The benefits or burdens of downloading e-books

WIRED:As illegal distribution of books online continues, it doesn't seem to have taken off as expected, writes DANNY O'BRIEN

LAST WEEK, I went on a ride through the shadier parts of the internet – the file-sharing sites, the bittorrent trackers dedicated to copyright-infringing content. I was interested to see what was happening in the infringing distribution of electronic books.

People have been distributing pirated electronic texts of popular works of literature and non-fiction since long before the internet. Scanned or typed by hand, these text files were mostly passed around a small community.

Now, in this age of Kindles and iPads, more people are interested in reading text on a screen. It’s a bit like the moment where the first pocket MP3 players appeared, and publicised what had then been known only to a geek minority: that you could carry not just a CD, but an entire library of music around with you.

A library, in the case of e-texts, is literally what you can get – and quickly and free. Among other e-book files, I found a 8GB file with 18,000 books written by 1,700 different sci-fiction authors.

Those who call for stronger enforcement of copyright will note, rightly, the insane amount of work and investment that this one file represents. Assuming an average book price of €5 for each of those titles, it would cost €90,000 just to purchase these works through legitimate means.

And if the pricing of such a file is mind-boggling, so too are the penalties for downloading it. In the US, someone found with a cache of 18,000 infringed e-books can be fined between $750 and $30,000 for each work.

That means that current law will already penalise an infringer a minimum of $13,500,000 and a mindboggling maximum of over half a billion dollars. Yet the distribution continues and going after distribution sites won’t stop it. A file 10GB big will fit on a USB drive the size of your thumbnail available for less than €15. Given the usual advances in technology, we can expect that that drive will be available for €10 next year, €5 the next and will then be free in a box of cornflakes.

If the internet provides a cheap medium for distributing illicit wares, so increasingly do dorms and pubs and coffee houses.

With such cheap technology, you don’t need the internet. You can distribute this library by hand.

In places where the internet is controlled or banned, like Cuba or Iran, contraband files such as these are spread every day using Bluetooth on phones or by passing around USB keys in exactly this way. In those cases, the files contained banned erotica or politically prohibited information, with far greater penalties.

If it’s so easy, though, what is “limiting” distribution of such files? I found this file in a few minutes: downloading it would have not taken much longer. I doubt that anyone has been caught and fined for such downloads.

If this file and such like it is free and readily available, why aren’t we all carrying and passing on copies? I think the majority of us don’t because infringement like this feels deeply wrong. It’s one thing to pass a friend a mixtape containing a song by your favourite band, it’s quite another to help yourself to the complete life’s work of 2,500 writers.

I also wonder though, these days who seriously wants this much data? In a previous age, the allure of a complete library like this would seem temptation.

Now though, as we begin to wander into a world where we can access books and music digitally, at a fair price, when and how we want them, the idea of having such a huge, completist lump of illicit data-gristle doesn’t seem so tempting. It seems more like a burden.

The real penalty for the infringing downloader is having to manage, categorise and curate those 18,000 works. I suspect most would rather pay the creative industries good money to protect them from this overload.

We need to keep making clear that infringing copyright has consequences, for users and for the artists they love.

Despite the inevitable advances in storage, bandwidth and communications, the best weapons in that fight remain services that give customers what they want. I don’t think customers want everything for free or USB keys filled with an unmanaged libraries that don’t return money to the creators. I think they want books from authors they love, in a form they can use – and they will always be willing to pay for that.