A Brief Note on “Piracy”

I have been wanting to read Howard Kaylan’s book Shell-Shocked (his autobiography) for some time now, but when it first came out it was only in paperback, and I’m trying not to buy dead-tree books unless I really know I’m going to want to keep them, or unless there will never be an ebook version, because my flat barely has room to move for books.

It’s now available on Kindle, but I don’t have a Kindle, I have a Kobo.
It is, however, available in (DRM’d) ePub form — in the Netherlands.

So in order to buy this book and read it, I have gone to bol.com/nl , gone through the registration and purchase process *in Dutch* (a language which I don’t speak — Google translate doesn’t work well with that site once you get to the purchase pages), and then gone through the process of stripping the DRM from it so it can be read on my GNU/Linux machine.

(It turns out that the book is also available as an epub in Australia, but that doesn’t show up until the second page of Google results, after quite a few illegal downloads).

I did that because I believe that writers should be paid for their work, and I am willing to go to quite some effort to pay for a legitimate, legal, copy of that work. But I can imagine a lot of people being put off by — or actually unable to cope with — that process, and just downloading an illegal copy, for free.

And here’s the thing — there have been times when *I* have done that, because it’s been impossible to find a book any other way. If someone who’s willing to go to the lengths I am to buy legally will sometimes end up going for the illegal option, is it any wonder at all if someone who cares less about the issue will?

It *should not* ever be easier to go for an illegal download than a legal one. I know that territorial deals are an important part of modern publishing, and that there are good reasons behind them, but still, it comes down to this:

If you don’t make your book (or album, or film, or whatever) available in every format, in every territory, and without DRM restrictions, you *will* lose sales. There *is* someone who would have bought your book/album/film who now won’t, not because they don’t want to, but because you won’t let them. Some of those people will ‘pirate’ your product, but it’s not the ‘piracy’ that’s the problem, it’s the fact that you’re preventing those people from giving you money.