Austin — I don’t think we disagree. Of course, something funny happened on the way to my responding to your comment. 1984. It appears the copy uploaded to the Amazon server was unauthorized. However, the consumers purchasing the book had no way of knowing this was an illegal edition. Funnily enough (or sadly, I suppose), this was (if the ebook was truly illegitimate) a case of true piracy. Money changed hands, though not for long.

Yeah, it just reinforces our (agreed) belief that conversation needs to happen to slow the tide of piracy.

(I did enjoy the idea of police enforcing fare-jumping — nothing deters bad behavior like authority figures approving it!)

I think we need to meet you halfway and suggest that if the piracy problem indeed becomes a major one for publishers, finger-wagging alone will do them no good in solving it–but that, at the same time, the onus won’t be entirely on publishers to reform their business model. More effective anti-piracy enforcement is sorely needed across all branches of the arts. Since the latter point often gets lost, we emphasized it in our piece, but this compromise stance is really what we’ve adopted from the beginning.

I do wish Amazon, Sony, and other producers of e-readers, as well as publishers, would realize that the person buying and reading the books matter. They need to make it easier to buy, download, and store books, and to move books from one device to another. I won’t always have my netbook. In five years, I’ll probably need to replace it, and reload all those books on a new device. And what if technology changes so quickly that by the time five years has passed, those formats are no longer good?

That’s what worries me the most. That’s probably why I still buy some books in hardback or paperback, so I know I’ll have them no matter what.

Austin — I’m certainly not arguing that publishers are responsible for piracy, and if I created that impression, I apologize. I’m probably going to say it badly again, but let me try. When a consumer — a reader — goes online searching for a legal digital version of a book and finds nothing, that consumer will not always react in a textbook manner. That reader might assume there’s no digital and move on. That reader will not always shrug and say, “Well, I guess I need to think about something else.” That reader may not, necessarily, be able to distinguish between legal and illegal downloads. That reader may say, “Screw you, publisher!”…and go ahead and acquire a pirated version.

While we all agree piracy is bad, I think it’s really critical that we listen to the reasons behind piracy. It is not a simple, black and white concept. It is not always someone bent on doing bad. There is, I think, an uncomfortableness in discussing this topic, but if we do not acknowledge that piracy exists and there are layers of reasons, how do we seriously engage in combatting it? What are you fighting when you fight piracy?

I ask this question in all seriousness. I mean, how can you (not you personally, but the greater you) quantify lost sales versus increased awareness or actual sales? How much money are you really losing? Does every pirated copy actually equal a lost sale or does that pirated copy represent something else? What makes normally honest people think it’s okay to steal content? Are we asking these questions, talking to “pirates”, gaining insight into their thinking? What are you fighting?

One thing iTunes has taught us is that consumers will pay for entertainment content if basic criteria are met. One key factor is availability (others are, of course, price and usability). While there are indeed people who will, for reasons that seem unfathomable to most of us, pirate content, there are more who will pay. It is the job of publishers to make the pay option the most attractive choice. That was the failure of the music industry — they tried every possible scheme but the one that utilized the technology and access preferred by consumers.

I would love smarter anti-piracy enforcement. I encourage it, and I thank you for your piece and the link. But I am also a bit tired of publishing people not hearing what readers are saying (and I’m not including Sourcebooks here because I know they’re listening and absorbing and making the best possible decisions for their business) . It’s always the consumer who is bad, wrong, not getting it. But is that true? I don’t think so. Over the course of the past few posts, a lot of readers have voiced strong opinions. Are they being considered?

I mean, if you’re not listening to the people who buy your books, who are you listening to?

The truth is that online retail has made nearly every book on earth 10 times more available than it would have been 15 years ago. Rarely does a consumer have “no ability to purchase a legal copy of [a] book”; you mean a legal copy in the exact format he or she prefers, at the exact instant he or she wants it. There’s a big difference, although the latter is still a demand publishers should strive to fulfill. Regardless, piracy is never a valid option; consumers should have every right to vote with their wallets, but not with their sticky fingers.

Ultimately, the rise of digital piracy has far more to do with the ease and low risk of the crime than with the stodginess of evil media companies. We’d like to believe that the majority of pirates are frustrated, law-abiding consumers who would leap at the chance to pay money instead of getting stuff for free if given a chance to do so, but the persistence of music theft in spite of iTunes suggests otherwise. Editorials like yours, then, raise many valid points but would ultimately be better directed toward calls for smarter anti-piracy law enforcement. See our post at the Abbeville Manual of Style today: http://www.abbeville.com/blog/?p=4077. As always, we welcome further comments and debate.