Saturday, January 21, 2012

Piracy for the Kindle

Piracy is not only for young people looking for music. It is now found among the book club set looking for books for their Kindles and e-book readers.

I was given a flash drive with many folders. I have been buying books to read from Amazon. I was not sure what I was looking at. The nice lady who lent me the flash suggested I copy some books onto my Kindle. On examining the flash drive, only when I found my favourite author and found titles I have bought for Xmas last year did I realise – this is piracy! I thought they were old books out of copyright!

I could not / cannot take any of these and put them on my Kindle. It is wrong. I would like to but … no!

7 comments:

Dr Pam Miller said...

I overheard some ladies from the mink ‘n manure set talking excitedly how they were copying e-books onto their Kindles. Well, one should be excited that they had at last learned to copy files. When I tried to explain that it was piracy, they complained that they lent their books, why not give/lend files of books. Now I understand why some authors do not make their books available for Kindle or in e-book format.

Dr Pam Miller said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
BGR said...

Of course Pam the flip side of the argument (from my kids at least) is that if you look at the book prices (at least on Kalahari.com) is that the prices are not particularly cheaper than buying the physical book. It's like the expense of online music - buy a CD worth of songs it's not much cheaper so the question is - are publishers, record companies etc not pricing themselves into piracy?

Anonymous said...

So Pam, you have never ever used one piece of pirated software, ever ever?

Dr Pam Miller said...

I do not recall ever using pirated software. If you know that I did please remind me off this blog - thanks.

babygarden said...

Amazon is about r90 cheaper per ebook that kalahari and R60 that Exclusive books for the two series that I wanted. I used a google currency convertor to compare prices. Even Afrikaans titles were cheaper. I gladly buy from Amazon, but is saddend that South African online stores are so expensive.

LOVE the Kindle

David said...

I haven't followed piracy specifically on the Kindle, but piracy of just about everything is rampant, and I'm not surprised to hear about it on the Kindle. Remember that the purpose of copyright law is to promote the creation of new creative works. As an author, I might be less likely to write books if I weren't fairly compensated for them. My books are mostly small market so I do it for the love of the work more than the small compensation, but the compensation helps.

As a moral point, piracy is clearly wrong, but the person who pointed out that they are pricing it for piracy is correct as a practical matter. I have no control over the price of my books, but I would do my best to avoid paying the high prices that the publisher and Amazon charge. I think that the lack of a used book market for Kindle books also plays into this. Most people who bought my first book didn't pay full price for it; they got it used, and I didn't make any money off the used sale, but the lack of a legal used book market encourages piracy.

Finally, jumping back to the author perspective, the amount of money that most authors make is very small (10-15% of the price received by the publisher). If books were 1/4th price, it would take 4 times the sales to generate the same money for the author.