Book Pirating

This post is a response to the article link below about iPads and pirating. So  read the article first.

Is iPad supercharging e-book piracy? (from The cnet Blog ) 

 

I only have a few gripes with this article. First, I just don't see the pirating of books being accelerated by the iPad or any other electronic reading device. Plenty of books have been illegally scanned  into electronic formats for years. Yes, even before Google started their whole scanning scheme. However, the advantages vs. the disadvantages of electronically viewed books does not add up. Electronic books require power and hardware/software to view. Also, the convenience of carrying a couple of thousand books in you purse or backpack does not a flight from New York to LA will take even longer?

Second, this article compares pirating books to pirating music. The pirating of music started out just as another way to share music from one electronically driven resource to another. We had records to tapes, Then tapes to CDs. Now CD's are giving away to mp3s and other software driven audio formats. All of these technologies require some type of power and hardware/software to use. Bottom line: with today's music culture, we are talking about ease of access, manipulation, and storage. Back to books. Yes, electronic readers make it easier to carry a horde of books around. And, given the format, you can share books with almost anyone with out even paying for it. However, there is a another resource that is legally free that holds probably 10 to 20 times the amount books that one of those electronic gadgets currently holds. Yes I am talking about your local library. I can just go down to the public library and check out a book. The only software required to view it is my mind.

Third, you can't sell back data to a bookstore for cash.  We all can't have a library that is the size of the Library of  Congress. So selling books is a logical choice versus, god forbid, throwing them away. Also I don't see an auctioneer at Sotheby's saying " Now showing the first edition of War and Peace, 20 MB in PDF for $2000 bucks." I do think that guidelines need to be set where authors are assured that they get a maximize amount for there works value as offered through various electronic vendors. It took years for the music industry to get apple to raise the price of some of their mp3 albums.So if authors are worried about the price of books being sold through amazon or apple, they should focus that issue with them.

Lastly, here are a few more things authors should focus on:

• Keeping Public Libraries open. Municipalities are closing Public Libraries like they are going out of style.
• Make sure academic libraries and public libraries (small and large) are adequately funded. Academic libraries are increasingly having to judge the value of their electronic and physical monograph counterparts.In short, one has to go because they either can't support the space of one or the cost of the other.
• Stop trying to turn this electronic reading trend into a nightmare and focus on the positive aspect of it. Just as a large portion of the population went crazy over the Y@K bug, spreading paranoia over pirating books just makes thing worse.
• Do more book tours in public and academic libraries as well as markets that your publisher normally would not recommend. Maybe, Alabama? Take a cue from Neil Gaiman "Of course, in Alabama the Tuscaloosa, but that is entirely irrelephant..."

 And that's it.