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Book Piracy... Ridiculous pricing?

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From a story on TechDirt.com:

"Upset that students might actually try to learn something without first paying ridiculous sums for textbooks, some textbook publishers are complaining that students are sharing scanned textbooks over file sharing network. Of course, the reporter had trouble finding a single student who was actually doing this -- and most students seemed to think it would be something of a pain to read a textbook that way. Instead, many believe that this is just the textbook publishing industry's way of explaining away the fact that they keep raising prices every year for no clear reason. Next thing you know, the textbook companies will start going after libraries for "sharing" books for free... "

As a book author (okay, I've only written one book but that still makes me an author :) ), I myself have been wondering about the threat of piracy on the industry. This article focuses mostly on schools and textbooks but the problem itself is still widespread. And this is probably even more true today considering many books can be purchased in electronic form (usually PDF files). I haven't found a pirated copy of my book (yet!) but have seen some other books floating around. This leads me to wonder if some form of DRM should be implemented on such documents. Although, i doubt it would prevent pirating, it would at least hinder it.

This brings on another topic, book pricing... The article states that textbook pricing has been going up because of piracy. In my opinion, this is somewhat of an oxymoron. The reason most pirates will cite (whether it is for book or software) is that the price it too high, so do publishers really think that increasing retail prices will help the issue? On the other hand, people might argue that it is because authors want more money. But to face the facts, being a book author works in similar ways to the music industry. As an author, I may only get about 5% of the retail price of a book back in royalties (minus advances, reserves and whatever reason the publisher can find to withhold funds). Sure, a price increase will bring in a little money for the author. But, in the end, when you look at the numbers, it's the publisher that rakes in the dough.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2004
    Text books are the worst, they have a kind of "Captive audience" as in college you generaly must get a book that is part of a given class, and your opinion of that book is irrelevent.

    paperback novells seem very costly anymore.
    I seem to recall buying them for around 2-3 bucks us when I was yonger. now it's 6-8 bucks most of the time. but hardcover books seem the same 20-30 for most novels in hc versions, so in the end the hc is a better buy as its on beter paper and bindings and larger type face.

  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2004
    This post gave me the article to build a web app that would function as a trading post for college books. It would be deployed as a local installation for each college...

    A student registers on the site, and then builds a list of books:
    A) he is looking for
    B) he has to get rid of.

    Once he builds his list, he is giving results that complement his list:
    A) People with the book he wants
    B) People wanting the book he has

    The student record would basically be ID, Name, Email, Password, Contact Info

    The book record would be ID, StudentID, ISBN, Title, Condition, Desire (Buy/Sell), Condition, Notes (What you'd like in trade... $20 or a case of beer, etc)

    When a student sees a match he likes, he can use a contact form to send an email to the match or use the supplied contact info to intiate a trade. At this point they make the trade offline and then login and remove the book from each of their lists.

    "Cool" enhancement could be web services to allow separate installs of the web app to query each other, useful for when multiple colleges in the same geographic region have their own instance runnning.

  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2004
    Good idea Jim, there are several sites like this setup for students trading Michigan State University books. It works out better than amazon or ebay, but I generally end up buying new books because authors seems to have a habit of releasing new editions with minor changes except page numbers.

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    September 20, 2004
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    September 21, 2004
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