The Amazon Kindle War Against Piracy

So how exactly pirating the books give money to the writers?

How different is it from going to a public library?

Instead of lining bezos pockets get your ebooks from above sources and go to a real bookshop to buy hard copies of books you like especially - you can give them away and so support the actual author while not supporting bozo

Where in the message did he claim that pirating the books compensated the writers?

The cycle has been:

Piracy -> Friendly ways to buy -> Unfriendly ways to buy -> Piracy -> ...

Unfortunately, giving money back to writers involves hopping through piracy. At that point, a new, consumer-friendly service will sprout up. Everyone will use it.

Over time, the service will want to profit-maximize, and will adopt anti-consumer techniques. Leading people to go to Pirate Bay. Leading to friendly services.

Rinse, repeat.

Book authors should make money from concert ticket sales, not books. /s

Almost every country in the world apart from the US pays authors for library lending.

You should check out Chokepoint Capitalism by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin. To put it briefly, you've been fooled.

You're making an argument that empowers the likes of Amazon, not "writers", and it's by design that you've been fed that story.

How many times has this happened, such that it can be called a cycle?

There are other possibilities, such as people simply not writing as much anymore, or higher quality writers existing the market due to lack of sufficient return.

The more people who pirate my books, the greater my sales across all platforms. That's not hyperboly - its something I track.

Individuals who pirate my books are also more likely to buy them in the future.

Piracy is just about accessibility and trust. If the person can't afford to take a chance, they pirate. And if you win them there, they'll buy.

(Nit: Zero of that applies to corps. Thanks Anthropic, Meta, and everyone else.)

Are you looking forward to tens of ... dollars from that recent suit?

I wasn't sure how it works where I live, so I looked it up and apparently in Germany (according to Wikipedia) public libraries pay 3-4c per checkout to a central private body which redistributes it somehow.

So unless the book is checked out a thousand times over and its lifetime, buying it still dominates overall.

I am guessing this works for you because more people reading = more people talking = more readers discovering and potential sales?

It would be interesting to see at what point of notoriety that is no longer true. Like is this still a factor for Stephen King, or at that point is it really just lost sales?

If they sell a PDF that I can download, then I'll give my money to them. But I'm not giving money for DRM.

It’s happened to some degree with music, movies, and TV shows.

>The more people who pirate my books, the greater my sales across all platforms.

You think more piracy leads to more sales, but surely this is correlation, not causation? It seems far more plausible that popular books get pirated and bought more, hence the correlation.

It could be pure correlation if you, personally, are a household name. If you're secretly Stephen King commenting on Hacker News, then yes, exposure isn't going to help you.

But if you're not Stephen King, then more piracy is going to make a direct, causal, positive impact on your sales.

I mostly sell by word of mouth. You've certainly never heard of my books before. I am in no way "popular".

Piracy creates an invested reader. Its not much different than games selling by offering free demos.

There is a _causation_ there, because the reader likely never would have discovered me, otherwise.

Some of my publishers are, as they're American. I'm unlikely to see any of that.

Unfortunately, I'm Australian, and my government saw fit to narrow their interpretation of current laws, to make AI scraping of illegally obtained data, legal.

You now have to prove direct harm - not the indirect harm happening to the entire industry.

That's my interpretation of it.

As for scale... There is only a tiny fraction of the industry that can support their life on writer's income, let alone be a household name.

It probably does become just lost sales at that point, but to reach that, you're probably already beyond most competitive forces, leaving only piracy around.

I pirate all the books, I treat that as a public library. I don’t read most of them. The ones I have read and found good, I talk about them, write about them, and I can buy them. For myself, plus as gifts to others. I just dislike buying highly marketed book that turned out to be useless.

If I’ll ever to become an author myself, I don’t see any issue with that.

Is non-AI-related scraping now legal too?

Only if the original data scraper gets permission. [0]

[0] https://www.oaic.gov.au/news/media-centre/global-expectation...

The libraries also bought the book originally.

Bad DRM led to Napster led to Netflix lead to a fragmentation of services led to a resurgence of piracy.

Similar thing happened with music, only rather than piracy, it landed on legal / free (e.g. Youtube). Youtube is just starting to do the consumer-unfriendly thing (but it's got a long ways to go before piracy comes out competitive).

Similar in books.

I'll mention: A lot of these are consumer-unfriendly in some ways (e.g. Netflix DRM), but friendly in others. $20/month for all the movies you can watch beats piracy.

I use the local public library from time to time (physical/via Libby) while reading on my kindle otherwise. Libby is something else, but for the physical books, I just see zero difference between going to the library in person, checking it out and returning it later vs just pirating it online. It's not like the publisher does not get any more money. OK there is a difference where there is a limit to the number of copies available, so some people have to wait, just typical of public resources. But I noticed that most books I borrow are always available, especially with interlibrary borrowing. So what difference does it make?

In the end I pirated more often. I am not proud of that, but I also don't see how any of this makes any difference. It's not like I'll ever buy the book with my own money.