Steal Like an Artist

Your time is up, publishers. Book piracy is about to arrive on a massive scale

An article by Adrian Hon, originally published in Telegraph.co.uk

If book publishers want to see the next decade in any reasonable health, then it’s absolutely imperative that they rethink their pricing strategies and business models right now. I hope this example will illustrate why:

I’m a big fan of Iain Banks’ novels; I always buy them in hardback as soon as they come out. It doesn’t matter what reviewers say, I need to have his books immediately. His latest novel, Surface Detail, came out a few days ago and promptly arrived at my office – all 627 pages of it. I lugged the thing home and began reading it this morning.

Being a Culture novel, it’s a real page-turner and I found it difficult to pull myself away from it. I didn’t want to lug it back to the office again, not least because I didn’t have any space left in my bag, so I did the unthinkable – I googled surface detail ePub so I could download and read it on my iPad (and iPhone).

I try doing this every six months or so, and I usually end up mired in a swamp of fake torrent links and horrible PDF versions; for what it’s worth, this was mostly out of curiosity, since six months ago I didn’t own an iPad.

This time, it took me 60 seconds to download a pristine ePub file, and another five minutes to move it to my iPad and iPhone. While this was going on, I took the opportunity to poke around the torrent sites and forums that my search had yielded, and discovered a wonderful selection of books, including:

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

Our Kind of Traitor, by John le Carre

Jump! by Jilly Cooper

The Fry Chronicles, by Stephen Fry

Eat Pray Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert

Solar, by Ian McEwan

Zero History, by William Gibson

Obama’s Wars, by Bob Woodward

Now, that’s not all of the current bestsellers, but it’s not a bad start. “Oh, but we’ve still got the backlist!” I hear some publisher cry. No such luck, because some helpful pirate has bundled entire collections of popular backlist novels into a single torrents, including:

Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels

Lord of the Rings

Narnia

Harry Potter

Artemis Fowl

Twilight

The Hunger Games

Every Ken Follett book

Every Stieg Larsson book

Every Stephen King book

Every Douglas Adams book

etc.

Pretty much all of these books are available in ePub, mobi, PDF and every other popular format (the non-fiction and literary selection is much worse though, which probably reflects the tastes of the people uploading the torrents – that’ll change soon enough).

I am not a torrent-finding genius – I just know how to add ‘ePub’ to the name of a book or author. I don’t need a fast internet connection, because most books are below 1MB in size, even in a bundle of multiple formats. I don’t need to learn how to use Bittorrent, because I already use that for TV shows. And Apple has made it very easy for me to add ePub files to my iPad and iPhone. So really, there is nothing stopping me from downloading several hundred books other than the fact that I already have too much to read and I think authors should be paid.

But why would the average person not pirate eBooks? Like Cory Doctorow says, it’s not going to become any harder to type in ‘Toy Story 3 bittorrent’ in the future – and ‘Twilight ePub’ is even easier to type, and much faster to download to boot.

After Christmas, tens of millions of people will have the motive, the means, and the opportunity to perform book piracy on a massive scale. It won’t happen immediately, but it will happen. It’ll begin with people downloading electronic copies of books they already own, just for convenience’s sake (and hey, the New York Times says it’s ethical!). This will of course handily introduce them to the world of ebook torrents.

Next, you’ll have people downloading classics – they’ll say to themselves, “Tolkein and C. S. Lewis are both dead, so why should I feel bad about pirating their books?” Then you’ll have people downloading ebooks not available in their country yet. Then it’ll be people downloading entire collections, just because it’s quicker. Then they’ll start wondering why they should buy any ebooks at all, when they cost so much. And then you go bust.

(In case you think this is just a scary story, think again – a conservative estimate this month suggests there are 1.5-3 million people looking for pirated eBooks every day [nb: this is a link to a PDF]. A suggestion: If you gave away a free eBook copy with physical books, that might help things. A bit.)

But of course I’m exaggerating. Most publishers won’t go bust. eBook prices will be forced down, margins will be cut, consolidation will occur. New publishers will spring up, with lower overheads and offering authors a bigger cut. A few publishers will thrive; most publishers will suffer. Some new entrants will make a ton of cash; maybe there’ll be a Spotify or Netflix for books. Life will go on. Authors will continue writing – it’s not as if they ever did it for the money – and books will continue being published.

Three years ago, I wrote a blog post called The Death of Publishers. Back then, most commenters didn’t believe that eBook readers would ever rival physical books for convenience and comfort. They didn’t think that it would ever be that easy to pirate books. The post caused a splash at the time, but it didn’t change anything.

Here’s an excerpt:

Book publishers have had a longer grace period than the other entertainment industries. Computers and iPods had an easy time besting DVDs and CDs, but it’s been difficult to make something that can compete with a book. It may be strange to hear, but a book is a fantastic piece of technology. It’s portable, it doesn’t need batteries, it’s cheap to print and easy to read. This has led many publishers to complacency, thinking there’s something special about books that will spare them from the digital revolution. They’ve seen so many poor or substandard eBook readers that they think it’ll never be done properly.

They’re wrong. eBook readers are about to get very good, very quickly. A full colour wireless eBook reader with a battery life of over a week, a storage capacity of a thousand books, and a flexible display will be yours for $150 in ten years time. If this sounds unbelievable, consider this – the first iPod was released only six years ago and cost $400. Imagine what an iPod will look like in four years time.

How wrong I was! It’s only taken us three years to get the Kindle 3 at a mere $189, with a battery life of a month and a storage capacity of 3500 books. Sure, it doesn’t have colour or a flexible display, but it does have global wifi and 3G, and it’s a lot lighter than I thought it might be. Give it another year or two and we’ll have that colour as well.

(I was also wrong about scanning and OCRing being the main way of pirating books – turns out it was people cracking the DRM of eBooks that publishers had helpfully formatted and distributed themselves!)

But I was right about the complacency of publishers. They’ve spent three years bickering about eBook prices and Amazon and Apple and Andrew Wylie, and they’ve ignored that massive growling wolf at the door, the wolf that has transformed the music and TV so much that they’re forced to give their content away for practically nothing.

Time’s up. The wolf is here.

An Informal Report of my Academic Journey over the Last Year

(Image from John May's The Generalist)

Below is an informal report I wrote for a postgraduate workshop at my Alma Mater, which I was not able to attend. Another attendee read it, and apparently it was well received. Some professors even asked that it be forwarded to them, to my surprise. I guess there is something about such candidness about ones frustrations that's worth sharing . . .

Dear fellow scholars,

As you might know, I’ve accepted a position at an English Department halfway around the world, in the obscurities of the Orient; therefore, my attendance at the postgraduate workshop on the 5th of June is impossible. Nonetheless, I would like to give an informal rendition of my scholarly progress (or lack thereof) in the pages that follow. To take inventory in this way of the past year will most likely be of personal benefit. I hope that such a written account may also somehow be of value to some of you.

Last year, I registered for a PhD in “Algemene literatuur- en taalwetenskap”, with the intention to focus on Creative Writing. (My Master’s degree research also concerned Creative Writing.) My personal proviso for starting with a PhD was that I must be able to do something with it afterwards. The PhD should work for me; and not merely be three, four, five years of philosophising, culminating in a thesis gathering dust in the university library. Not that contributing to one’s science is not a worthy pursuit in itself. However, with no guarantee of future employment at an academic institution in South Africa, a formal academic pursuit must have other practical applications.

I started to read up on characteristics that would probably be necessary for anyone that wishes to be successful in our fast paced and changing world. Two books I want to mention are: A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink (2006) and 5 Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner (2008). The former resonated much more with me, although the latter also added value to my contemplation. Both authors are of the opinion, whether directly or indirectly, that the act of storytelling will be a progressively more valuable skill. “The ability to encapsulate, contextualize, and emotionalize has become vastly more important in the Conceptual Age,” writes Pink (2005:104). He links this to giving “meaning” to the world. In less academic style, Bruce Jackson in The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories describes it as follows: “Stories are the way we domesticate the world’s disorder. Facts are incidental” (2007:150). Pink also mentions “Symphony”, which echoes Howard’s “The Synthesizing Mind”; both concepts concern the ability to bring seemingly unrelated ideas together into a sagacious construct. Howard (2008:46) argues that the “ability to knit together information from disparate sources into a coherent whole is vital today”. The creative writer has the ability to bring disparate things together, to create a “coherent narrative” (Howard, 2008:47); for this reason, Creative Writing is a highly relevant pedagogical pursuit.

These arguments, among other reasons, persuaded me that research in Creative Writing could indeed allow my PhD to “work” for me. So began the next (achronological) phase of my journey . . . what exactly will I research?

My special interests were in Creative Writing (pedagogy), Creativity, and the changing world in which text is becoming increasingly more digital – just think of Google’s ambitious endeavour to scan in all existing book titles – also, the interaction of text with other media (images, audio and video). Regarding the latter, Prof. Franci Greyling and Prof. John Gouws suggested that I read up on Intermediality and the study of Rhetoric, respectively. Both of these sciences could prove valuable means for tracking the interaction of text with other media. Another theory I considered is the Meme-metaphor which has become somewhat of a fad of late, to describe pop-phenomena like the viral spread of cultural ideas.

(Note that I’m using the term “text” to refer specifically to the written word and within my sphere of interest, even more specifically to refer to creative texts as pursued in Creative Writing; i.e. novels, short stories, poetry, etc.)

During the first couple of months after my registration I was playing hopscotch with some of the following ideas:

• With people reading increasingly more online, how should creative writers adapt to this new e-text environment?

• Because of multimedia and the Internet, it has become the norm for text to be combined and juxtaposed with other media. What effects do such text-media combinations have on the reading of the text? What skills ought a creative writer have to create such combinations in a successful, creative and cohesive way?

• How ought the pedagogy of Creative Writing change/adapt to stay in step with the requirements of an increasingly digital way of interacting with text, be it in the form of electronic palm readers, e-books, audio-books, online text (blogs?), and other text-media combinations?

Such were the questions that I juggled with. However, when I arrived in Korea the sudden realization of my milieu and geographic location hijacked my thoughts. Shouldn’t I make the most of this opportunity in Korea? Ought I not make use of this unique setting as an occasion for distinctive research? Practically immediately my love for poetry jumped into the limelight. I’ve been reading anthologies of Korean poetry, some in Korean, but mostly with English-translations for some time now and devouring the verses with a great appetite. On occasion I would translate some of these poems into Afrikaans with much satisfaction. Subsequently my academic ponderings shifted to the creative translation of poetry. I’ve been involved with creative translation in the past as part of the South African government’s Lingo-project (http://www.lingo.org.za/). How about doing a thesis on the process of performing creative translations of Korean poetry into Afrikaans? This new idea excited me and for several months I seriously considered it; doing some initial reading on the translation of creative work, for example André Lefevere’s Translating Poetry: Seven Strategies and a Blueprint (1955). (If I remember correctly this source was suggested to me by Prof. Hein Viljoen.) Another noteworthy read was an insightful essay by Brother Anthony of Taizé, a scholar known for his translations of Korean poetry into English. I even started to ponder some Korean poets I’d like to look into, for example Mi Dang, Hae In Lee, Ku Sang, Ko Un and Heo Nanseolheon.

Eventually, however, I came to the realization that this research idea is not practical. My grasp of the highly ambiguous Korean language is just too limited to commence such an endeavour. To really do the research justice I would first have to spend at least a year or two officially learning Korean; this does not fit within the time frame of my intended studies. In the meantime I will still continue my informal translation of Korean poetry. Who knows, it may bear fruit in the future.

Finding myself back at the proverbial drawing board I’m admittedly a little frustrated. I’ve resumed my pondering of my initial possible research questions. I’ve also recently found, what I hope will be, a key source with regard to Intermediality. During my initial research on this topic I found hardly any useful sources on Intermediality and Literature. It was no surprise to me, of course, that I wouldn’t find anything on Intermediality and Creative Writing. Nevertheless, my hope was that if I could find a good Literature link, I could still employ the source by means of academic reverse engineering. (When I did my Master’s degree research in Creative Writing I often had to “reverse engineer” literature theory for use in Creative Writing theory.) However, my luck changed for the better and only just a couple of weeks ago I found a prospective source: Literary Intermediality: The Transit of Literature through the Media Circuit (2007), edited by Maddalena Pennacchia Punzi, which I ordered online at a somewhat ridiculous price – nearly R400! Although this book focuses primarily on Literary Intermediality as manifested in cinema, theatre, and MTV, there is a small section devoted to the Internet. I hope that this will be a springboard from which to build my research towards what is still a very vague exploration of the future of Creative Writing and the future of the pedagogy of Creative Writing.

And so, most recently, I thought of a novel idea (or at least a probable title) that might encapsulate many of my initial questions: “Future Books, Future Writers”. Catchy, isn’t it? Except that research on the future, especially a future so closely related to phenomena like the Internet, is highly problematic. By the time my research is done, it would probably be already outdated because of the extreme pace at which new inventions occur and online innovation transpires. Just think of such current occurrences as blogs, Facebook-profiles, online publishing and e-books. While these things are common today, a couple of years ago they were hardly known. A more appropriate title, although less appealing, may be “Changing Books, Changing Writers”. Nonetheless, I’ve lately started searching for material on “future books”. An astute entry to the topic is Sam Vaknin’s essay “The Future of the Book” . I’ve also come across The Institute for the Future of the Book with whom I hope to network. In a pleasant twist of fate the Creative Writing and Graphic Design departments at the Potchefstroom Campus has as their new project “Transgressions and boundaries of the page” – regarding artist’s books. I’ve decided to join this project and work on some kind of digital or multimedia book. My reading, although still somewhat haphazard, will now also possibly include material on the history and development of books, such as:

• Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

• Eliot, Simon, and Jonathan Rose, eds. A Companion to the History of the Book. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

• Finkelstein, David and Alistair McCleery, eds. The Book History Reader. Second ed. London: Routledge, 2006.

• Finkelstein, David and Alistair McCleery. An Introduction to Book History. London: Routledge, 2005.

from a short list compiled by Prof. John Gouws for the aforementioned project.

This then, dear fellow scholars, has been my journey over the last year – nearly to the day. I registered for a PhD in May 2008. I find myself having come full circle, but hopefully this cycle has not been a downward, but rather, an upward spiral.

Good luck also with your own journeys and may the workshop on Friday be most fruitful.

Sincerely,