Booksquare

I am cranky. You’ve been warned. So I’m minding my own business, or, rather, minding other people’s business as I cruise the Internet when what has to be one of the dumber notions to cross my screen appears. Given the stuff I read online every day, this is really saying something.

Devices don’t make pirates. Unreasonable barriers make pirates.

In what has to be a desperate attempt to find a new angle on the now-waning Kindle story, a few writers have speculated that the Kindle can spark book piracy. Yeah. That’s what the world needs to worry about. The Kindle and piracy. Uh huh.

Don’t get me wrong. I have a lot of faith in the ingenuity of my species. There has always been and will always be a percentage of humanity that believes it’s better to live outside the law. Even though Amazon made it near-impossible for people to share books with members of their own family, I believe that there are busy little beavers out there trying hack the Kindle’s DRM. And, frankly, the way the DRM on this device has been implemented, there’s a certain level of begging people to thwart the system.

The music industry — and to a large degree, the motion picture business — really screwed up when it became obvious that consumers wanted to access music online. Rather that making it easy and affordable for customers to get the music they wanted in the format they wanted, the music industry spent a good decade, untold millions, and countless hours of meetings trying to create a standard or process or method that worked for the industry.

Had the music biz thought, “Wow, we should listen to the people who want our music”, I would wager that piracy would be a much smaller problem. By continually and repeatedly erecting concrete blast walls and — you gotta love this approach — treating all customers like criminals, the music industry turned piracy into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If iTunes has taught us anything, it is that flexible, easy-to-use, affordable music will get people to open their wallets.

You know, this is so obvious that I feel kind of dumb saying it. Again. Devices don’t make pirates. Unreasonable barriers make pirates. Most people are happy to pay for convenience — and let’s all be perfectly frank here: pirating books is not necessarily the most fun thing you can do on the high seas (it’s also not that hard if you’re seeking current releases). If it were easy for me to get all the ebook formats I can purchase on the Kindle, man, I’d be ordering two (one for me, one for the husband, we don’t share well).

If book piracy increases, do not blame the Kindle. It’s shooting the messenger. Blame Amazon and the publishing industry. I can’t download a book from the eHarlequin store and store it on my laptop and a Kindle. I have to buy the Kindle version. This means I have to commit to my reading device when I make a purchase. That’s just wrong.

I can’t buy a PDF ebook from another retailer and easily read it on the Kindle. Amazon, maybe not fully grasping the beauty of the iPod, has chosen to try to lock device to retailer.

Bad move. Very bad move. I am a grown human with a decent job. I pay my taxes on time (or rather, someone in my household ensures I am not committing a crime). I read like I breathe. I take far too many books on vacation. I am never more than five feet away from reading material. All I ask is that the people whose job it is to get books to me (you know who you are) make it as easy as possible for me to read those books.

I am tired — tired!! — of reliving the Beta versus VHS scenario. I don’t want to buy any media in any format while living in fear that my hardware (or software) will be obsolete in a year. I am not a pirate. Never have been, look lousy in an eyepatch (also horizontal stripes? Let’s get real.). Is it so hard to understand that treating the customer like someone who is giving you money for goods and services is a good thing?

The Kindle will not spark book piracy. Pirates aren’t nuts about putting several hundred dollars into a device unless the return on investment is worthwhile. As long as the publishing industry, and this includes Amazon because I am convinced they worked more with the industry than the consumer on the Kindle, treats its customers like pirates, these same customers will decide that that publishers don’t value them.

That’s what sparks book piracy, gang.

Piracy lives in the DNA in some people. But most of us just want to get our entertainment media in a convenient, affordable manner. Rather than building better pirates, maybe more time should be spent on creating happy customers.

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