I spent the summer of 1993 working at Oklahoma Graphics, spending twelve hours a day standing at the end of a Goss C700 Printing Press<\/a>. The C700 is a beast of a machine that, when running at full speed, could churn out 70,000 books per hour. At the other end of that printing press were giant rolls of paper, each one weighing well over a ton. Twelve hours a day I stood at the end of that god-forsaken contraption, stacking piles of printed pamphlets onto wooden skids and wondering about stupid things like if I could pick up one of those rolls of paper.<\/p>\n

I know picking up something that weighs 2,500 pounds may sound impossible, but my reasoning was (I thought) fairly sound. The rolls, after all, were made of paper. Anyone can hold a piece of paper, right? And anyone can hold two pieces of paper, right? My theory was, by adding one piece of paper at a time I could eventually get up to 2,500 pounds. Of course we all know that this won’t work. In fact, we even have a saying that covers this exact situation: “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” A camel can’t carry an entire bale of hay, even if you add it one straw at a time.<\/p>\n

Big jump here; stay with me.<\/p>\n

At what point does piracy become a bale of hay or a 2,500 pound roll of paper?<\/p>\n

For me personally, I’ve always equated my own personal “copyright infringements” with those insignificant single sheets of paper and straws of hay. “Electronic Arts made a billion dollars last year. Who cares if I download a copy of one of their games?” Those pieces of paper went both ways; taking one couldn’t possibly hurt, and paying for one couldn’t possibly help. To me it was like taking a grain of sand from (or adding one to) the biggest beach in the world.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately as shown by our poor camel’s broken back, single straws can and do add up. Those pieces of paper, even when added one at a time, can end up weighing a ton. Literally.<\/p>\n

I honestly believe that back when I was a kid, the computer games my friends and I swapped back and forth didn’t affect anyone’s profits, mostly because there were tons of technological throttles in place that kept us from being particularly efficient in our illegal endeavors. Long distance phone calls were expensive, modems were slow, and even blank floppies put a dent in our collective allowances. Our sucking of the software companies’ teets was too small and slow to be noticed.<\/p>\n

Who knew that someday piracy would become so mainstream, so efficient, so slipstreamed? Hard drives that once held megabytes now hold terabytes. Things that once took me hours to download now take seconds (or less).<\/p>\n

In the middle of all of this, something else strange happened. An entire generation woke up and decided that everything digital should be free. <\/p>\n

Software piracy is as old as software itself, but even as little kids, we knew what we were doing was wrong. Sure, we justified our actions. “I can’t afford it.” “I wouldn’t have bought it anyway.” “It’s over priced.” “The game sucks.” “I’m just trying before buying.” Trust me, I’d heard (and said) them all. But always, they were said with a twinge of guilt. That guilt today is gone.<\/p>\n

There are dinosaurs such as myself who feel like downloading music is stealing. I’m not saying we didn’t and don’t do it; I’m saying we feel guilty about it and\/or continue to offer up one or more of the excuses listed above. But now have a generation of kids who never waited for a record store to open to buy a new album. They have no attachment to physical media. Taking a straw or a piece of paper means nothing to them and they don’t care what happens to the stack because somebody somewhere continues restocking the paper stack.<\/p>\n

The flood gates opened with mp3s, but the damage has spread to include television shows, movies, and now, books.<\/p>\n

Peter Wayner<\/a>, an author and blogger, recently lamented in the New York Times that five of the top ten hits on Google for his latest book were links to websites where it could be downloaded for free. That didn’t surprise me. What was shocking were the comments left by readers. There are over a hundred, and close to half of them all say basically the same thing, which is “haw haw that’s what you get stupid old book writer with your outdated business model!!!” Seriously. Several people stated that the author was an idiot for trying to sell physical media. “There is so much free content online that trying to charge for it, in the form of a book, is becoming a quaint anachronism,” commented one reader. Another reader adds that since “books are free at the library,” then stealing them online is okay. One person said that “paying $10 for an eBook is ridiculous,” since there is no paper or printing involved. I wonder how many hours I spent working on my last book? Two hundred maybe, so that’s about two and a half cents per hour for my work.<\/p>\n

Here’s one of my favorite comments: “Sorry you feel the need to be paid for your ideas. I write poems and share them all the time, like most every poet I\u2019ve known, with little hope or expectation of payment. Just as I make love with no expectation of payment, and rightly consider those who do expect payment to be prostitutes — which is, of course, what they would be.” I don’t even know what to say to that. Anyone who wants to make a living making movies, playing music or writing books is now a prostitute? I’m literally speechless.<\/p>\n

While I’m at it, here’s another nugget of compassion from a different reader: “If you can only barely make a living writing textbooks, don\u2019t write them. If you enjoy writing textbooks, even though (despite tactics to drive up prices, mislead professors about costs, and establish monopolies that are, quite frankly, a disgrace to the publishing industry) you don\u2019t earn as much as you\u2019d like to, suck it up.” <\/p>\n

Not to smother you, but here’s a third point of view: “Please don\u2019t write any more books. In fact, I wish all those authors, artists, musicians or whatever who periodically show up to complain about the internet and how their work is being \u201cstolen\u201d on it, should just put their money where their mouth is and find some other career. When the smoke has cleared, I\u2019m willing to bet a year\u2019s salary that people will still be writing books, making music, art and still be making a living. And we won\u2019t have to deal any more with these whining creators who don\u2019t seem to have realized they didn\u2019t magically produce their works out of thin air.”<\/p>\n

Several people suggest that authors, like musicians, need to find another business model — quickly. One such model suggests that authors need to start “touring.” As mp3s began to take a bite out of record company profits, many musicians began focusing more time and energy toward touring. Whereas musicians often make a dollar (sometimes less) per CD sold, they often retain 80% or more of touring revenue and merchandise sales. I’m not sure if that model is applicable to a writer like me, a guy who enjoys writing “on the side” and doesn’t do it for a living (yet?). If that’s the future for fledgling authors, I’m in trouble. The organizers of the Oklahoma Electronic Game Expo had to postpone my speech for a few minutes while they went and drummed up interest over the PA system. <\/p>\n

Another suggested model says that writers should just start giving away their books for free and adding some sort of virtual tip jar. “If you liked this book, please PayPal me a few bucks.” I may do that just to see how it works out, but let’s just say I don’t expect to be able to retire from the revenue. If you go to Lulu.com right now and buy either one of my books, I make about $5. If you buy a copy of either of my books from Amazon, I make less than a buck. Maybe a price tag of $5 or less would entice people to buy digital copies. In one way it seems a little degrading. “Hi, my name is Rob O’Hara. I spent 200 hours writing this book. Please download it for free. If you like it, please PayPal me $2.99. Also, be sure to kick me in the balls on the way out the door.”<\/p>\n

I currently sell PDF copies of Commodork for $5. In the past year, I’ve sold around 20 copies. In humanities’ defense, my book has not yet appeared for download on any torrent sites. Commodork is a book full of stories about pirating software on the Commodore 64. Should a pirated copy of it show up online, the irony will not be lost on me. I will even smile a little, in between the tears. It wouldn’t be hard to do. I don’t put any DRM on my books. DRM is bullshit that harasses honest customers and doesn’t slow down the pirates. Trust me.<\/p>\n

You can’t fight piracy head on. You just can’t. Ask music executives. Ask the head of Sony Pictures (who was quoted this weekend as saying that “nothing good has come from the Internet”). Ask Peter Wayner. Ask anyone who ever released a game on the Commodore 64 that ended up in my collection. When it comes to digital media, free > not free.<\/p>\n

I am currently working on half a dozen books at the moment. Most of them are less than 10% done and a couple are nothing more than general ideas, but I’ve done at least “some” writing on all of them. I might be able to print one or two of them, but what I really want to do is put my head to work and come up with some interesting things to include … like audio versions of the book, podcasts, e-mail lists, random phone calls to customers … I don’t really know yet, but the more I think about it, I feel like the days of traditional book printing may truly be numbered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent the summer of 1993 working at Oklahoma Graphics, spending twelve hours a day standing at the end of a Goss C700 Printing Press. The C700 is a beast of a machine that, when running at full speed, could churn out 70,000 books per hour. At the other end of that printing press were giant rolls of paper, each one weighing well over a ton. Twelve hours a day I stood at the end of that god-forsaken contraption, stacking piles of printed pamphlets onto wooden skids and wondering about stupid things like if I could pick up one of… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}