Book Piracy
on 04.02.08, 06:05am in writing • comments (4)
[Times Online] Book piracy on the internet will ultimately drive authors to stop writing unless radical methods are devised to compensate them for lost sales. This is the bleak forecast of the Society of Authors, which represents more than 8,500 professional writers in the UK and believes that the havoc caused to the music business by illegal downloading is beginning to envelop the book trade.
My last book, Pocket PC Network Programming was published in July of 2003. On August 31st it had made it to Safari Online. By September 17th, the entire book had been ripped and placed online for the world to download for free. (Side note: I found Safari HTML tags in the ‘pirate’ version, so they basically downloaded the entire book and compiled it into a CHM, although they claimed that was ‘impossible’).
Flash forward to 2008: I can view the book on Google Book, for free. It says on the page that my published has ‘approved’ it, but I’ve never been asked.
After writing two books (Pocket PC Network Programming and Teach Yourself Windows CE Programming in 24 Hours) and spending several months in 2002 writing the Device Directions column in .NET magazine, I’m pretty convinced that I’m done with “professional” writing.
While I doubt online piracy has make a huge dent in my rare royalty checks, these days I’d rather throw together a blog post when I have something to talk about. I’m sure most technical authors who’ve been through the book publishing process probably feel the same way.
PaulT (April 3, 2008 @ 3:12 pm)
Actually google only has about 10 pages or so of the book.
smakofs (April 4, 2008 @ 5:22 am)
Not true.
I go to: http://books.google.com/books?id=T0H_fHP8wpgC , then select a page. I can now go forward/backwards through the whole book. Well ok, I tried about 60 pages then stopped.
Andrew (April 4, 2008 @ 11:41 am)
You didn’t try very hard. No pages after 180 are available. Also a third or half the (often very important) pages before 180 are missing. There’s enough there to get a few useful tidbits of information, but mainly its enough to see that the book is well written.
Unless I missed some way to specify an exact page and then go backwards and forwards from it. I’m guessing your publisher approved this with the thought that “It’s enough to get people to invest their time in reading the book, but not enough to make it so they don’t need to buy it.” Honestly I could see myself starting in on it just to get an introduction, then discovering that I’ve already invested so much time in your order of teaching things that it would be best to buy the whole thing.
smakofs (April 5, 2008 @ 4:59 am)
I went to page 562, and went up and down. I went to page 368, and tried the same thing. You are correct though - the publisher approved it - I had no say about it (should I?).
Regardless, I don’t care about it being on Google. The point is that tech book writing is dead.