About Book Piracy Copyright 2001 by Ed Howdershelt http://abintrapress.tripod.com/    Book piracy is one of the reasons publishers and authors give when asked why they don't produce ebooks. I've been told by several publishers that they feel that printing books on paper is the only real deterrent to illegal copying.    Whoopsies, fellas. You're absolutely wrong.    Anyone on the net can visit one of (currently) four or five newsgroups and download damn near any paperback title about a week after it hits the racks. Try alt.binaries.e-books for starters.    Want a title not on the list? Leave a request note and come back in a day or two. Even some 'out of prints' are up there for the taking and trading.    That's right, trading. Like bubblegum cards, they're trading ebooks.    People are scanning their books into their computers and making ebooks out of them. Ask them why and the number one answer you'll receive is: "Because it isn't available as an ebook."    They'll also complain about high paperback prices, availability of certain titles, and give you other reasons and excuses, but the fact of the matter is that they're doing this because they want ebooks.    The publishers and authors are now taking up arms against book piracy, but they'll follow the beaten path through the courts and wind up trying to swat down every showoff kid, ISP, and Internet file trader who might have any involvement in the creation, transfer, or storage of illegal copies of paper books.    Simple fact: They'll never get them all. They'll perhaps chase the copiers underground, perhaps make them use port 25 for FTP file transfers to avoid detection, and they'll generally spend a lot of legal fees and time accomplishing very little.    What about copyrights, publisher's rights, and all that other stuff? They're valid issues and those rights are very definitely at serious risk, but protecting those rights will be damned near impossible.    How to prevent copying is the puzzle of the moment, as the publishers and authors see the problem. All sorts of schemes involving software locks will fail, just as they did with the game industry, which eventually adopted proprietary hardware.    There is another way to handle things that would eliminate the perceived need for book piracy. Let advertisers sponsor authors just as they sponsor race cars, bikini contests, and everything else of entertainment interest.    Who is going to steal something that anyone can read for free?    Here's a big, fat hint for all you paper publishers and authors who want to produce e-literature: Do it like the TV and radio people do; let advertisers pay for everything. Charge the reader nothing! (or very little)    Here's another big, fat hint... Don't use pop-up, interruption-style ads.    Ads don't really make people buy. They make people remember the product name. A colorful, imaginative banner ad at the top of a page can do that job. So might a subdued wallpaper design as a page background.    A window-box that pops up and breaks the reader's involvement with the story will likely just irritate mightily and make that reader avoid the product altogether.    Reading isn't like watching a TV movie or a sitcom. The reader's mind is actually working at entertaining itself. A TV watcher's mind is usually on a kind of autopilot, having to do no more than wait for more brain candy between commercials.    There will be those who will bitch and moan about "commercials" and such and swear that they'd never read an ebook published under such a system. No biggie. The same noises were made by hardback-lovers when paperbacks appeared and when movie makers felt threatened in the early days of television. Indexes to my other articles and ebooks may be found on my websites: Abintra Press! and