

Sometimes you have to laugh. Because if you don't, then crying becomes your only option. Nobody likes to see a librarian cry (except for this guy).

The case in point is this post from the Go To Hellman blog, titled Official Book "Lending" Costs Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion. It's a great post; funny, bitterly sarcastic and with more than a kernel of truth to it. My personal favorite tidbit comes near the mid-point of the post:

To get to the bottom of this story, Go To Hellman has dispatched its Senior Piracy Analyst (me) to Boston, where a mass meeting of alleged book traffickers is to take place. Over 10,000 are expected at the "ALA Midwinter" event. Even at the Amtrak station in New York City this morning, at the very the heart of the US publishing industry, book trafficking culture was evident, with many travelers brazenly displaying the totebags used to transport printed contraband.

As soon as I got off the train, I was surrounded by even more of this crowd. Calling themselves "Librarians", they talk about promoting literacy, education, culture and economic development, which are, of course, code words for the use and dispersal of intellectual property. They readily admit to their activities, and rationalize them because they're perfectly legal in the US, at least for now.

Typical was Susanne from DC, who told me that she's been involved in lending operations for over 15 years. This confirms our estimate that "lending" has been going on for over ten years, beyond even Google's memory. Our trillion dollar estimate may thus be on the conservative side. Of course, it's impossible to tell how many of these lent books would have been purchased legally if "libraries" were not an option, but we're not even considering the huge potential losses to publishers when "used" books are resold for pennies on the black markets.

Hellman makes the point very extravagantly: to a certain type of mind in the business world, we represent the guys who are taking money out of their pockets. That type of mind probably wrote (or read with sympathy) the article in Publisher's Weekly that Hellman took to task:

Attributor Study Finds Pervasive Online Book Piracy

Publishers could be losing out on as much as $3 billion to online book piracy, a new report released today by Attributor estimates. Attributor, whose FairShare Guardian service monitors the Web for illegally posted content, tracked 913 books in 14 subjects in the final quarter of 2009 and estimated that more than 9 million copies of books were illegally downloaded from the 25 sites it tracked. Although Attributor needs to make some projections to arrive at total numbers, the hard figures the survey uncovered are disturbing to any publisher worried about the possible impact of piracy of e-books.

In other words, it's not the lending that makes them crazy so much as the on-line book piracy, which they define in the report as a book that was downloaded from one of four file hosting sites. Additionally, the 9 million figure was a projection based on traffic sampling rather than a hard and fast number.  On top of that, the study "does not attempt to address the issue of determining to what degree pirated books represent financial loss to the industry as it does not estimate how many free downloads might have otherwise resulted in a sale."

In short, this study was an attempt to quantify the prevalence of book piracy as a portion of general online sales rather than a suggestion that it will spawn the Antichrist and destroy civilization. That's fine. You have to start somewhere, and this is a fine place to do so.

Worse, the business types have a point: downloading a copyrighted work without paying for it is essentially illegal. That doesn't stop millions from doing it, but the fact remains. Note that illegal and wrong are not necessarily synonymous. Fair Use can give the downloading party some leeway in determining whether the illegal act is wrong or just, well, illegal. As a general rule, however, making photocopies of the entire work in bulk is a bad idea and this logically extends to copying a copyrighted file several million times. This is nothing that a basic course in business ethics can't teach.

(As an aside, the study found that books that were categorized as Business & Investing, Professional and Technical and Science were downloaded the most often, which suggests that the sales impact of this activity hits these types of books hardest. The biggest market for those categories tend to be institutions of higher learning (i.e., college book stores). That in turn suggests that if you want to beef up understanding of business ethics, colleges and B-schools would be the place to begin.)

And that is where my sympathy for the publishing industry stops. It's not really news that the publishing industry business model is decades behind other more nimble internet-based businesses (the entertainment industry is one that easily comes to mind, although not uniformly so. ) The biggest gripe I have with the idea of working with a model that essentially says "one download per customer, anything else will be prosecuted" while legal is just plain unenforceable. I don't care what the RIAA says or how many 10 year old girls or dead grandmothers it takes to court, you just can't put 9 million people behind bars for downloading stuff on file-sharing sites. (I mean that literally: "can't" as in "not possible to do".)

There are better models out there, and publishers should be thinking about adapting their businesses to the reality of file-sharing rather than the other way around. Following the money is more profitable than trying to game the system so the money has to come to you. It's that simple.