Recently my public library posted a growing concern about how libraries are being asked to pay too much for ebooks, particularly from the Big 5 publishers, sometimes as much as 8-times an individual reader's list price of a book.
I was aware that Tor, the leading publisher of sci-fi and fantasy books in the US, announced last year it was withholding sales of ebooks to libraries for 4 months after publication, citing dips in consumer sales.
After a year of collecting sales data, Macmillan expanded the ban across all its imprints, but for two months.
In that same year, many publishers started changing the terms by which they license ebooks to libraries, ending the practice of allowing libraries to buy perpetual access to ebooks and instituting ebook expiration dates.
In researching the reasons for the changing terms for library ebook purchases, I found a lot of fingers pointed in many different directions -- including, but not limited to, accusations of publishing house greed, but also the very real cost of offsetting ebook piracy. By the way, no one accused authors of making a mint off their ebook licenses to libraries.
No matter where you fall on this issue, I realized quickly it's important to understand the depths to which ebook piracy affects book sales and society as a whole. It doesn't just affect authors' and publishers' bottom lines.
Ebook and audiobook piracy affects us at the most basic level by influencing what we as readers get to read in the first place.
The story of Blue Lily, Lily Blue illustrated this tragically.
But that was several years ago, and the problem of ebook piracy has only continued to grow.
There is no clear-cut solution to combating ebook piracy. Blockchain in media was proposed as one possible solution, but as the article points out, any digital media can still be copied and duplicated. Period.
Another possible solution, building on blockchain in media, is to incentivize consumers' reporting of pirated material. Video game developers are experimenting with doing this, by "building a blockchain system that rewards gamers with tokens for in-game achievements."
It's unclear how to do this for ebooks but I could imagine a system by which readers who discover an ebook on a torrent site can report it and earn credit (of some sort) with the publisher.
But there's also the fact that pirates are uploading clansdestined copies of already published books and selling them illegally. Amazon does almost nothing to stop this.
It would be up to US law enforcement, and ultimately taxpayers who pay to support those law enforcement agencies, to assume the costs of the investigations and legal proceedings to have these book pirates and torrent sites taken down, and those are formidable.
Taxpayers foot the bill no matter what solution is instituted. More of our taxpayer dollars go to pay for library licenses of ebooks, instead of other social services libraries now commonly offer, and potentially higher taxes so our federal law enforcement can track down these site owners and prosecute them.
For now, libraries are being asked to subsidize an industry (publishing) that is losing traction over its products year after year. Creators of those products, authors, steadily lose the reason to tell their stories in the first place -- a modest profit off their stories.
It's a slippery slope but unless we do something to combat piracy, we're heading toward a culture that places no value at all on the written word. And I'm already chafing at knowing there are GREAT stories I will never get to read, because someone pirated yet another of the author's works, and killed the next one before fingers even hit the keyboard.
