Paper Piracy?

[jeff_duntemann]

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

Comments

[regek]

Well, I know that scan piracy is a big problem for a publisher I know. He operates in a rather niche market and there's been someone in Washington who gathers scans of everything he publishes (and everything some other companies publish, so it isn't just him), makes a torrent out of it all, and shares it. Not as high-quality or as small as getting the Pagemaker source file and sharing that out, but it's good enough for most people.

As a weirdly-related aside, I've been playing with the speech synthesis engine in Mac OS X Leopard. Alex actually sounds *really* good, and I've figured out how to get him to "read" text files in faster-than-real-time and store the result as an audio file on my machine. This makes turning raw text into high-quality audiobooks rather fast. When the OS is actually released, I'm considering doing some pieces like that for Librivox. While they would be machine-read and the inflection might be off in some places, it would be a lot faster and would have much more uniform quality.

[jeff_duntemann]

I've seen those sorts of crap-scans of Paraglyph books, especially on Usenet, and it boggles the mind to think that people would put up with either monster image collections or uncorrected OCRs. Then again, some nutcases are willing to watch feature films recorded on cell phones in theaters. I don't see the psychology there, but it exists.

There's a theater here that shows slightly dated feature films for a dollar a ticket. I'm patient. I guess a lot of people aren't.

[unkbar]

Well, one solution to this problem has already been found - by Pitney-Bowes

[whl]

Actually, there are postage meters with modems. The contract terms usually make this uneconomical, in my experience. (For example, billing for a semi-rural Internet Service Provider, whose customers definitely preferred getting their statements in the snail-mail. )

[chris_gerrib]

My understanding is that the traditional publishing industry already has somewhat of a piracy problem. Basically, the dishonest bookstore rips the covers off of the mass-market paperbacks, sends those in for credit, and sells the coverless books for cash.

I do think unkbar's comment above about renting POD machines is a viable option. The stickler for details in me should note that one rents the meter - the actual machine that prints / seals the mail can be bought. At any rate, the business concept is valid.

[jeff_duntemann]

On reflection, what's significant in my conversations with the big NY houses is that their thinking revolves completely around paper. I don't think ebooks are really on the radar for them as more than a vehicle for promoting paper books.

On the other hand, they don't love paper. Paper is a PITA, trust me, and you've cited an aspect of perhaps the biggest discontent focusing on paper: Retailer returns. Tearing covers off only applies to MM PBs. Other formats require that you ship the whole, undamaged books back physically to the publisher, and neither retailers nor publishers want to do that, as the people and infrastructure cost is high and contributes little to the bottom line. (To be fair, retailer returns do influence the number of different titles stores carry by reducing the risk for shelving unproven books, and most publishers do recognize this, especially those who still emphasize midlist titles

Print-out piracy happened to me

[anonymous]

I know for a fact that "Thinking in C#" PDFs that I was selling for $5 (1184 pages, more than 200 sample programs) were printed out and sold commercially in Turkey (at least). Of course, it was also widely pirated despite the personal request from me that "c'mon, even if you're a student in the third world, if you pirate this, I'm not going to do it again." There is no price-point "below which people will not bother to pirate."

The only answer that I can think of is some sort of DRM (for physical printing, where it seems less draconian); use PK nested transactions to produce upon request, on a given piece of hardware, a given number of copies.

Larry O'Brien

Re: Print-out piracy happened to me

[jeff_duntemann]

I wonder if that couldn't be done at the driver level, with the drivers closely controlled, pollable by the vendor, and not available to just anybody. I wouldn't want to see new layers of DRM added to the PDF format. Not that any system like that can't be broken, and we must not forget Schneier's Law: A DRM system only has to be broken once.

Interestingly, for all the years I've been in book publishing, I do not recall a single rights deal with a publisher in Turkey. I have copies of my books in a lot of languages (including Croatian!) but not Turkish.

Re: Print-out piracy happened to me

[anonymous]

It's pretty "ob hack" to write a printer driver that accepts encoded input and uses the _previous_ legitimate print request hash as "salt". (Therefore, if you get a brand new machine and print out "Moby Dick," you send some sequence "ABCD...." that prints out "Call me Ishmael...." But you can't just capture and replay that, because once the printer's printed out "...and only found another orphan." the proper encoding of the beginning is "WXYZ...").

Of course it would be vulnerable to physical tampering and memory interception, but "secure kiosk containing valuable slips of paper" seems to be a pretty-much solved problem.

The key (I think) is that DRM is _nothing_ but an inconvenience to legitimate end-users, while DRM is a _benefit_ to legitimate POD kiosk renters / owners. (As the existence of a pirate POD kiosk in their town harms their business.) Therefore, they have an incentive to tolerate the "phone home" and "only this hardware" annoyances of DRM.