How to prevent ebook piracy from stealing your livelihood?

It is sad but true that without strict enforcement of anti-piracy laws, and in the absence of broad cultural perceptions that consider the act of acquiring and reading a pirated ebook as either criminal or unethical (and I am talking society and culture here, not intellectual property laws or their enforcement) any reader who can get an ebook free is unlikely to insist on paying for it or buy a physical copy. They will simply read the book, and use the money saved there for some other purpose, such as buying a memory card for their mobile phone. There might indeed be communities where many people would rather pay for their books or ebooks, but that indicates to me a broad cultural understanding in those communities that pirating ebooks is criminal or unethical. That is however not yet understood in every part of the world.

Circumstantial exceptions that might tempt a reader to choose an unauthorised 'free download': Sometimes the physical book or even a legitimate ebook is unavailable or no longer available for purchase via bookstore or online shopping in the reader's country or locality, or else the reader does not possess electronic payment means such as a credit card to complete the online purchase transaction. [I know many people who do not have any credit cards or debit cards or any other online payment options mainly because they consider it a risk for online fraud.]

In short, a reader reading a pirated ebook represents an actual sale lost only whenever the person had the motive, means and opportunity to buy a legitimate ebook or physical copy, but still chose piracy simply because it was easier, cheaper and socially not unacceptable to acquire and read a pirated ebook, irrespective of intellectual property laws or digital rights.

This is the hard reality for writers in the digital age, but forms of piracy existed even before ebooks and the internet. Also, @Mark Baker in his answer here has made the pertinent point that even in pre-digital eras, the author was not being paid for every time their book got read by a new reader, since many readers would borrow books from their friends, a library or the hotel; get gifted second-hand physical copies; or buy second-hand physical books whose resale does not create royalties for the writer. All of which practices continue in the digital age (even if some studies seem to suggest that reading as a whole is quantitatively on the decline, and even though friends will tend to 'send/receive' digital copies rather than share physical books, whenever digital sharing is the convenient option). Add large scale indiscriminate online piracy to the mix and it's the last straw that can break the author's back!

@Mark Baker also notes that the type of person who reads a pirated ebook is not the type of person who would actually pay for it if it weren't illegally obtainable for free, but I think there are far too many easy ways available at present for even specifically interested readers to read an ebook without needing to pay the publisher or the author in order to get access to the written work, so the widespread "free sharing" of ebooks does represent an additional drain on potential (if not necessarily actual) sales.

However, it can be sobering for every author or potential author to reflect that, if digital rights were strictly enforced, your work would still only be paid for and purchased by somebody who considers it a work worth paying good money to buy and read, even if that person is ethically against piracy and would never read a pirated work. So the free circulation of pirated ebooks actually gives many authors a 'casual' reader base, many of whom wouldn't read the book if they had to pay for it, but at least some of whom could form a dedicated fan base and/or might later be ethically motivated to pay for the writer's hard and honest work.

On the other hand, as also pointed out by @Mark Baker in comments, DRM is always an option. But if enough digital locks (read DRM) are placed on a work to absolutely prevent piracy, could that possibly affect your legitimate sales via legally purchased ebooks and physical copies? Also, is the publisher/distributor who guarantees you complete digital protection really capable of getting your work the best possible exposure and earn for you the maximum possible revenue? That is what you need to work out for your particular case. On the broader societal level, individual readers need to take an ethical stand against helping themself to "free" ebooks and communities need to develop the cultural consciousness that reading pirated ebooks is unethical and a crime.

Most people tend to commit actions that they personally and their community in general don't consider unethical, whatever be the legal position -- and obviously a huge number of people still do not consider piracy unethical. So this trend is likely to continue until cultural values change to reflect the unethicality of piracy, or 'until laws come down harsher on this type of theft and a way to hold people accountable, so this act becomes not worth the hassle', as noted by @ggiaquin in a comment.

posted about 7 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

English Student‭

10 reputation 0 2 2 0

It appears to be just the cost of doing business. Pretty much everything I am going to say here comes from https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/book-piracy-a-non-issue/ but I will sumarize.

First, in the days of paper, authors only got paid for a fraction of the people who read their book. Many readers borrowed the book from a library or from a friend. Many bought them a second hand book stores. Many read them in the common room library of Inns and B and Bs or found them abandoned on the train.

Ebooks could actually mean more sales for authors since you can't lend or resell an ebook.

And it is vanishingly unlikely that pirated ebooks represent lost revenues. The people who pirate books were likely not going to buy them if they could not get them for free. And since (unlike physical goods) there is no unit cost for a ebook, you don't suffer shrinkage or a lost sale.

This is why, as Tim O’Reilly explains in a quote in the linked article, O’Reilly books does not use DRM. He reckons it is actually better to sell 10,000 books and have 100,000 readers than to sell 10,000 books and have only 10,000 readers.

You will probably make a lot more money by spending your time and energy on writing more and better books than by worrying about book piracy.

posted about 7 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Mark Baker‭

4381 reputation 12 1104 745 58

Watermarking.

This is common with high-priced (>$30) documents, such as building codes and scientific journal articles. The downloaded file will include "Purchased by User@Example.Com" in the footer of each page and a unique ID in the meta-data. If the file ends up in the wild or in the black market, the publisher knows from who to seek damages.

Technical solutions can only discourage copying. Once copying happens, your problem is legal, not technical. It's up to you to enforce your copyright, so it's to your benefit to make enforcement as easy as possible. Easy enforcement also discourages anybody who fears litigation.

Watermarking is an option only if the publisher offers the feature, because the file must be dynamically generated for each customer. Also, watermarking relies on customers' identity being authenticated. Credit card transactions may offer a path to an identity, but anonymous payment methods won't work.

posted about 7 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

Spencer Joplin‭

5 reputation 0 1 1 0

Is there a practical, effective way to prevent this IP theft?

Yes.

As someone who has pirated countless books, I might give you some insight into my frame of mind. There's a very simple way you can counteract this "theft":

Put a donation link on your website.

You'd be surprised if I told you how many times I wanted to donate to an author after reading their book but couldn't because they didn't take the simple step of enabling it.

Prefer a easy to use payment method - paypal and bitcoin are good candidates. You don't have to phrase it as "paying for pirating". "Supporting my writing" would be appropriate.

As a reader, here's things I care about, in order of importance:

• I want to read your book
• I want to finance your future books (so I can read them as well)
• I want to get a sense of contributing to the development of culture and society

Here's some things I don't want:

• complicated DRM schemes that at best make my e-reader slow, or at worse, don't work with my model at all, or make me unable to read on my computer.
• lose access to my book when I migrate to another book publisher service, e-reader or computer.
• I don't care about exclusivity agreements. I won't create a new account in a new publisher again just because your book is there.
• I don't care about middlemen like amazon profiting at your and mine expense in an age where data distribution is virtually free.
• I don't care about the price of your e-book being virtually identical to the price of a paper copy. No matter what the actual production costs are, I feel I'm getting ripped off.

Finally, please consider subscribing to a crowdsourcing/patron platform like Patreon. Or letting donators leave a message. The only thing better than supporting authors you love is doing it publicly.

Summary:

I want to read your book in whatever way I see fit. Please just make it easy for me and take my money.

posted about 7 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

BookPirate‭

5 reputation 0 1 1 0

Apparently the following section requires emphasis! :-)

I do not endorse this solution, I do not USE this solution, I am a semi-retired professor in computer science that is aware of this product, I met somebody that uses this product to protect their work and likes it. It is a Windows-only product, but at last report 91.8% of all laptops, desktops and non-phone computers are Windows-based. Thus it restricts your audience.

My specialty is not security, but my informed opinion is that all security is deterrent, not certain, but that said, deterrents do indeed reduce piracy, especially when the price and/or effort and/or risk and/or learning curve required to circumvent the deterrent exceeds the price of the product.

The rest is basic computer science: If an author is intent upon protecting their work then some licensing and restrictive scheme is necessary, either to a device (disk, MAC address, dongle) or requiring an online connect to ensure only X simultaneous users at a time. The latter can be accomplished at some multi-hour checkpoint intervals, to cover spotty network availability.

The hardware type of licensing can be more invisible. Disks have unique serial numbers, network cards have unique MAC [Media Access Control] addresses, and USB dongles can be read-only devices that are difficult to hack. That said it is possible to run software that has an encrypted form of such a signature; and reads that unique signature from a device and then encrypts it, and refuses access to the encrypted content if it does not find a match. That encryption can be a one-way hash; meaning even if the user can see the hashed outcome they are supposed to match, they cannot reverse that to find the hardware signature that would hash to that.

Thus, With no endorsement whatsoever, but awareness of the product, see this eBook Compiler, a commercial product that costs money, but they basically can encrypt your eBook with a licensing thing like commercial games, tied to a specific computer, so it can only be read on that computer. They offer services (for a minor fee) to handle all the licensing communications for you.

The easiest way to steal your book is if someone takes photos of the screen, and then transcribes those to text (there are character recognition programs that could assist in that).

So it isn't as easy as copying a file and a cookie or whatever. The license can be tied to unique hardware on a specific computer. Software is required there. The first time the user gets it they must register and be online, that is the only time they have to be online, and the use (on that machine) can be invisible thereafter.

I don't know how easy it is to use, or how good their support is, or how the whole thing works.

Any form of security is going to inconvenience the consumer. That said, for an author intent upon protection and willing to sacrifice some sales to protect their copyright, strong deterrents exist.

I will leave this answer up despite the negative reception: It is an actual answer to the question instead of a rebuke to the whole idea of protection, and all the negative responses seems to be from people ideologically opposed to any form of protection. But the question was not "should I try" but "How to prevent ebook piracy". This is a potential answer, with the caveat already given: Protection by its nature inconveniences and restricts legitimate customers, which may significantly reduce the number of legitimate customers.

posted about 7 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Amadeus‭

3166 reputation 2 1399 614 37