The E-Book Piracy Debate, Revisited

The other day, I saw an interesting announcement from Tor Books UK, a publisher of science fiction and fantasy.

One year ago, the company tried a remarkable experiment: it dropped copy protection from its e-books.

Now, there are two batches of common wisdom. Most publishers, of course, think that strategy is insane. If you’re a publisher, copy protection is all that stops the pirates from freely circulating your goods. Your revenue will crash. Maybe you’ll go out of business.

But there’s another school of thought, which says that nobody pirates software except cash-poor kids who wouldn’t have bought it anyway. This school maintains that if your books are fairly priced and conveniently sold, people will happily pay for them.

Some in this school even maintain that removing copy protection leads to more sales, because your customers get a taste of your wares. They learn just how good your stuff is â€" and next time, they pay.

But in general, all of this is just opinion badminton. There have been very few experiments to test which camp is correct.

Which brings us to Tor’s announcement. The crucial line: “We’ve seen no discernible increase in piracy on any of our titles.”

Now, I can’t say I’m surprised. O’Reilly and I ran a similar experiment on one of my Missing Manual books and got about the same results.

Tor’s decision and its results have, of course, drawn thousands of comments on both sides of the argument. They largely reinforce the two common-wisdom chants.

The thing is, the Tor experiment isn’t a perfect stand-in for other publishers. Its results don’t constitute solid, transferable proof of much of anything.

For example, Tor acknowledges that its science-fiction/fantasy reader community “is close-knit, with a huge online presence, and with publishers, authors and fans having closer communication than perhaps some other areas of publishing do.” This experiment might turn out differently for other publishers.

(The publisher of my Missing Manual books, O’Reilly, also successfully sells e-books without any protection. Then again, O’Reilly’s audience is a tightly knit, highly online community, too.)

Finally, I’d be intrigued to know how Tor measured its piracy rate. What measuring tool is there to know how many people are quietly e-mailing the PDF files of your books to each other?

I’m in a strange position in the copy-protection debate: as a consumer, I despise copy protection. But as an author, I despise piracy.

So I’ve probably thought and read a lot more about copy protection than most people. The Tor experiment may not be conclusive, but I do have a few responses to the common lay reaction:

“Of course that was the outcome of Tor’s experiment! Copy protection doesn’t inconvenience anybody but the law-abiding customers.”

Well, wait a minute. It’s true that copy protection doesn’t stop all pirates. Any determined pirate can crack any copy-protection scheme ever devised. (Even Tor doesn’t say it hasn’t been a victim of piracy. It says it didn’t detect an increase in piracy.)

But it’s too much of a leap to say that copy protection has zero effect. It does discourage casual pirates â€" nontechnical people who would click “Download free PDF” if they could.

“How long does it take these industries to get it? Sell a good product at a fair price, and people will pay for it.”

Not necessary true. Friction also matters. That’s why Apple and Amazon have had such success with the single click-to-buy button. To avoid piracy, it’s not enough to offer people a good product at a fair price. You also have to make buying as effortless as possible.

(That said, it’s a good start to make your e-book product available at all. This means you, Dave Barry.)

“As long as e-books are priced ridiculously high, I’m going to pirate them.”

I hear this a lot: that e-book prices seem too high.

Now, I’m not saying they are too high â€" publishers still have big initial investments to recoup (author advance, editing, indexing, design, promotion and so on). But the average reader is entitled to wonder why an e-book should ever cost as much as a physical one since there are no printing, binding or shipping expenses.

As an author, I’m happy with the notion that the e-book costs less than the physical one. I figure, I’ll sell a lot more books because of the low-friction aspect.

“All the publishing industry has to do is look at the music industry. They eventually dropped copy protection, and the publishers will, too.”

That’s not an entirely legitimate argument. Songs (cheap, small, repeatedly enjoyed, easy to rip from CDs) are not the same as e-books (big, generally enjoyed only once or twice, much more difficult to scan from printed books).

In other words, the music industry’s experience doesn’t apply to every industry; some formats, like DVDs, have been copy-protected from the beginning, and nobody seems to mind.

So where does that leave us?

Even though we don’t know for sure, there’s mounting evidence that e-books are more like music files than DVD movies: removing copy protection doesn’t hurt and might help. And there’s very little evidence that copy protection is stopping piracy.

That doesn’t mean the issue is settled either way. The point is, there’s very little evidence. More publishers in more categories should perform more experiments like Tor’s. Let’s quit opining about what will happen, and find out.