Pirated Books: How Low Can We Go?

It’s been over a week since I read about pirated copies of Haruki Murakami’s books masquerading as ipod apps and I’m still trying to sift through my reaction to the news. Just because an illegal version of the novel is up there doesn’t mean readers will flock to buy it and cut the author out of the financial transaction. Still, they’re out there, which creates the possibility of the only two groups being paid for Murakami’s efforts being those who possess the incredible talent of operating a scanner and Apple. (You can read the original article here until the Asahi takes it down. Based on a companion article that appeared in the Asahi the next day, Murakami isn't the only Japanese author being victimized this way.)

According to the first article, Apple’s policy is to send the copyright holder after the pirate directly, but they will remove pirated versions if pressed. What pirate would return a publisher’s phone calls anyway?

Even though the pirated translation was in Chinese, let’s consider a scenario where it is in English. Faced with the choice of spending $12 for the legit copy or $2 for the pirated version, which would you choose? Take the $12 version and rest assured that the author, editor, publisher, and translator all get their fair share? Perhaps you might settle for the $2 version, reasoning that Murakami has made enough already, the literary equivalent of a band like U2, and won’t miss the royalty from your sale when there are so many other customers (suckers?) who will pay full freight.

Followed to its logical conclusion though, where does this send the book industry? Will publishers need to lower prices of e-books to the $2-3 dollar range to take what they can get? Sounds promising for the customer at first. But destroy the current model for publishing and what will be left? It’s not like as many authors can move a million copies of a book as easily as a band can reach a million downloads of a song. Authors also don’t have the option to go on lucrative book tours with a tractor trailer full of merchandise loaded with eponymous sweatshirts made in China that they can sell for $85 a pop to fans looking to expiate the guilt they feel for downloading an author’s collected works for free at pirate sites.

If $2 is all people are willing to pay for e-books, what will we be left with? My guess is that there would remain a small market for literary books--the type that compete for the big prizes every year. Everything else would be published electronically with no filters to guide readers with less elitist tastes still looking for a good read. In other words, the market will consist of a bunch of self-edited, self published books, with no way to sift through the morass. Sure, social networking sites might help create some buzz around these titles, but it would still not guarantee anything about the quality of the book.

In the end, the plight of the aspiring novelist seems as bleak as ever. Spend hours writing a novel, undercut the pirates and sell it for two bucks, and risk devaluing your own work to the point that people a) don't take you seriously or b) find a free pirated version somewhere else. Ultimately, you're left wondering if you even have an audience at all or if you're just indulging in an exercise in narcissism.

And yet, just when the pessimist in me threatens to take over, I think of my experience using emusic. At forty-nine cents a download, they've got itunes prices beat by a mile. While bands make less per album sale off of me, I'm more likely to experiment and try a band based on a review. If I like what I hear, I'll then buy the band's whole catalogue instead of adding one title at a time until the Law of Diminishing Returns sets in. End result, the band makes more off of me and I get a better overview of their recording career. If readers are willing to take more chances on unknown authors at $2 or $3 a pop, then maybe someone like me could benefit in the end. So lower prices maybe, let's just agree not to support the pirates.

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