Piracy on the E-Book Ocean - Debbie Bennett

Have I ranted about free books before? I promise I won't again. I know that offering your books free works for a lot of people, so who am I to argue? What do you mean I always argue - with anybody, about anything? But the free I want to talk about now is the unintentionally free. The rip-off free. The pirating free. The illegal free.

If I buy a paperback book, I own that book as a physical entity - the paper it's printed on and the physical copy of the story on its pages. I don't own the content of the book. The story itself remains the property of the author and I've just bought the right to read it as often as I like. And lend it to other people too.

But ebooks don't have a physical presence. An ebook is a digital file stored on a server somewhere. When I buy an ebook, I buy the right to download it to a reading device and read it as often as I like. The fact that Amazon apparently has the right to remove it from my device without warning or compensation is a whole new ballgame ...

So why do people think it's OK to copy ebooks? 

I'm sitting in a pub recently and I see somebody with a few DVD/CD cases. The top one has a homemade cover that says something like Best Ebooks of 2012. I'm horrified and I explain to the person that it's ripping off other people's hard work, that I'm an author and I expect to be paid for my books, that it's called pirating and it's illegal. Blank look follows.... 

To be fair, it may be that the books on these CDs are all public domain, or have now been deleted from all other devices. But even so, you can't just lend a kindle ebook to somebody else. Amazon specifically says so: Kindle content cannot be shared like a physical book ...

Now I'm not whiter-than-white. As I child I recorded the Top 40 onto cassettes on a Sunday evening. And as a student I bought cassettes from suitcases on street corners in Liverpool city centre. And I genuinely never realised they were pirated copies and that was why the cardboard inserts were a bit blurry. Remember back then, all we had were cheap cassette recorders - there were no CDS, no cables to connect things up and get perfect sound quality. This was the early 1980s and there was no public internet or i-tunes. Music rip-offs were done by 'professional' outfits who had access to the technology. So it wasn't unreasonable for the more naïve among us to not know what was genuine and what wasn't. I don't rip-off music any more, I should add. I buy CDs or tracks from i-tunes, amazon (or even a local shop!), and I pay for them.

I pay for my books too. Print and ebooks. I'm lucky in that so far I've not had issues with websites pirating my ebooks, although it's all too common these days and there appears to be little to be done to control it when the 'companies' are based abroad in Russia or China and apparently outside of any legal systems. Maybe the current media attention focused on certain social network sites and the internet in general will force some kind of worldwide 'law' onto the internet, but frankly I doubt it. It's impossible to police - and that's just the web we know and see. Given that a lot of the criminal online dealing takes place in the deep web, where even the search engines fear to swim and you begin to see the scale of the problem.

But websites will only sell pirated goods so long as there is a market for them. Given that the majority of people I know these days don't pirate music (not that they tell me, anyway), why do they think it's OK to rip-off ebooks? Is it just that digital literature hasn't been around as long as digital music? How long will it be before polite society considers it wrong to steal books? Or at least wrong enough not to be so blatant about it in public?

www.debbiebennett.co.uk