Book piracy: the saviour of the publishing industry?

Posted by Ciara in Biting Commentary | 0 comments

Piracy is a touchy issue. Is it theft, or is it reappropriating wealth from incredibly rich record labels and publishing houses?

It seems to me like piracy can serve as a great introduction to an author’s work. I know countless people who have illegally downloaded music, and then gone on to buy band t-shirts, or concert tickets, that they wouldn’t otherwise have bought.

The same goes for books. I know people who illegally downloaded one or two books from a certain author, and then gone and bought more books by them, or indeed, bought all their works.

Yes, the author is losing revenue from that one book that was illegaly downloaded, but if the money is being made back from avid fans turned on to their work by that illegal download, what does it matter?

There are plenty of examples of authors putting their work online for free, and becoming bestsellers on the back of those online copies. Let’s take the book “Go the F— to Sleep” by Adam Mansbach. A PDF review copy was made available, and was forwarded again and again until it went viral. Rather than losing profit, the author actually shot to the top of Amazon’s bestselling list, and had 100,000 orders placed before the book was made available.

PC Magazine summed the story up by saying  “To conclude that piracy is good from this story would be dangerously oversimplifying things. But if the publisher had sealed advance electronic copies of the book with deadlocked digital rights management (DRM), it would never have had a chance to go viral.”

There are plenty more examples of authors becoming bestsellers after having their books pirated illegaly. So, my question is, is it as bad as some people are making out? Is it actually just a possible viral marketing strategy for publishers and authors?

Publishing houses who clamp down on piracy in an aggressive way like record labels have done run the risk of feeling the backlash the record labels did. Many people I know download their music illegally out of spite, because they loathe how record labels have reacted to piracy. Rather than look at business models, and how they can work around piracy, they’ve sued 16- year-olds.

I fear the same might happen to record labels. I don’t know if I consider piracy theft or not, but I do know that the publishing industry as a whole isn’t doing terribly well at the moment, and it needs to sort out its approach to the Internet in general.

I still don’t know how I feel about piracy. Do you? Let us know in the comments.