Teachers always said to share!
I was going to talk about something totally different and then this unexpectedly got into my head so here we are. So now I want to talk a little bit about ebooks and something that we’re taught in kindergarten is a good thing… sharing.
I’m a big fan of ebooks and I adore my Sony Reader. I have easily around 2,000 ebooks so I’m the first to admit that ebooks are a wonderful thing. The availability of books in electronic format have made it possible for me to discover authors I might otherwise never have been exposed to. And most importantly, it’s saved me some space in my house that is already overrun quite enough with books and bookshelves.
Even with how many ebooks I purchase, there’re still some things about them that I find a bit frustrating. One in particular is the concept of sharing with friends. I own a lot of paperbacks, and even some hardcover books, and it’s not uncommon for me to loan a book to a friend. If I read a book and am absolutely blown away, my first thought usually is, “I have to give this to X to read!” If I enjoy a book, I inherently want to spread the news and introduce the author to some good friends that enjoy reading like I do. Often those friends have gone on to buy the author’s other books, and I wished for a few seconds that I could get a kickback from the author!
As we move into the age of the ebook, sharing has become an extremely controversial topic. Sharing is almost unequivocally seen as pirating, which authors aren’t too fond of as a rule, quite understandably. The most significant argument goes back to number of copies. When I purchase a paperback and give it to a friend to read, there is one copy of the book. I purchased that one copy and even when I give it to someone else, there is still only one copy. We can’t read the book at the same time. In a perfect world, I get the book back when the friend is done with it (though that’s not always been the case, lucky me).
When purchasing an electronic copy, the intention is that you are paying for one copy that you then download to your computer or your reader. Of course, the minute you download a copy to a reader, you’ve technically gone beyond one copy. I purchase ebooks primarily in PDF format. They are stored on my computer and I use calibre to upload to my Sony Reader. Calibre creates a copy of the ebook in a dedicated folder and then moves yet another copy to my Reader. Without any intention of malicious behavior, I’ve now got three copies of an ebook which I only paid for once.
Sharing an ebook with a friend usually means you’d be sending a version of the ebook via email. Of course now you’ve created a few more copies of the ebook, as most email programs these days save a copy of sent emails and the friend has a copy in their email. And from there the number of copies just continues to multiply.
Logically then the only way for me to share an ebook is if I can hand my Reader to my friend, who uses it to read the book. Now I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m extremely protective of my Sony Reader. The sucker was quite expensive, and if we are separated for even a few hours we both start to experience separation anxiety. Plus, if I give my Reader to someone else to borrow I can’t be reading anything on it! So I don’t want to do that. Plus the majority of my friends who love reading like I do, and read the type of books I do, live all across the country. The internet provides the primary form of communication, hence email. In order to share an ebook, I could email it to my friend, delete (and I really mean delete, by removing from Trash) my sent email, my friend gets the email and deletes (again, really delete) the email after downloading the book, reads the book, then deletes the ebook file and empties their Trash on their computer. That is the closest way to approximate the sharing of paperbacks, but boy, that’s a lot of steps and a lot of points for error.
There was an uproar recently when a Kindle reader admitted in an article to reading books she hadn’t paid for but had gotten from friends. Numerous authors attacked her for being a pirate and a horrible person, without doing any research into how the Kindle works. Eventually someone from Amazon clarified that the Kindle is set up so that you can “share” ebooks with up to 4 close friends. This is done by having everyone “share” an Amazon account. You can register up to 5 devices to an account, and if those devices happen to be random friends no biggie. Of course all payment is also done under that one account. If your friends want to always be the ones to pay for the books, that’s their prerogative, but among the 5 of you, you get to share the ebooks that any of the others purchase. Excellent! There’s only one problem…this works for ebooks from the Amazon store only. Damn. Back to square one. (Note that the same applies to books purchased from the Sony store where you can have up to 6 devices, which includes computers and Readers, and they all share the same list of ebooks. Same note about payment applies to the Sony store and, again, it’s only for Sony store books.)
The large majority of the ebooks I purchase do not come from the Sony store, and even more so are not from Amazon, and most of them are DRM free which I’m actually grateful for. But it does mean that there really doesn’t seem to be a good option for “sharing” or “lending” a book to someone to read. On the surface that probably appears to be a good thing, but in the end I think it makes it harder for me to convince my friends to take a chance on authors that I really liked.
I don’t have a solution to all of this, but I’m curious as to your thoughts on the subject. Would you be more interested in a specific brand of eReader if it included a method of sharing books? Do you even want to be able to share ebooks with a few friends? Are you frustrated by the limitation of ebooks as I am?
Authors, how do you feel about readers sharing your books? Are you for or against it? Do you think that the effectiveness of word-of-mouth is decreased by the inability to share books or are they mutually exclusive?
Posted in Ramblings
Very good questions, Emily! I’m sure this will lead to a lively discussion.
Not that I have any answers, just more questions – what happens to libraries as ebooks become more prevalent?
I hope so! It’s something that’s often on my mind as I read so many ebooks these days.
LOL Don’t worry, I don’t really have any answers either. I know that some libraries are looking into ways to check out ebooks from alibrary and then read on your eReader for a certain time period. I really think that’s the direction things are going to be going in the very near future. I would personally *love* to be able to check out an *ebook* from my library. I might read even more than I do now!
This is a really good post, Emily. I wish I had more answers. I almost never share ebooks because I’m so bothered by the e-theft issues. Like maybe 1 out of every 100 books I read, I might share (but probably not) and if I choose to share, I’ll send it only to another reviewer because I know she’ll do a review and it will help the author. In that way, I’m telling myself that my doing this isn’t so far off the advance-reader-copies that the publishers send to introduce a reviewer to a good book to review. But even with all that in mind, I virtually never share and don’t even like to receive a shared book (I’d rather have someone send me a purchase link to a good book) because the e-theft issues are so worrisome. Great post — thanks for doing it.
Thanks Val! I wish I did as well, it’s something that I think about often but don’t necessarily have any good solutions.
E-theft issues and piracy are most definitely worrisome, and for those of us that do follow the rules we become even more careful like you said. I agree with sharing with another reviewer for the reasons you mentioned, though I know some authors would be aghast at reading that. I’ve talked with people who are adamantly against sharing and others that are for it, and it’s hard to find a happy medium.
I don’t wanna share with the world, and not even that many people, but I wish I could share with one or two people and not have to feel guilty about it. I spend lots and lots of money on ebooks and books in general, and in the end I don’t really share that much. I’ve bought books on recommendations and been disappointed and wished I had “borrowed” the book before going out and buying it myself. I’ve also had the reverse be true, where I bought books based on a recommendation and ended up buying the author’s entire backlist. You just never know.
Maybe one day we’ll have a magical eReader that has functionality for sharing. We can only hope…
“We can only hope…
” I hope so! That would be great.
“how do you feel about readers sharing your books?”
They’re going to do it anyway, so they may as well do it with my blessing. Try before you buy works for me. I do what I can to make sure readers know what they’re buying if they buy a book of mine (especially if it’s one of my self-pubbed books) through previews, free copies etc, but often there’s no substitute for a reader saying to a friend, ‘hey, you should really check this out!’
Sure it loses me a few sales initially, but it picks up new readers and spreads the love, and I am all about spreading the love
But put one of my books up on a file sharing site – or go onto a blog and whine about it’s totes your right to make a digital version of my books and *then* put it on a filesharing site, because my mean old poopyhead publisher won’t give you what you want now, damn it wah wah wah entitlement bitching – and you will find a pissed off, claw’s extended author up in your grille so fast you won’t have time to brake before you’re shooting through the windscreen of doom.
One of these things is not like the other. Sharing != wholesale theft, and so long as you’re clear on the concept, then we’re good.
“Try before you buy” is definitely a good way of putting it. Often when another reader recommends an author I’ll read excerpts from books but sometimes the short snippets just aren’t enough. I read a lot of reviews but there’s one or two readers in particular where I listen when they tell me what they think I should read, and I reciprocate with my own thoughts as well. Sometimes my opinion might not be enough to sway them, and being able to “share” in that case is invaluable to convince my friend I’m of course totally right.
That really is the best way to look at it. Spreading the love is a wonderful thing, and if other readers are like me at all, when I find an author I’m impressed by, I often end up buying the rest of their backlist. Loss of sales on one book versus the gain of sales to numerous titles from the backlist is a total win for the author.
Uploading to a file-sharing website is a WHOLE different story for sure! Once you start giving an ebook to people you’ve never met before, you’ve left “sharing” and moved on to piracy. No question about it. There is no excuse for uploading an ebook to a file-sharing website, and I’ve yet to see an argument that would justify downloading from one of the sites.
I couldn’t have put it better myself and you are absolutely right. Most definitely not the same thing.
You know, I don’t mind if people are sharing a copy or two with their friends. That’s not a problem to me, at all. We all do it with hard copy books and have done it all of our lives ya know?
It’s the people who take and upload my work on a file sharing site that really wrinkle my nightie! I don’t consider them fans, I don’t consider them friends, and I sure as hell don’t have any warm, fuzzy feelings when I see that the top search that led people to my website this week was for “meg leigh (title) free download” >:(
Share away, if all you’re doing is sending a copy of a book to one or two friends with a “Read this!” recommendation. In the long run, that’s going to earn me the kind of readers who DO give me the warm fuzzies!
I absolutely agree with you, the dividing line really comes when an ebook is uploaded to a file sharing website. At that point, as you said, it’s no longer sharing a good book with a friend it’s throwing the ebook out there for all the world to access. That’s piracy, plain and simple. And most definitely no warm, fuzzy feelings!