Paper Piracy?
I got a note from a chap at a major NY publisher who's been reading Contra for some time and has a special interest in new business models, particular those that allow the reduction of retail returns. He thinks the notion of "just-in-time" bookstore replenishment will happen someday, but it will be capital-intensive and slow to implement. (Just one book manufacturing machine won't make it. To be effective, a big urban store would need five or six and eventually more.) His firm would love to have their backlist out of their warehouses and onto a hard drive on a server, but they're worried about something I hadn't thought about: Counterfeiting of paper books.
He isn't sure how much to worry about this (and I'm not worried at all, especially for my own work) but there are people at the large houses who do nothing but worry about IP issues.
Here's the scenario: TeraHouse Publishing transmits a print image (almost always a PDF) of a book that has gone from frontlist to backlist over to a POD manufacturing server somewhere. The initial print run has been sold, and it will not be reprinted conventionally. TeraHouse intends to harvest the book's Long Tail by manufacturing either extremely small quantities (under 25 at a time, as Lightning Source does) for a "shelf cache," or as the technology matures, onesies.
The danger lies in having the print image files get out on the Net somehow. Anyone who claims that this can't be done needs to be kept away from computers. A print image for an all-text novel or nonfiction title isn't very large. The print image for my republished Old Catholic history book The New Reformation is 2.2 MB in size, including the cover. That's smaller than most MP3s. A full-color cover image would be larger, but not larger enough to matter. A USB port and thumb drive is all you need, at any point in the pipe.
So far it's business as usual: Print images have been sent over the Net to print houses for years. The danger comes when you're sending the print image to not one place but to lots of places, like rooms full of POD machines in hundreds of bookstores. The more joints in the piping, the more you need to worry about leaks. If the only place you send the file is to your print house, you know who to blame if the print image shows up on BitTorrent or Usenet. If you have to send it to a thousand places, forget it.
The part that I hadn't thought about was small print shops who have POD machines in the back rooms. The machines are expensive but getting cheaper, and will eventually cost under $10,000, which means that they will be all over the place. If the print image of a novel gets out on Usenet, a print shop owner can run off ten or fifteen copies of the book for his wife to sell on her Amazon Associates or eBay bookstore-or her table at the weekly flea market. Assuming the original print image is used, it would be difficult to tell the difference between a legit copy made under a bookstore or a counterfeit made in the back room of a small print shop, and a seller can always claim that the book is used. Multiply that by thousands of small-time pirates, and you have a serious problem. (And then, of course, there's China...)
Far fetched? Seems so to me. I asked him if he had ever heard of this happening, and he said, "Can't talk about that." Heh. Sounds like somebody, somewhere got burned a little. I'd worry more about people just passing the PDFs around-and then loading them temporarily on Lulu as private projects, printing single copies for themselves, and then deleting them. That would be very difficult to police. Interestingly, he hadn't thought of that, and I so I guess I gave the poor guy still one more thing to worry about.
Future generations of POD book machines may have technology to imprint a machine-unique code on each manufactured copy. Color copiers do that now to make it easier for the Feds to trace counterfeited money. And if you're a publisher, books are money. It'll be interesting to see how things work out over the next ten years or so.