Posted By Scath on April 8, 2009

Visiting the Amazon forums today, I saw a post by one Kindle owner who mentioned a friend of hers wanted to ‘loan’ her some e-books.

The Kindle owner felt that it would be stepping all over the authors’ copyrights. Her friend told her it was no different than loaning a physical book.

Wrong.

You can’t loan an e-book. It’s flat out impossible to do that. In order to share one with a friend, you must reproduce the file and give it to them.

You still have your copy; it’s not missing from your bookshelves like a physical book would be if you loaned one to a friend. You are reproducing and giving away for free a full, complete copy of an author’s copyrighted work.

Not only is it illegal to reproduce a copyrighted work without the copyright holder’s permission, you are also damaging their ability to earn a living from the work in question. Not just damaging, but preventing them from doing so.

You might not think so; what’s one free copy to a friend, right?

What if that friend turns around and reproduces that e-book three times to ‘loan’ to other friends? There’s four free copies floating around. There goes the author’s chance at four sales and a few bucks of income.

Those three friends turn around and ‘loan’ more copies out. And so on, and on, and on…until hundreds or thousands of free copies have been distributed.

This is the sort of thing that DRM was created to prevent: damage to a creator’s ability to earn income from their work. Without DRM, creators just have to hope that people won’t share what they’ve bought. That people will think about the fact they’d be damaging someone’s ability to earn a living and choose not to share their purchases of e-books.

It’s a bit of a scary proposition to choose to electronically publish because of that. What if you publish an e-book, and it begins selling? You’re earning a buck or two from each sale the first month, and it’s going okay. Maybe you’re seeing a sale a day.

Then that one person – it only takes one to start the avalanche – decides to share your e-book on a file sharing network.

Your sales stop. No one’s going to pay for something they can get for free somewhere else.

You spent hours writing, editing and polishing this e-book. You may have even paid for the cover art, having someone else do a final edit or format it for you, so you might be out of pocket a couple of hundred dollars starting out.

Those thirty copies that sold don’t cover your out of pocket expense and now you’ll never recover it because your e-book is being shared around freely by people who don’t care they’ve just ruined future chances of sales for you. Or people who have no idea the book was for sale in the first place, because they’re seeing ‘free download’ when they visit the file sharing site/network next to the title.

How bad would that suck?

So don’t ‘loan’ e-books or listen to people who tell you it’s just like loaning a physical book. It’s not. There’s no way for it to possibly be like that.

I gave that Kindle owner kudos for her respect for authors’ copyrights. She deserved it.

Additional note:

People who pirate usually give some kind of ‘justification’ for doing so. They’re ‘sticking it to the big corporations’, etc.

Most of the authors I know who publish e-books are regular people. They write in their spare time, have bills to pay and families to feed. Any income they might earn from their writing might go towards those responsibilities, or might be their ‘mad money’ to be used to purchase a little luxury item here and there. Like someone else’s book.

Just some things to keep in mind if the thought of ‘loaning’ an e-book you’ve purchased ever comes to mind.

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Categories: Self-Pubbing
Tags: Babble, DRM free, e-books, writing