Xandra Gregory

So over at Dear Author’s Thread That Ate Cleveland (and walked away still hungry), the thread derailed jumped the track switched trains altogether found out it was actually a Transformer and could fly, too, and sooner or later the subject of ebook piracy came up.  I thought I’d compose my thoughts over here instead of muddying up an already lengthy thread.

It’s beyond doubt that piracy hurts authors.  Unfortunately, no one’s yet been able to quantify how much.  And just as it’s hard to prove a negative, no one can really determine whether or not it’s a one-to-one correlation between illegal downloads and lost sales.  I’m operating on the generally-accepted idea that the majority of “pirates” would not have purchased an ebook if they weren’t able to get it free.  I’m also operating on the assumption that most people don’t go out of their way to get something for nothing unless they are either hard-up, or just assholes.  In small-scale marketplaces, and in much of the world, and for much of the world’s history, “value” is a fluid concept.  My own experiences in countries outside the US, and at small market venues like flea markets, yard sales, bazaars, and other individual transactions, along with the haggling scene in Monty Python’s Life Of Brian suggest that this is not an unusual state.  Bargaining, dickering, haggling, back-and-forth–are all dialogues that help interested parties determine agreed-upon value of something.  Value that both parties in the transaction can live with, if not celebrate.

This to me suggests that there are some parties out there who find no value in an electronic file.  But there are many, many parties who do, and those are the parties I care about reaching.  Of course, I can ‘t do that if I can’t feed my cat.  The problem is, essentially, how to compensate authors of creative works without punishing those who want to compensate while at the same time penalizing or neutralizing those who actively work to deprive the authors of said compensation.  I’m not talking about somebody who emails a copy of one of my ebooks to their best friend in an, “OMG you HAVE to read this!” email–hell, I want to find those people and shake their hands.  I’m talking about wholesale pirates–people who go out of their way to actively divert customers away from a legit venue and into a not-so-legit one.  People who chop and scan books or burn pirated DVDs extracted from the factory prior to shipment of the release in mass quantities.

One of my key thoughts on the matter is this–most people won’t pirate if it’s easier to find something legitimately.  And more significantly, if people feel the cost of acquiring that something is fair, they will pay it.  But that’s the key, isn’t it?  The value of that something has to be a fair and reasonable value, and neither fair nor reasonable is easily quantifiable.

Quantifying the effect of piracy on the ebook market in simple financial terms also presents an incomplete picture.  We can’t really understand a way around piracy until we understand better the full value of a creative work, and it can’t be accurately measured in simple sales.  And we will lose the battle against piracy if we choose only to measure it in financial terms, and ascribe its only value in the commercial.  If one thinks of a lost ebook sale, what comes to mind is a single copy of a book, say, a mass-market paperback.  Valued at 4.99-8.99, it most tangibly represents what we tend to think of as a book, and it most tangibly also represents about six ounces of pulp paper, cardstock, ink, and glue.  If someone walks out of a store with a paperback stuffed up their shirt, they’ve walked off with about six bucks worth of raw materials.  It’s the intangibles that count, and the intangibles that make up the majority of the book’s actual value.  Enough people believe that a book is the sum of its raw materials and some vague quantity of “a little more” for what’s on the pages.  We know different, and so do they, if you get them to think about it.

Getting them to think about it is the hard part.  Artists do not have that much value in our culture.  Mention that you want to be an artist to your relatives in the tender college years and you’ll get a variety of responses, most of which will encourage you to study something “worthwhile” or “more reliable.”  Mention that you want to make a living off artistic pursuits, and you’ll be encouraged to find a “real job” you know, just to “fall back on” (translation, you’re expected to fail, and on the off-chance you do succeed, you won’t see enough money to be a contributing member of society and you’ll therefore become a drain on it).

Part of the problem is that art is so tied to commercial endeavors, at least in the publishing world.  In the past, there existed an idea of patronage–an artist’s expenses were subsidized by a patron (aka a wealthy noble)–the artist’s food, shelter, materials, and equipment were paid for, leaving the artist free to create works which were shared with the public, and in so doing, bestowing upon the patron the respect and accolades one would receive for enabling the continuation of the arts.  Oftentimes, in payment for the patronage, the subject matter of the artist’s work could be directed by the patron, mutually beneficial for both individuals to a certain extent, and potentially censorious in another.  If it became enough of a problem, though, an artist could find a new patron more receptive to his or her subjects of interest.

I have no interest in being a kept woman, any moreso than I am currently kept (by people I’ve either married or given birth to).  I do, however, have an interest in being both read and fed.  I can’t change the way our culture views art and the creation thereof, but I can think about trying to encourage a few minds at a time to think about where the real value is in the things they own.

Tags: books, e-publishing, internet

This entry was posted by Xandra on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 1:28 am and is filed under An Author's Life, Deep Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.