Why?
Downloading is convenient. It’s quick. It’s cheap. I get books downloading that I can’t on ITunes and at the Library – out of print titles I used to have to search across the country for. I have ebooks and audiobooks in different language downloaded from DC++ private hubs – good luck finding these anywhere else!

Information…knowledge…art….music….it’s meant to be shared without restriction, without censure or the state/industry determining what we get, when, and how.

The only reason I buy books that I’ve downloaded is to give money to my favourite authors so they can make a living out of writing. I would rather they setup a donation fund and I would send them money to keep writing directly – cutting out the middleman. I would rather buy directly from the authors. We need a new way to promote authors, musicians, etc. Movies cost a lot – they need the massive industry to pump out the big budget flicks. Writing books and playing music? Couldn’t they self-promote online and we pay them directly? downloading from them directly?

Imagine paying to be on a site where authors publish their own ebooks…you pay the authors whose works you enjoy, you rate them, you get push notifications for authors who are similar to those on your favourites lists, you signup to get all the fave authors new books. I’d do it. Now THAT would be a good system I’d pay for. Would some people not pay? Sure thing. They are likely the same people who’d get the book at the library. The ones who buy used or borrow a copy from a friend. No big loss.

I mean, if you had to start from scratch, as of today, knowing what you know….how would you create a way for books to be shared with the public? or for music to be shared? Wouldn’t you want publishers and the music industry out of the picture? I know I would. I see little value added from their service or associated costs.

Thanks for answering my query. I wonder why DRM on e-books is so annoying, yet (another correspondent in another forum tells me) there is DRM on cellphones, and consumers never notice it.

With the advent of "textnovels", I suppose people will be reading novels on those same DRM-protected cellphones.

Maybe e-book publishers, authors, and agents ought to be granted stock options!

The common characteristic is I liked them a lot. May be any kind of book.

In my opinion DRM is the worst deterrent for ebook sales (certainly it is for me). Price is also an issue, but this is also true on ANY market (with or without piracy). May be publishing industry should think about price discrimination in ebooks.

For example: $10 for full featured ebooks (no DRM), $2 for 2-week-rent DRMed ebooks, and free for ebooks that include ads as a newspaper.

Also author's reward is a motivation to buy books (yes, also for pirates), but it is necessary to increase author percentage if you want this motivation to work.

Of course, your morality (whoever are "you") is not a selling point.

Similarly, if I wrote a book, I can do with it as I choose. I can keep it in a drawer and share it with no one. Or, I could sell it as a book to make a living, so I can afford to write more like it. Either way, it is my choice, because I created it. If you think this is selfish, why not leave the keys in your car with a sign saying "take this, everyone should be free to enjoy my property that I work every day to pay for". This is the argument pirates use, that everything should be free and you only pay if you feel like it, while you have done no work yourself to create it.

Novelists spend years on their work. Six years of writing a novel is hundreds of thousands of dollars in income they could have had. Pirating books, as miniature as one or two 'lost sales' might be, is on a very small scale the same as stealing a car. You want to enjoy the book. You want to enjoy a new car. It doesn't matter what you steal, because it's all covered under 'don't take what's not yours', which I think we learned in kindergarten. Most of us, anyhow.

Ultimately publishers have to make it as easy as possible for consumers to purchase and enjoy the books. For those who choose not to, then there should be some downside.

"Sometimes I pirate books, sometimes I buy them. Obviously, if you get to maximize the times I buy then you are increasing your sales."

Is there a common characteristic that the books you buy (having read them once) share?

I assume (but I might be wrong) that a plot-driven mystery or thriller would not be a good candidate. Once you know "Who Dunnit", why would you re-read it?

Would you derive repeated pleasure from Humor? Romance? A nonfiction How To…? Children's books, obviously, because small children like to hear the same story over and over again.

Readers are our friends and our customers. It seems incredibly rude to treat all readers as if they are potential thieves.

Apparently, at least one of the phone companies has "invisible" DRM, and most honest users don't even notice it. That seems like a promising app.

I like getting paid for my work. But rather than trying to stamp out freeloaders, I'd rather find ways to get their business.

These are people who actually read books. That's a rare commodity these days, and not one to be squandered. With the amount of competing media out there, and the ever-reducing attention span of the average adult (myself included), the last thing I want to do is find new ways to alienate potential readers. The very last thing I want to do is convince him he'd be better off playing and endless string of $.99 games on his iPhone.

People who read eBooks are, by and large, computer savvy and affluent. Odds are they pirate books as much for the convenience as for the savings.

It explains why they loath DRM. DRM interferes with the legal enjoyment of a paid for book. They either break the DRM, in which case they're a criminal, or they pirate a DRM-free copy, in which case they're a criminal. Most people would probably rather abide the law, but if they're going to be a criminal anyway, they might as well be a criminal with a few extra dollars in their pocket.

If he downloaded thousands of books in one big file, I hope to God one of them was mine, and I hope he read it, and I hope he told his friend how great it was and I especially hope he's eagerly anticipating the sequel. The odds are incredibly good that he'd never discover me any other way.

Personally, as an author just beginning his career, I know I have much more to fear from being obscure, undiscovered, and unknown that I have to fear from piracy.

If he only buys one out of every five of the books that he downloads, then rather than force him to pay for all five of those books (which he likely would never do) why not try to find ways to help him download five times as many for free. Counter-intuitive though that may be, it equals the same amount of sales in the end. I'm not saying that this is a solution, but looking for solutions is more productive than belittling the pirates.

There are thousands of places where I could pirate TV shows online for free, yet I stick mainly with Hulu (advertiser paid) and streaming Netflix (for which I pay a subscription). I don't do this because it is legal this way, I do it because it is easier that way. iTunes got this right, and if publishers can take their blinders off they'll see that the only people that might possibly buy books, are the people with a few extra bucks in their pocket. And if you make it easy for them to find, download, and enjoy what they want, then some of that money will come your way.
Creating barriers to buying pirated books will never increase sales unless there's an easy way to get them legally and cheap.

My friends and I have jokingly referred to Pandora.com as the most expensive free service on the web. Sure it doesn't cost anything to listen to it, but dang it if I didn't hear a lot of great music for the first time, and I can honestly say I've spent hundreds of dollars buying CDs and MP3s that I would never have known of otherwise.

An you've done your argument a complete disservice. jap comes off as someone I could carry on a cordial conversation with. By letting your emotions so thoroughly color your words, you come off as, well, I won't say. I don't think you are this rude, and I assume if you met him in person you wouldn't be so full of snark, but you didn't make a good impression with your post.

You use nothing but negative quotes about him, leading with the most negative while pretending to be balanced.

You imply that he misspelled his own name when you know full well that a lack of capitalization is the norm on the net. (nick name, handle, whatever you want to call it.) Are you trying to imply a lack of intelligence on his part? Blogs are a less formal mode of communication, the comments section in a blog even more so. If you can't keep up with the social norms on the net, perhaps it is you, Curtis, who is lacking it intelligence, whereas jap knows the norms of the places he goes.

And "diabolical" reasoning? You know his reasoning is not in any way diabolic, yet you throw the word up in giant letters in the picture. Call his reasoning ill-considered, amoral, or even vacuous, but please, Curtis, give me a break.
Hyperbole much?

You sound as bad as the RIAA did circa 2000, and your attitude will do all of us authors about as much good as they're attitude did them.

You can try to actually learn something from jap, or you can be petty, bitter, and cynical and insult him.
Why not just call him Hitler and put your credibility out of its misery?