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From the Desk of David Pogue
Readers Have Their Say in the E-Publishing Debate
Last week in this space, I agonized over the issue of releasing the books in my Missing Manual series in electronic form. The issue had come up when two readers, claiming to be blind, asked for PDF copies -- and then wound up releasing them to piracy Web sites for all to download.
Suddenly, I knew how the record companies felt. And I didn't much like the feeling.
Your feedback to that column was swift and, as always, fascinating. Many, many of you sympathized, and agreed that if my books were available for free online, sales of the printed copies would suffer. Other correspondents insisted that releasing the book online would *boost* sales of the printed version, not diminish them; more on this in a moment.
Several people wrote indignantly that I had offended blind people the world over. They evidently missed the quote marks that I used, which I hoped would make it clear that my exploiters were only *claiming* to be blind.
Lots of you offered technical solutions:
• "You need not release your book in an unprotected format. Why not make it available for the Amazon Kindle [e-book reader]?"
• "The best solution I can think of is through a service like Questia [or O'Reilly's Safari site]. Paying a monthly subscription for access to books online makes a lot of sense."
• "At wowio.com, they provide locked PDF versions of books for free. Each PDF file contains a few pages of ads, the title page has the name of the person who downloaded the book and each page is watermarked in the margin with information to allow tracking of the original downloader. This discourages sharing of the files, since the person responsible can easily be identified."
• "If a person who says he or she is blind ever asks for another book, you might want to consider making the text of the book available to an organization called Benetech (www.bookshare.org). You have to have a documented visual disability to become a member of Bookshare. Then you pay a nominal amount each year for the privilege of downloading as many books as you like."
• "Consider putting in big letters at the beginning of the PDF document: 'IF YOU DID NOT PAY FOR THIS PDF, YOU ARE DEPRIVING THE AUTHOR OF HIS LEGITIMATE INCOME.' Add a heartfelt, personal plea not to 'steal' the book, and make it really easy for people to legitimize their stolen copy by paying you for it, no questions asked.
• "Will it work? I think so. True pirates won't care, but they probably wouldn't buy the book anyway. Ordinary people will feel a pang of guilt."
Some of you took issue with my remark that, "Actually, authors like me are lucky; our bound and published books can't be duplicated infinitely and distributed by the millions online":
• "Sadly, this isn't entirely true. While it is prohibitively expensive for most people to make physical copies of a book, it is common practice for people to scan even massive books (such as textbooks) and post the resulting documents online."
• "With the advent of low-cost, high-speed OCR scanners, all one will have to do is take a band saw to the binding and then hit Scan. When this technology becomes commonplace, the 'Bookz' scene will take off."
A number of passionate writers were confident that releasing free copies of my books would lead to more sales of the printed ones, not less. These people could not understand why I don't see that:
• "You are a technology expert, a columnist for the Times, an accomplished author and you even had a limited-run TV program. You have earned the stature of being always being named first or second as an expert on general technology matters. Your attitude towards e-publishing (paid not free) is so last-generation that it baffles me.
"Mr. Pogue, you are a brand, and the more your brand is in the public, the more it grows, and the more you are sought after. Of all people, it seems that you really should see this as a positive and not a negative. Don't be afraid; take a tiny step and release your works electronically. In, say, 6 months to a year after the initial printing, I think you will find this to be very beneficial to your career. Feel free to send me a percentage of your future revenue stream in return for this sound advice."
And similarly:
• "All you have proven is that there is pent-up demand for an electronic version of your book. Your conclusion is only valid IF you had a legitimate electronic version to sell, and people chose to get the free one instead of the paid one. You haven't given them that choice. They used the pirated electronic version, because it is the only one.
"The same principle was true in the pre-digital world. People could read the book for free from the library, but many of them would still choose buy a copy. Even if your book was on a pirated site, people (like me) would buy a legitimate non-DRM'd electronic version if you sold it. Until you do, you cannot make any claims about digital piracy from personal experience, because you haven't done a valid test."
This is the crux of the matter, really: *nobody* can do a valid test. Some authors (like Cory Doctorow) point to anecdotal evidence that free e-versions boost the sales of printed books; other authors (like Stephen King and Steven Poole, whose blog I quoted last week) declared their e-book experiments failures.
But a truly valid test will never be conducted because it would require parallel universes: one where you released only the paper book, and one where you made a free electronic version available. Only then could you compare sales and profits.
Thank you all for your incredibly well-reasoned feedback. If you didn't completely contradict each other, I would be thoroughly convinced.
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