I promise a DragonCon report soon. There is much to talk about. My problem is DragonCon is a bit like the '60s: If you were there you don't remember it. :-) But this is more on the SCRIBD thing. I picked up a blog response about it which was well reasoned and I thought I should respond more broadly. The blog is: http://dbroussa.livejournal.com/435671.html And includes a nice plug of Vorpal Blade. Don't go showing your ass, people. Some of this is repetititve of previous ebook discussions on my site and in Mutterings. Read it if you wish. (And a bit of it, I later realized, was actually an unintentional pastiche of Eric Flint's writing. Heh.) My response was too long to put on his site so I'm putting it, in its entirety, here:

The wonder of the internet. Mention my name and via the magic of Google in a puff of sulfurous smoke I appear.

:-)

You raise good points but it's complicated.

I don't want SFWA touching anything I deal with because I wouldn't find them competent to watch my kid for ten minutes. Individually they are bright people. You don't write SF if you're not at least slightly above the norm of intelligence. In a group they are the perfect example of a committee: All stomachs no brains.

And the way that they handled this item, in particular, was poor to say the least. Both in their initial approach and in their response.

The EFF if not the Dark Lord of the Sith. EFF supports legal distribution. There are members of EFF that are 'all information should be free' idiots, but that is not their general position. Frankly, if SFWA would get off of the 'all eBooks are ePiracy' bandwagon and work together with EFF things might actually, you know, work. But there are too many of the members of SFWA who are terrified of ebooks. (How SF writers can ignore that a technological wave is coming is a question for psychiatrists.) So SFWA can only take a hard stance.

Eric Flint in his 'Mutterings' has covered the issue of eBooks, in their current incarnation, pretty clearly. Paraphrasing:

It's not piracy. Piracy is when a ship captures another ship, kills the crew and passengers and takes the ship and its cargo for sale. That's piracy. This is petty theft at best. Maybe writ large...and maybe not.

Let us think about the conditions of estealing. There are, effectively, four groups that are potential 'thieves.'

The first is people who are just out there to screw with the system. Call them crackers or vandals or whatever you'd like. anarchists is being kind. They are the people that don't care about the content, they just want to grab something that has some notional worth. Some of them, perhaps most of them, are the people that immediately OCR any book by any major author so that it's available on the web before you can get it in the bookstore most of the time. People like that aren't an author's market. They don't read, they steal. There also aren't that many of them and most of them are young. When they grow up they tend to change their habits. Sure, there's always another generation, but every generation has to deal with barbarians, they're called children.

The second group is really a sub-set of the first. They are crackers but readers as well. They OCR a new book or upload it because they like it and they want other people to read it and like it. They are a potential market but not at any sort of unreasonable price point or condition. (Paying more for the ebook than the deadtree and only able to view it on one platform is unreasonable price and condition.)

The third group is people who like estuff but don't want to go to a lot of bother finding them. They can afford the DRMed and monetarily screwed ebooks but generally don't deal with them because of the DRM and the monetary screwing. So they go out on the web and download the content, with a little feeling of guilt, because they'd really like to pay the artist but not be extorted. Or the stuff just isn't available legally. (JK Rowling. Metallica.)

The last, and about the same numerically I would guess as the first group, is the 'total legal' people. They'll pay through the nose for ebooks that are DRM, they only burn one copy of a song and don't distribute, etc. And they generally won't look very hard.

So, we have this tiny little fraction that is the true 'pirates' but they're not a market. No matter what you do, those people are not going to pay for your content. Ever. They don't care about the content, they only care about the petty power they get from 'stealing' it.

The last three are your major potential deadtree market. And, by and large, it's been my experience that they will all pay a reasonable pricepoint for ebooks. Especially if they can get them easily and in a non-DRM format. Furthermore, most of them consider ebooks to be fillers. They put them on their PDA to read during boring meetings or on flights. They, often, buy deadtree formats for reading under other conditions. A portion of that group will 'steal' content if they 'have' to. You want any JK Rowlings book you can find it somewhere on the net in a non-DRM format. You won't find it on SCRIBD because her publisher will come down like a hammer on them every time it gets posted. And if it gets posted enough it goes beyond 'the billboard' metaphor.

The thing is, Rowlings could be making more money (not that she needs it) by posting the books for pay in a convenient format and a known arena. Make it cheap, make it easy and people will pay. Baen has proven that. Hell, iTunes has proven that.

The only people who are having books 'stolen' from them at this point, to any noticeable share of their market, are people who are fighting the wave. Eminem, a couple of years ago when Napster was still 'stealing', was the highest downloaded artist on Napster. And he was the highest selling CD in the nation. Stealing? I wish people would 'steal' my stuff like that.

But this current mish-mash is the complexity. Cory Doctorow is very in favor of ebooks and non-DRM. He sees them as an additional market and marketing, Jim Baen's 'sheep fleecing themselves.' There are other authors who feel the same.

Another SFWA author stated publicly that 'anyone who downloads one of my books should be put in a cell with a gigantic AIDs riddled homosexual rapist.'

SFWA has taken the latter author's position.

When a group, without questioning the authors, goes out and orders that stuff that the authors and publishers have intentionally allowed to 'free roam' be removed from a free-roaming environment they tarnish the author and publisher's names <i>to the very market</i> they are trying to court. That hurts the 'Cory Doctorows' (and myself) of the world. And the anti-DRM crowd is very aggressive about that sort of thing. The 'legal anti-DRM' people are pushing a very big weight against a lot of pressure from RIAA and such. That makes them touchy as hell. That is, in part, what SFWA ran into.

SFWA was doing what it thought was right. And for values of 'right' they are. However, they did it wrong. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And SFWA is all about, has always been about, paving the hell out of that road.

The onus, frankly, should be on SCRIBD and similar sites. They need to figure out if what is being posted is a. copyrighted and b. legal for free-roaming. A suit by authors and publishers who do not permit free-roaming against SCRIBD will eventually occur and they'll improve their copyright protection.

(Won't be from me because in several of my books we've put CDs with my entire backlist in non-DRM format. And I've had an increase in market after every CD.)

As to authors who are from small press, etc. My gut response is 'it's only going to improve your sales' but that doesn't work for the emotional side. The authors who are totally against free-roaming won't listen. The more complex answer is: Keep an eye out. When you find something of yours is being posted (via various search engines) go to the site and request its removal. That takes a few minutes out of your day. If the site is recalcitrant report them to the FBI and InterNIC or if you have an attorney have the attorney send a letter.

And if you don't find it, most of your market won't, either.

Writing is a business. It's not even an easy business. I'm responding to this because, in part, it's my business. That's why my ISP is a write-off. If you're not willing to approach it as a business, you're never going to get very far, anyway. You may be a writer. You're not going to get very far as an author. Deal.

Couple of last notes.

There is, arguably, a fifth group of the 'thieves.' It seems today that even if people don't have money for food, they can be found on the internet. They 'can't afford' to buy books. They go to the library instead. And, in many cases reluctantly, they download them. Some of them, someday, will be in better financial circumstances. (I know. I've been there.) When they are, they will probably buy the hell out of the books where authors posted them for free.

I know some of those people from online correspondence as well. I don't begrudge them at all. Been there, done that, got the mental scars.

Last point of this rambling response:

A few years back when Webscriptions.net was just starting up a poster came on Usenet alt.ebooks and asked 'Can someone post...' forget the title. One of the latest Baen ebooks. (Available from Webscriptions.net in various non-DRM formats, by the way.)

The response was: "You can get it at Baen for five bucks. Pay the artist, dude."

That has always, in my opinion, been 'nuff said.'

Take care,

John Ringo

PS: Thanks for the plug on Vorpal Blade. I personally love the hell out of that series. It's what I grew up on and getting to write it was a hoot