One thing the book industry has against it is a few hundred years of institutionalized free books in the form of libraries. I've often struggled with the difference between going to the library and getting a book and downloading the torrent and reading it. I rarely reread books and in neither case do I end up with something physical sitting on my shelf...
They seems the same to me, ethically speaking. I'd love to hear a well thought out counter opinion. And if is isn't the same, then what is the digital equivalent of my neighborhood library?
One primary difference is that libraries have real scarcity; they only have so many copies of any given book, only so many books in total, and a limited timeframe for borrowing. That's most important for new releases, where the number of people who want to read the book far outweighs the number of copies the library might have. It also holds to a lesser extent for people who want to read books the library is less likely to have (for example, if you have a favorite author, your local library might not have all their books), and for reference books, where you don't want to be constrained to a particular timeframe.
If libraries had unlimited copies of all books in print and you could borrow them instantly whenever you needed them, most of the main motivations for buying books would disappear, and the book publishing industry would operate very differently than it does today (whether or not that would be better, by providing more access to information, or worse, by removing the incentive to create, is open for debate).
So while in some sense downloading a book and getting it from the library might feel the same, in that you're reading the book without having to pay for it, the reality is different because all of those constraints have been removed.
As with things like music and movies, the primary problem here is that the physical medium imposed real constraints that are a big part of how and why the current business model for publishing has functioned. Just because it's possible to remove those constraints doesn't mean it's necessarily the ethical or pragmatic thing to do.
For the case of libraries, I think it's very much up in the air what the future will look like. You could imagine imposing the same constraints on digital copies via DRM, or imposing those contraints only for new releases, or charging for digital access but leaving physical access as free, or simply moving to some sort compulsory licensing model. But I don't think that digital equivalent exists yet, and I think it'll be a long, difficult road to ironing those questions out.
Scaling makes them different. A physical book can have but one reader at a time, and it can only be lent a limited number of times before wearing out, all of which limited the impact.
That limited number of times is probably quite high though. In our college library there were regularly used lend-able books from the 1920s/50s and older which hadn't worn out. Authors probably shouldn't hold out too much hope of repeat sales to a library due to their books wearing out!
The key difference is that a physical copy of a book can only be loaned out to one person at a time, so it is in no way violating copyright. No copy is made. A lot of people will break down and buy a book that they really want to read if there's a long waiting list at the library (I've done this plenty of times). Once you cross over into the digital realm, you're talking about copying and distributing.
Unfortunately, I don't know what the digital equivalent of the library would be.
I'm tremendously surprised by this (I don't doubt you're right, I've just never heard of it). I can't find any mention of this online, do you have a link where I could read about this?
I may have a moral issue with downloading books for free, but I also have a anger issue when I buy textbooks for $230 and at the end of the semester the bookstore want's to buy it back for $50.
I once bought a Chemistry textbook for a summer class for $170, I went to sell it back to the bookstore a month later they wanted to pay $10 because a new edition was about to come out.
What makes me even more angry is that the new edition is 95% the same as the old one, except for the fact that they change the order of the exercises.
The textbook industry is just a big scam IMO. And if they scam me it's not that hard for me convince myself to scam them back too, specially when it's that easy, even when going against my moral principles.
Yeah, but you could always try and buy a used textbook from a student, and pay $50 instead of the original $230, no?
Of course that would be hard. You'd have to find a student which is selling, and then seeing if the book is well preserved.
That's one of the values of having a store. They pay you less because its easy to sell for them. Just the same, you could try and find a student that wants to buy your used book for more money. That's hard tho, and the store knows that, and charges accordingly.
I agree it sucks tho, specially for students who are usually short on money, but its an open market. It's a somewhat similar situation with used games in Madrid.
It's exacerbated by the fact that once a new edition comes out (which can happen every few years) the old versions have much less worth for new students. So you could buy a $50 copy of an old version from an old student, but if it's different enough from the new version then it may be more hassle than its worth (page numbers not matching up, exercises being different etc.).
As a college instructor and a citizen concerned about the cost of financing higher education, I share the outrage over textbook costs.
But I don't expect to be outraged for long about the dinosaus textbooks are. The sale, bianuual revision of a text, and sale of its next edition is breeding revolts and moves to alternative models. If I get tired of waiting when I retire (soon) I will help launch the revolt: turning to models of publicly-held, easy-to-update, non-tree-cutting formats such as wikis.
I don't attempt to prophecy often, but: "Textbooks are the next... newspapers."
1. Price: I typically read a lot of business reference books that are primarily sold to professionals and as a result are pricy. When I was a college student, I usually just checked these books out from the library, but now that I have moved cities and am away from such a well stocked library I find downloading to be my best bet.
2. Convenience: I really like to have ebook copies of all of my books. I often like to work outside of my home and find it extremely convenient to have all of my books in my laptop. They are also amazing for quick reference. Having a searchable copy of a book is very useful for referencing key items.
3. Preference for E-books: Lately, I have noticed that I am quickly coming to prefer ebooks. Most of my work involves being at a computer, performing research and being able to quickly switch to an ebook whenever I am there fits in with my work flow.
I still buy books, on Sunday I picked up three at a used bookstore. But for new books I use publishing contacts for review copies or wait or them to become available online.
4. Indexing. I fulltext index all of the books that I have for situations when search results from the internet aren't that useful and wikipedia article is confusing.
Cost != Price. Although I have no affiliation to publishers and do sometimes think the prices are too high, downloading content made for individual sale is stealing. Estimating the cost to the publisher or author is irrelevant. It's amazing people can rationalize stealing by the impact that stealing has on the original owner. That's not why we don't steal. The reason why we don't steal is because we want to promote a society that consistently provides new and improved products and services at prices the market determines as fair. Stealing dis-incentivizes producers from producing because they know they won't get rewarded for their work.
I think there are various levels of "badness" when it comes to theft:
1) When you steal your neighbour's car, that's the worst because you're completely depriving your neighbour of the exclusive use and enjoyment of their property.
2) When you copy a digital product that your neighbour has created, and then sell it for profit without paying royalties, then that's pretty bad, but less bad than 1). Your neighbour can still sell / use their works but you have deprived him/her of exclusivity in selling their works.
3) When you copy your neighbour's digital product for your own enjoyment, then you are depriving your neighbour of a potential sale. Still bad, but less bad than 1) and 2). It's only when everyone does it and your neighbour loses all their potential sales does it become as bad as 1), i.e. tragedy of the commons.
I'm not at all suggesting that reproducible digital products are public goods, but they share some similar characteristics in the context of piracy that I think are interesting, namely non-rivalness and non-excludability. And as mentioned before, a tragedy of the commons scenario occurs when everyone (or lots of people) engage in piracy, just like what happens when all fishermen over-fish a lake.
This obviously suggests that some kind of regulation is needed, which I suppose is the point of copyright laws. But what I'd like to know are the economic effects of piracy, for example:
What is the "piracy elasticity of demand"? In other words, how does demand for a product change as piracy levels change? Obviously as piracy levels approach 100%, the demand would be near zero, but what are the changes between 0 to 100%. Of interest is if there are any "sweet spot" levels of piracy where demand actually goes up.
I suspect there's a possibility that at low levels of piracy, the positive effects from things such as word-of-mouth marketing, early adoption / user familiarity (particularly in software) and try-before-buyers could offset the negative effects of lost sales. (Has anyone done this research?)
Anyway my point is that I don't think all theft is created equal, and that some kinds of theft do not dis-incentivize producers as the OP has asserted.
Excellent story. Thanks for the share, blasdel.
The wall street journal had an interesting article on this subject, as does Leo from Zenhabits.net
I recently decided to undergo a similar writing experiment on the concept of focus (http://howtogetfocused.com/) in which I use a technique that's like a freemium model...
This philosophy centers on the following characteristics:
Writing the book using a blogging platform (I’m using Wordpress)
Listing one main author, and listing many contributing authors (you, the reader, are a contributing author if you comment)
Releasing the book 100% for free online (and selling the offline format)
Sourcing the book’s editor to the readers (Readers comment on each chapter suggesting spelling changes, organization changes, ideas and illustrations
Crowd-sourcing the book’s design
As usual, those screaming "pirate!" are claiming losses equal to the number of suspected acts of "piracy" -- a bogus conflation. If someone was to download an ebook for free, it does not automatically follow that it's a lost sale. Most of the time, I'd suspect that it's not a lost sale at all; it's more like someone browsing books in a bookstore.
They seems the same to me, ethically speaking. I'd love to hear a well thought out counter opinion. And if is isn't the same, then what is the digital equivalent of my neighborhood library?