Life In 19x19

jts was being sarcastic. ...I think.

@jts: Sorry, I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic or not.

amnal wrote:

Redundant wrote: All of the easily pirated go books are what one would consider classics. In order for them to be pirated, you need someone interested enough to scan the entire thing and compile it. This won't happen for just any go book. In fact, the only go books I've seen available in these formats are what one would consider classics. Those books became so by word of mouth and what I'd assume to be worthwhile sales.

To a go book publisher, what you just said may sound more like 'If your book is popular, it will be pirated. But don't worry, the less popular books will be unaffected!'.

As a separate point, it isn't obvious to me that your assertion is true.

Thanks for keeping things civil! My argument is that books are usually pirated after either the author or the book itself becoming popular, in which case I'd contend that the book will either sell enough or have sold enough to be profitable. Note that this is especially true in the case of go books, which are usually sold in paper format, so creating a pirate copy requires scanning of hundreds of pages of text.

amnal wrote:

Redundant wrote: I'm annoyed because you jump to piracy and blame it when free availability of ebooks has a track record of actually improving sales

This is also a dubious argument. It isn't clear to me to what extent this effect is due to the extremely high profile of the event, along with its (currently) rare occurrence.

I'd like to reiterate that I have no idea to what extent piracy really affects the market, and I'm not saying you're wrong, just unjustified (and perhaps a little naive) in these cases.

For the second, I don't think it's possible to have good justification for this without having many long term studies. I will however, leave this article (ignore the name of the website, the article itself is well cited). It argues that for most musical artists, piracy is actually an economic plus. I cannot say how well this transfers over to books, but it is at least interesting.

Redundant wrote:[Also, there's no way in hell I'm every buying anything from you. Your contributions to the go community and this forum may be impressive, but reading some of your posts makes me realize that I simply do not like you as a person and do not wish you to have any of my money.

I won't pretend to know who is right in this discussion. I do pretend to understand why John would be bothered by the possibility that he is right, I am somewhat more mystified by why his comments would upset you so, other than outright support for what John would consider piracy.

And I certainly cannot compete with you in math skills - but I can suggest some "math" that support the conclusion that you might be in the minority in the opinion you express above. You have posted 735 times, and been liked 60 times. John has posted 707 times, and been liked 849 times.

I sincerely hope that John continues his certainly impressive contributions here, which he provides, free of charge for the benefit of all of us, and does not decide that your opinion of him is widely held and a reason to leave.

I am not sure you understand that the effort that goes into John's books far outweighs any financial remuneration he receives. While he appreciates the small sums he gets, mostly because he more than earned them, not because he needs them or because they are signifcant in size - what John wants is his publisher to make enough money and sales so that they will continue to want to publish his wonderful work.

And right now, the books are not selling well enough to publish more as fast as John is putting them out - and one of the reasons is piracy - however small or big a reason that is.

This is not an analogy to music and other areas - where pirated sources and forms can arguably lead to mainstream and real profitability in a world where "everyone" loves music. The go world is small, and sales are smaller and some people are small enough to justify to their small selves that they cannot or should not pay for what they want and in a small world small numbers of small people make more than a small difference.

John, now I'm curious-- are you open to trying some sort of model where people fund the writing of your next book in advance, instead of after the fact? I'm willing to bet that if you got enough publicity, you could possibly get more with that sort of system than you do book royalties currently... I'd chip in $10 or so, which I bet is more than the royalty you get on a paper copy of one of your books.

Yes, and in a way I've already been the beneficiary of such largesse on a grand scale, though it's not really about me. It's just that I can only speak about what I personally know and without breaching confidences. Bill Cobb of Slate & Shell has already raised this idea as a way of getting Gateway To All Marvels (Xuanxuan Qijing) published. His thinking was that as it's a major representative of Chinese culture, somebody like a Chinese businessman might wish to see it appear in English as a way of promoting awareness of Chinese culture. But, as far as I know, there is nothing concrete behind that.

Your version - many subscribers - has also been suggested and in principle it can obviously work, as subscription concerts prove. But it seems like a lot of extra work, with complications such as having to return money if a target is not reached. Even when it was functioning, the book market offered little reward for everyone in it (except perhaps outside printers and the postmen!). Extra work and hassle just get back to that situation may not seem justified to everyone - I don't think I'd want it.

I think it would be useful also to scotch the idea that this is all about making pots of money. Like most people in the productive go world I can make much more money doing other things. Go is a hobby, and few people seriously expect to get rich from a hobby. But it's a hobby that can cost producers quite a bit of money, such as source books, printing costs, picture rights, software, etc. Most people of normal means that I know in go or similar hobby businesses feel that the base line is that they'll give their time but must recover their costs. Obviously any surplus that can be called profit is nice, but it's not really profit as no account is taken of the time. It may not be logical, but it does seems that while people are keen to get their other outgoings back, they are generally more relaxed about time, which many might regard as more valuable! With my well known aversion to logic chopping you won't be surprised to know that I accept it just as part of human nature.

I think this is the same situation with, for example, organising tournaments. But in my experience this approach is so common even outside of go that it has to be called the norm.

It can be a struggle to get your basic costs back. I know one book (not mine) that took 12 years to do that, and generally it is a slow, years-long process. Sometimes you can even lose out and never recover costs. Against that background, it becomes extremely frustrating and annoying when people pirate or plagiarise your work. In the sense that everyone I know in the business (not just westerners) is annoyed and frustrated by it, it seems safe to call those feelings normal human nature too, whether you think it's logical or not. Most of the cases adduced to prove that many people do give their work out freely turn out on inspection to be special cases: e.g. people who are extremely wealthy and so able to feel especially philanthropic, or people like academics who have already been paid tenure to produce works, or people who are doing it to boost their cv or promote some other activity.

I haven't suffered as much as some people in the go world, so I'm not quite as frustrated or annoyed as they are. I just happen to be more voluble about the problem. In line with that I will say that I regard the immature "property is theft" youngsters with the utmost scorn. I understand that those people who sold photocopies of Invincible at a European Congress mysteriously regarded their takings as their property. Two lots of theft in one go! Three if the photocopying was bootlegged in the office.

There is also a separate issue of respect. There are several people here (and Daniel is one of them) who can vouch for the fact that GoGoD, for example, has given free permission to people to use our database. I have given free permission to some people to translate ny books into foreign languages. I know others who have done similar things and in some cases I or GoGoD have been the beneficiary. The important thing is asking. Unless you've produced some public work it may be hard to understand, but very often what an author treasures as much as or even more than royalties is control of his work.

Respect (or lack of it) comes up in another way. Robust discussion is to be welcomed, but when I (as an example) offer an opinion on a topic such as this, to which I am perfectly entitled, which is formed not from thin air but from my own experiences, and which does not harm anyone else, I am attacked for "persecution mania" or neuroses or racism by mostly anonymous immature newbies, compulsive but unfunny wisecrackers, amateur psychologists, testosterone sufferers, feminists and others who rarely read carefully what is written anyway. I often get the impression that many people here think I'm not allowed to have opinion.

Dusk Eagle wrote:

jts wrote:

John Fairbairn wrote:The relevant sites appeared at the top of the list, and clicking on the first gave 114 go books all with covers and all offered as a free pdf download.

Horrifying. I'll observe once again that it's pathetic that the European Piracy Taskforce is off gallivanting about in Somalia when they have their own pirates to settle with back home.

Really, this is a much different definition of piracy.

True, the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas has not yet been extended to cover the cyber-oceans of our internet era. But I think we all know that the mayhem and robbery these digital seadogs perpetrate outside the geographical borders of sovereign states are every bit as cold-blooded and lecherous as the indignities that Blackbeard and Captain Kidd inflicted on innocent seafarers in an earlier, more innocent, age.

Redundant wrote:
I'm annoyed because you jump to piracy and blame it when free availability of ebooks has a track record of actually improving sales (see Cory Doctorow, Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker, and the time when Neil Gaiman's American Gods was free on his website).

That's a crock. Only a handful of authors have benefited from giving their books away. And they are authors who were doing fine before that. Cory is a good example; he managed to attract a lot of the freetard crowd, even though plenty of others had been buying his books.

But for those three you mention, there are thousands of others - including myself - whose books are pirated.

Regarding John's books, however, I agree with you. A quick search on torrent trackers doesn't turn any up. I have seen a few go book torrents, but, as mentioned above, generally older books. I'm not saying they're not passed around, but they're not easily accessible.

I think piracy is a very real threat to any prospect of professional standard publications of Go books. At the moment I doubt anyone writes a Go book for the money. It is nice though, to buy a Go book, and still be able to read it ten years later without finding that the cover has been scratched off and the spine is ripped into two or three or even four parts.

It is pretty easy to find pirated Go material on the internet as far as I am aware. You may also not always be aware that it is pirated.

John Fairbairn wrote:... But it seems like a lot of extra work, with complications such as having to return money if a target is not reached. Even when it was functioning, the book market offered little reward for everyone in it (except perhaps outside printers and the postmen!). Extra work and hassle just get back to that situation may not seem justified to everyone - I don't think I'd want it.

Check out kickstarter.com, mentioned previously. They handle all the details (like returning money if the goal isn't met) for you.

And, of course I understand that you're not in it for the money. My own contribution to the go community is that way, also.

Javaness2 wrote:At the moment I doubt anyone writes a Go book for the money.

I do.

Without money, texts look like this and can be written in 2 or 3 weeks:

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/kodame.pdf

With money, texts in books assume book quality and are (in my case) written in 3 or 4 months per volume.

John Fairbairn wrote:...I am no longer working on go books...

I didn't know that, and I'm sad to hear it. I like your books, John.

I've been told recently that there is no demographic for 'regular' digital go books.

Is anyone aware of how this conclusion was reached?

I hope it's not "Books get pirated as PDFs ergo everyone interested in buying PDFs would pirate them instead" or just "Kiseido Digital Bookshelf's selection of five books <still> hasn't had a big followup so there was probably no demographic".

Horibe wrote:
And I certainly cannot compete with you in math skills - but I can suggest some "math" that support the conclusion that you might be in the minority in the opinion you express above. You have posted 735 times, and been liked 60 times. John has posted 707 times, and been liked 849 times.

If you look through John's posts, you'll see that I like a lot of them. John often posts useful and interesting news from the go world. I play Malkovich games. I do not in any way claim to contribute more than him to the go community or this forum. I do however claim that sometimes his posts display attitudes I find distasteful, as when he attacked someone for asking a question about one of his books in a manner he found distasteful.

Horibe wrote:
I sincerely hope that John continues his certainly impressive contributions here, which he provides, free of charge for the benefit of all of us, and does not decide that your opinion of him is widely held and a reason to leave.

I am not sure you understand that the effort that goes into John's books far outweighs any financial remuneration he receives. While he appreciates the small sums he gets, mostly because he more than earned them, not because he needs them or because they are signifcant in size - what John wants is his publisher to make enough money and sales so that they will continue to want to publish his wonderful work.

Note that I did not say that I was going to pirate his work. I'm simply telling him that the attitude of some of his posts here is offputting, even if much of his information is very interesting and useful to the community. Because of this, I don't want to support him financially, just as I don't buy books from Orson Scott Card or Terry Goodkind. I know that he provides a great service to the go community without making nearly enough money to offset his work. I do not, however, need to like him as a person for this.

Horibe wrote: And right now, the books are not selling well enough to publish more as fast as John is putting them out - and one of the reasons is piracy - however small or big a reason that is.

I do not buy this reasoning. I think that the null hypothesis here should be zero effect of piracy on sales of books. Until I see research to the otherwise, I'm going to follow with this hypothesis, given that I've seen evidence that the opposite can be true.

It's not that I'm a huge supporter of piracy. I just think it's an easy scapegoat for other, much larger issues.

kirkmc wrote:

Redundant wrote:
I'm annoyed because you jump to piracy and blame it when free availability of ebooks has a track record of actually improving sales (see Cory Doctorow, Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker, and the time when Neil Gaiman's American Gods was free on his website).

That's a crock. Only a handful of authors have benefited from giving their books away. And they are authors who were doing fine before that. Cory is a good example; he managed to attract a lot of the freetard crowd, even though plenty of others had been buying his books.

But for those three you mention, there are thousands of others - including myself - whose books are pirated.

Regarding John's books, however, I agree with you. A quick search on torrent trackers doesn't turn any up. I have seen a few go book torrents, but, as mentioned above, generally older books. I'm not saying they're not passed around, but they're not easily accessible.

I'll concede that both authors were already somewhat high profile before this, but it does demonstrate that even if an ebook is freely available, people will still buy the dead tree edition. In fact, it shows that it can be the case that the first correlates with the second.

I'd also prefer not using the term freetard here. Loaded language is not conductive to a civil, balanced discussion.

There's also the example of Mark Pilgrim, who put his book Dive into Python, which as far as I can tell is his first ever book, online for free in what I'd consider to even be a more useful format than the dead tree edition.

I won't doubt that your books are pirated, but I will doubt that you've been negatively affected by it.

I hope that you don't mind me assuming that you're not an incredibly popular writer, in which case the extra exposure that piracy has brought to your work may have caused some to buy it who otherwise might not have. You are free to disagree with me on this, but it has been my personal experience that I later spend money on things that I already own through piracy, simply because I enjoyed the show, album, etc that I wish to support the creators of said item.

John Fairbairn wrote:I am attacked for "persecution mania" or neuroses or racism by mostly anonymous immature newbies, compulsive but unfunny wisecrackers, amateur psychologists, testosterone sufferers, feminists...

Don't forget the condescending bigots.