With Amazon’s announcement two weeks ago that they’re launching the Kindle on the international market, I briefly thought this hypothetical dilemma would be obsolete. Sadly, it is all too relevant: Geographical restrictions still exist.
This is the third of four hypothetical dilemmas regarding piracy. The more I learn about piracy, the more convinced I am that there are two types of pirates: those who want something for free and those who want something which is otherwise unavailable to them. Fighting the former is probably a lost cause. Combating the latter is more realistic. The most logical solution to my mind is to make material available to all potential customers for a reasonable sum of money.
Without further ado, here is this week’s dilemma:
The word of publishing has finally embraced digital and print books are increasingly difficult to find. Although you were aware of geographical restrictions on ebooks, you were always able to purchase the books you wanted in print form from various etailers and regular bookstores. You have a digital reading device and you want to purchase ebooks. Suddenly you realize that all of your favourite authors’ books are unavailable to you in digital form and are no longer being printed. You’re distraught as this will entirely change the way you read. All the books you want are available for download on an illegal filesharing site and you’re sorely tempted…
The above dilemma is obviously a worst-case-scenario. I don’t see ebooks replacing print faster than it takes to sort out the convoluted mess that is foreign digital rights, but perhaps I’m being overly optimistic. If this were genuinely the case, I would contact the authors to see if they could find some loophole by which they could sell me their work directly. The obvious solution to this hypothetical dilemma would be a change in digital rights.
What do you think? Do you see print becoming obsolete faster than it takes to make ebooks available to all interested customers, regardless of their country of residence? What other solutions could work in this situation?
{ 4 comments }
I am the queen of tracking down hard to find books, and have a fairly reasonable success rate. Having the website is also golden, cos the business can pay the price for the book, and then I can onsell it.. just saying.
Hard call, if I wanted it really, REALLY bad and all the normal avenues didn’t turn up the secondhand copy, I would probably do the fileshare thing, but can’t think of too many books that I would want that much.
And one can only hope that the situation doesn’t come up.. surely if by some chance the print book gave way to the ebook in my lifetime, surely by then the publishers would have figured out some kind of solution to the geo-restrictions???
OK probably not..
I want to know where all these magically free, comprehensively-stocked, illegal filesharing sites are! Not that I’d use them, but they seem a bit too good to be true. What’s the catch? Do you get malware as an extra free bonus with your non-purchases?
The answer is, I wouldn’t download anything ever from a filesharing device. My criminal past is uh, past me now, and anyway, I like to see what I’m buying. (I made some wicked bad choices when I first discovered quilting fabric online!) I’m with Edie — I’d find the book secondhand, someway somehow. Everything is available eventually…
I like the idea of contacting the author for a digital copy of the book directly. If we do get to the point where ebooks replace paper, we might see a lot of writers distributing their work directly from their own sites. I mean, why not? But I wouldn’t buy a pirated version from a file sharing site; that would be too close to stealing directly from the creator for me.
@Edie I am hoping against hope that it doesn’t take a decade for them to sort geographical restrictions.
@Magdalen I’ve heard some illegal downloads come with the added bonus of spyware and other undesirables.
@heidenkind Being self-published may well lose its stigma in the digital age.