Writers have remained relatively unscathed and unaffected by digital piracy. Until now. With the proliferation of E-books and digital devices, it’s only a matter of time before writers will face the same problems as recording artists and filmmakers. From the Times article:
Until recently, publishers believed books were relatively safe from piracy because it was so labor-intensive to scan each page to convert a book to a digital file. What’s more, reading books on the computer was relatively unappealing compared with a printed version.
Now, with publishers producing more digital editions, it is potentially easier for hackers to copy files. And the growing popularity of electronic reading devices like the Kindle from Amazon or the Reader from Sony make it easier to read in digital form. Many of the unauthorized editions are uploaded as PDFs, which can be easily e-mailed to a Kindle or the Sony device.
I’m not worried. If people can make money off of iTunes, I’m assuming that they will come up with a digital model that will fix the problem of writers not getting paid. And as it has been mentioned in other business discussions, sometimes giving stuff away for free increases exposure and eventual sales.
Related posts:
But here is an...
I agree with everything you said. About #1…I think...
Yeah, I agree. I think having the feel of a book in hand in as natural as having a cigarette in your mouth, regardless of the latest electronic media device used as a reader. =)
It may also signal a new era where we start living with the fact that piracy happens whether we have laws against it or not. The fact is that consumers are much faster than producers at copying once the material becomes recordable. In the amount of time a producer can find a new encoding technique of making information read-only, a user can find a way to replicate it many times over. Even if encoding gets so good that users can’t decrypt information, there’s still the problem of display. Meaning, if you can sense it, it can be recorded.
As a filmmaker it’s a reality that I’m facing now. My film’s being pirated successfully through torrents right now. I even met a guy at a convention who said he saw “Contour”. I asked him where he bought it, and he flatly said, “Naw man I downloaded that shit.”
Even though I’m an artist, intellectual property rights are going to evolve eventually, if only because they’ll have to.
Did you do a back-spinning kick on him? “You downloaded my action…now see it live!”
Book recommendation: “The Pirate’s Dilemma.”
Some of the claims and stuff are crazy, but it talks a lot about creating new systems for profit in the era of piracy.
Yeah, because we grew up with home entertainment it’s easy to forget that audio and video recordings for home use are a very new thing in history. And I feel it’s not been around enough yet to know how it will be standardized over the long run. Live entertainment on the other hand has been around “forever” and has a similar format and mode of operation since before Shakespeare and Mozart.
The interesting thin about Kindle to me is the maker of audio books are up in arms about it’s voice-talk feature. Which might be troublesome later in development but for now sounds like robotic garbage. Ugh. They just need to have an mp3 app on kindle where you can also dl audio books from I-tunes, read by proper actors (if they don’t have that already in it).
I just can’t take looking at an LCD screen that long.
I’ll have to check it out.
You’ll like it. He actually talks about a radio guy (I think it was) who tried to start his own country on the sea.