Summary: Neil Gaiman says positive things about ‘piracy’ of books and I have some reservations. Longness warning: pretty long.
“When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true. And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.” What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.”—
Neil Gaiman on Copyright, Piracy, and the Commercial Value of the Web (X)
Ugh, I’m so uncertain about all this stuff.
Downloading an electronic book is not the same as borrowing a paper book. When you borrow a paper book the lender is unable to use the book during the time when you have physical possession of it, and when you give it back the lender can use it again but you can’t use it any more. When you download it, the person who has the original can still use the original and you can use the new copy. The book hasn’t been passed on, it’s been reproduced. Downloading is not borrowing. It also isn’t stealing, for exactly the same reason: when you steal a paper book, the person you stole it from can no longer use it, whereas when you download a copy you don’t deprive that person of the use of their book. Downloading is not theft. Downloading is a new thing that is not the same as anything any previous generation has done with books, and that’s exactly why there’s no consensus about it. False analogies don’t help anybody.
But to give Gaiman credit, I think what he’s mainly saying is that the effect downloading has on the book-market is the same as the effect that the lending and borrowing of paper books has on the book-market. Which may well be true, and certainly seems to be substantiated by his experience and semi-scientific experiment. And that’s an extremely important point and a very good counter to one of the main arguments of the ‘downloading is theft’ camp.
Then again, Neil Gaiman is Neil Gaiman. He is a famous, popular, and (I think) wealthy author. He personally, and his publisher professionally, can afford to pull stunts like putting up a book for free on their website. When I say they can afford it, I mean two things. First, they can afford to take the risk that letting people read the book for free will not in fact increase sales and thus turn out to be profitable in the long term. But secondly, and more importantly, they can afford to have a profitable long-term marketing strategy that involves making no money for a month. What if you can’t spare a month’s royalties, especially on top of all those months you spent actually writing the book, plus the cost of web-hosting and other associated costs needed to put up a book for downloading, even if in the long run it will triple your sales? And this goes for publishers and editors as well as authors.
Can we really expect that downloading won’t to change the book industry? It may not hurt big well-established authors, editors, and publishers, but will it make it harder to break into those professions? I don’t think it’s especially helpful for people like Gaiman to just say that it’s all okay and we should relax. I’d like to see people putting forward some kind of alternative. If the way forward is not SOPA / ACTA / WHATEVA (which I agree it probably isn’t), then what actions should we be taking to ensure that people can still make a decent living from writing and editing and publishing good books?
In 2000 another Neil, Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy, came to talk at my university. When he took questions from the audience, somebody asked him why the band had chosen to re-record The pop singer’s fear of the pollen count as a single for their ‘best of’ compilation. He said they’d thought it would make a good single when they first recorded it for Liberation in 1993 but they didn’t have the money to release and promote singles back then. Then a while later, in response to some other question that I can’t remember, he was commenting on Radiohead’s recent release of Kid A and the huge success it had had even though it had had no singles or promotional videos or any of the usual hoopla. He said it was amazing seeing people queuing up around the block on a cold October night to buy he album as soon as it came out at midnight. ’But,’ he said, ‘You know, they’re Radiohead. They’re huge enough to do that kind of thing. We couldn’t get away with that. Back in ‘93 we couldn’t afford to release singles. Now we can’t afford not to.’
And of course in 2007 Radiohead would go on to release In rainbows as a download that cost whatever you wanted to pay, including nothing at all. The point is, what works for Neil Gaiman or Radiohead may not work for people lower down the ladder of fame, success, and income. I don’t want to know whether Neil Gaiman is okay with downloading because I’m confident that he’s going to be okay whatever happens. I’m not worried that one day I will suddenly not be able to read any more Gaiman because he’s too poor to write or his publisher is too poor to publish. The people I’m worried about are the people who will be my favourite authors in ten years if they can manage to make a living as writers right now. I want to be reassured that downloading is not hurting them. If we’re not sure about that, we need to not only resist reactionary crackdowns driven by big media companies but also work positively for a new artistic economy that uses digital technology, and the new things it can do that are not the same as theft and are also not the same as borrowing, to support creators.
(Source: roominthecastle)
