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Ebooks: with popularity comes piracy

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Plenty of stories recently about the massive uptick in ebook sales (though many of them are playing a little fast and loose with the figures), but with an uptick of interest in an infinitely reproducible good comes a proportional uptick in people interested in getting it for free.

eBookNewser points to an Attributor study that seems to suggest the arrival of the jeebusPad – which has made some publishers very excited, perhaps by dint of being arguably the first piece of ereader-functional hardware with a bit of sexiness to it – has brought with it a 20% increase in search queries for pirated versions of ebooks.

Attributor began the project by investigating the relative importance of the cyberlocker sites (sites that store personal digital files) in the book space, including Rapidshare, Hotfile and Megaupload. Google Trends allowed Attributor to extract data and compare the relative importance of terms searched for pirated content.

The study showed that the popularity of Rapidshare as a host for pirated content has steadily declined since Attributor first raised awareness about the site in August 2009. However, other, smaller cyberlockers, have increased their position in the piracy market, with a 54 percent increase in overall demand for pirated material since August 2009.

Further, recent innovations and availability of new technologies has catalyzed e-book syndication opportunities. The chart below shows a spike in the demand for pirated e-books around May 2010, only one month after the release of the Apple iPad. More than 250 iPhone, iPad and iPod platform users searched for pirated copies throughout the study, pointing to the immediate need to raise awareness and education about syndication proliferation in the age of digital and mobile media.

ebook piracy stats from Attributor

[image ganked from Attributor article; contact for immediate take-down if required]

Now, I’m no stats boffin, but it looks to me that the green curve there is actually just continuing much as it was before the iPad’s arrival; the downtick around its launch date could be down to any number of factors, but I remain to be convinced (or have more thoroughly explained to me, perhaps) how the increase since then is out of character with the curve as it was before.

(Try holding a ruler up against the screen; the downtick from June 2009 to June 2010 looks to me more like a momentary anomaly than a trend that supplanted a previous trend only to be supplanted again.)

A generous helping of cynicism salt is required to season Attributor’s interpretations, of course, because they’re in the business of selling ‘solutions’ to the piracy problem (good luck with finding one that can’t be circumvented by a handful of bored teenagers with a crate of Mountain Dew, folks); their implicit demonisation of “content lockers” will be a familiar meme to those who follow the digital end of UK politics, also (content lockers enable piracy, therefore they should be banned or policed; no suggestion of banning cars for enabling people to be knocked over yet, though).

What’s fairly obvious and believable, though, is that demand for pirated ebooks is climbing steadily, and has been doing so consistently. And that spells trouble for anyone looking to make ebooks a part of their business model… indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised to see similar growth curves for interest in pirated music files from around the time when the first affordable mp3 players began to appear.

The publishing industry appears to have woken up and smelled the coffee much more quickly than the record labels did, but whether they can successfully cut the Gordian knot of abundance economics remains to be seen… and while it’ll doubtless mark me as a Doctorow 5th-columnist*, I feel pretty safe in saying that DRM and closed hardware isn’t the sword for the job.

[ * Content crypto-Marxist? Or, y’know, just a pragmatic realist? Depends on which angle you’re looking from, I guess. 😉 ]

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Cory Doctorow lays down his not-actually-a-manifesto

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The more famous Cory Doctorow gets, the more people try to knock him down. I’m quite fond of him myself (he’s very charming in person, if somewhat perpetually part-distracted*), but while I’m not going to argue any sort of superhero status for the guy (I’ll leave that to Randall Munroe), when it comes to puncturing the poor arguments of his most vocal critics, he’s got undeniable flair. Witness his recent retort to an article that accused him and other net notables of profiteering from their “evangelism” of “free” business models for creatives, which also acts as a pretty good summary of the state of the artistic marketplace and the ongoing copyright wars. A few snippets:

What should other artists do? Well, I’m not really bothered. The sad truth is that almost everything almost every artist tries to earn money will fail. This has nothing to do with the internet, of course. Consider the remarkable statement from Alanis Morissette’s attorney at the Future of Music Conference: 97% of the artists signed to a major label before Napster earned $600 or less a year from it. And these were the lucky lotto winners, the tiny fraction of 1% who made it to a record deal. Almost every artist who sets out to earn a living from art won’t get there (for me, it took 19 years before I could afford to quit my day job), whether or not they give away their work, sign to a label, or stick it through every letterbox in Zone 1.

If you’re an artist and you’re interested in trying to give stuff away to sell more, I’ve got some advice for you, as I wrote here – I think it won’t hurt and it could help, especially if you’ve got some other way, like a label or a publisher, to get people to care about your stuff in the first place.

But I don’t care if you want to attempt to stop people from copying your work over the internet, or if you plan on building a business around this idea. I mean, it sounds daft to me, but I’ve been surprised before.

[…]

I understand perfectly well what you’re saying in your column: people who give away some of their creative output for free in order to earn a living are the exception. Most artists will fail at this. What’s more, their dirty secret is their sky-high appearance fees – they don’t really earn a creative living at all. But authors have been on the lecture circuit forever – Dickens used to pull down $100,000 for US lecture tours, a staggering sum at the time. This isn’t new – authors have lots to say, and many of us are secret extroverts, and quite enjoy the chance to step away from our desks to talk about the things we’re passionate about.

But you think that anyone who talks up their success at giving away some work to sell other work is peddling fake hope. There may be someone out there who does this, but it sure isn’t me. As I’ve told all of my writing students, counting on earning a living from your work, no matter how you promote it or release it, is a bad idea. All artists should have a fallback plan for feeding themselves and their families. This has nothing to do with the internet – it’s been true since the days of cave paintings.

I believe the appropriate phrase is “zing”.

[ * After appearing on a panel with Cory at Eastercon 2008, to which he managed to contribute more thoughts and ideas than the rest of us put together despite busily battering away at a netbook at the same time, a friend from the audience suggested a hypothetical version of posthuman bear-baiting: the game would simply involve installing Cory within a Faraday cage that blocked all wi-fi and phone signals, and then betting on how long it would be before he spontaneously combusted from sheer frustration… ]

Blasphemous Geometries

The Video Game Canon and The Age of Forgetfulness

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0. Asking the Question

If you were a game designer and you were taken into your boss’s office and given carte blanche to create your own roleplaying game, what would your influences be?  My guess is that the games you see as central to the computer roleplaying experience vary according to your age and when you started gaming.

Screenshot from early computer RPG WizardryFor example, if you are currently a teenager then the chances are that you would be most influenced by games like World of Warcraft, Fallout 3 and Dragon Age: Origins, because these are the games that you are most familiar with.  If you are a slightly older gamer, then you might list titles like Final Fantasy VII or Suikoden.  Maybe if – like me – you are one of those thirty-something gamers who spent his high school years playing video games instead of getting to second base, then you might list Baldur’s Gate, Dungeon Master or Shadowrun.  Maybe you are even old enough to remember playing the original Wizardry and Bard’s Tale titles, and think that the future of CRPGs lies in ASCII graphics and getting the players to draw their own dungeon maps.

Well, you’d all be wrong.

And you’d all be right. Continue reading The Video Game Canon and The Age of Forgetfulness →

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What’s wrong with science journalism (and how, perhaps, to fix it)

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You went and read this satirical skewering of science journalism clichés when I flagged it up, didn’t you? If not, go read it now… and then read this follow-up by Martin Robbins, the chap who wrote it, who makes a good stab at analysing the root causes of bad science journalism (somewhat biased for the UK market, but I expect the issues are similar elsewhere) and attempts to present some solutions.

My point was really about predictability and stagnation. The formula I outlined – using a few randomly picked BBC science articles as a guide – isn’t necessarily an example of bad journalism; but science reporting is predictable enough that you can write a formula for it that everyone recognises, and once the formula has been seen it’s very hard to un-see, like a faint watermark at the edge of your vision.

[It’s like the fnords, man! Just like the fnords!]

… you can see ‘the pattern’. They’re called ‘Scare quotes’ and they are used by writers to distance themselves from the words inside, or to indicate paraphrasing – unless you’re a cynic, in which case scare quotes are a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows journalists to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the words mentioned.

This habit is so deeply ingrained at the BBC that even the question of whether ‘effects’ are ‘interesting’ is deemed too thorny an issue for the headline writer to give an opinion on. God forbid that in calling a piece of research ‘interesting’ the BBC should sully its reputation for robotic impartiality.

Lots more interesting analysis and commentary, well worth a read. Go look.

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More mind-controlled motion: the Ratmobile

An opportunity arises to indulge in a bit of Gen-X/Y media nostalgia! UK-based readers of a similar age to myself may well remember this Ratmobile [context for the baffled*; image ganked from the TV-AM nostalgia archives]:

Roland Rat and his Ratmobile

Now, simultaneously compare and contrast the above with Monday’s mention of mind-controlled wheelchairs and this little cyborg rodent fella [image ganked from Hack-A-Day, who got it from this IEEE Spectrum article]:

Rat with brain-controlled cybercart upgrades

Awesome. Extremely creepy, and very much of its time, but still awesome.

[ * I was a huge Roland Rat fan, to the extent of pestering my mother for an at-the-time very out-of-fashion denim jacket in order that I might emulate his effortless cool. So, yes, I’ve always made rather odd fashion choices. Selah. ]

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