Jim Baen's Universe

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Adventures with a Search Engine

Written by Eric Flint

In this essay, I’m going to continue analyzing the following question, posed at the start of my last essay:

Even if it’s only a mental experiment at the moment, what would happen if electronic publishing did become the dominant form of publication—or even the almost exclusive form? What if any changes would be needed in the various policies that I’ve advocated so far?

In the last issue, I took up some preliminary questions involved with this problem. Now, let’s move on to the heart of it:

What effect would there be on traditional copyright practices if all publishing became electronic?

Not some, not even most, but all books. The only paper books still produced would be purely luxury items designed for interior decoration. Expensive, limited-run leather-bound copies, which couldn’t begin to support authors and any publishers beyond a small number of specialty houses.

What then?

The answer universally advanced by advocates of DRM is that doom would be upon us—unless the most stringent and harsh measures were put in place to protect copyright from the inevitable horde of slavering online pirates who would soon plunder all the works of legitimate authors, drive publishing houses into bankruptcy, and inaugurate a literary Dark Age.

How could it be otherwise? they argue. If books are readily available for free due to the ease of pirating unencrypted electronic text, why would anyone continue to pay for them? Adieu, the livelihood of legitimate authors! Adieu, the profits—nay, the very wherewithal—of honest publishers!

What’s wrong with this picture? (I leave aside the rather blatant projection involved, as psychologists might say.)

Well, any number of things. But let’s start with the central evasion. You can find it here:

“If books are readily available for free—”

STOP.

I’m going to spend the rest of this month’s essay analyzing this weasel phrase.

“Readily available.”

What exactly does that mean? Readily available compared to what?

And it does have to be compared to something. The weasel involved here is the implication that “readily available” is an ontological category of its own: something which can be gauged by virtue of its inherent essence.

But that’s pure blather. “Readily available” is, always has been and always will be a relative term. It has no meaning outside of a context.

An example: salt.

Salt is now readily available. You can go into any supermarket and almost any market of any kind selling food, down to and including gas station mini-marts, and you can pick up a box containing over a pound of salt for less than a dollar.

And, as a result, salt is almost never stolen by shoplifters. Why bother, when it’s so easy to find and so cheap?

But it was not always so. At many times and places in the past, salt was extremely valuable and had to be carefully guarded. For centuries, for instance, there was a constant barter of salt for gold between north Africa and the great medieval empires and kingdoms of West Africa. Caravans would cross the Sahara for the purpose—and had to be protected by armed guards whether they were carrying gold or salt.

Let’s take another example: free roads versus toll roads.

There was a time in American history—and much of world history, for that matter—when you had not much choice except to take a toll road, if you wanted to travel any long distance. That was especially true if you were hauling wagons with bulky commercial products.

Today, that’s no longer true. You can travel by motor vehicle (or bicycle) almost anywhere in the continental United States while avoiding toll roads. That includes hauling almost any kind of commercial load, of any legal weight. The only toll roads that still exist are a tiny number, compared to the overall mileage of roads available.

Yet . . . those toll roads do a good business. Why? Because they are strategically placed to provide a significant convenience to customers at a comparatively low cost. More precisely, given that time spent is usually money lost, toll roads are actually a savings for most people.

Again, an example. I live in northwest Indiana, not far from Chicago. In fact, except during rush hour, I can drive from my house to downtown Chicago in about half an hour.

If I take the toll bridge. That’s known as the “Chicago Skyway.” It’s an elevated road that crosses the mass of roads, canals, railroad tracks and industrial facilities that are located near the state line between Illinois and Indiana in the southeast area of metropolitan Chicago. (Over half of all U.S. steel production takes places within a fifteen mile radius of my house.)

It’s expensive, too, as toll bridges go. The charge is $2.50 each way; five dollars for a round trip.

Does anyone need to take the Skyway to get from northwest Indiana to Chicago?

No, of course not. There are two major alternatives, and a host of minor ones. The first is to stay on interstate highways which are not toll roads. You can take I-80 west to I-94, and then travel north on I-94 until it merges with I-90 (which, for a stretch, runs along the Chicago Skyway and is a toll road). Voila.

Of course, you’ll add at least twenty minutes to the trip, each way, and quite a bit more than that during rush hour. You’ll also burn more gasoline, partly because it’s a longer distance and partly because you’re far more likely to get stalled in stop-and-go traffic for a while.

Alternatively, you can take city streets. Get off I-80 on Indianapolis Blvd., also known as U.S. 41, and you can take that north all the way into Chicago. Eventually you’ll find yourself on Lake Shore Drive, which will take you right downtown. Voila.

Of course, you’ll add at least half an hour to the trip, each way, although it won’t matter so much whether it’s rush hour or not.

Leaving aside the extra cost of the gasoline and the wear and tear on your vehicle, how much is your time worth? For most people, unless they’re just sightseeing, time is valuable.

How valuable? Well, obviously, that estimate will vary from one person to the next. I know plenty of people who seem to have a very low estimate of the value of their time. At least, that’s the only conclusion I can come to, seeing that they stubbornly refuse to pay the $5.00 toll to use the Skyway and insist instead on using alternate and much longer routes.

As for me, I was a machinist for a long time before I became a full-time author, and I still tend to gauge the value of my time by those standards. Leaving aside the value of the various benefits that came with my wage package—medical benefits, vacation pay, holiday pay, etc., etc.—I was earning about twenty dollars an hour by the end.

So I figure that’s what my time is worth. (It’s actually worth quite a bit more, these days, but never mind. Trying to gauge the value of an author’s labor time is a lot trickier, and who cares? Twenty bucks an hour is plenty good enough for these purposes.)

By using the Chicago Skyway every time I travel to and from downtown Chicago from my house, I figure I save about an hour of my time. In monetary terms, I save about twenty dollars—at a cost of five dollars. My “net gain,” so to speak, is fifteen dollars. More precisely, my net loss is twenty-five dollars (one hour round trip travel plus $5.00 toll) instead of forty dollars (two hours round trip travel with no toll expense).

So, I use the Skyway. I haven’t used any alternate route into Chicago in many years, unless I had some specific reason to do so.

And I not only don’t steal boxes of salt, it doesn’t even occur to me to steal them as a mental experiment, unless I’m writing an essay on the blithering stupidity of DRM.

The point to all this should be obvious. Whether or not people will steal copyrighted electronic material is first and foremost determined by the relative ease of doing so, measured against the relative cost of buying the legitimate product. Please note that I am bending over backward to satisfy my opponents by accepting their premise that, given the opportunity, all people will always steal instead of paying for something. (For the record, I do not agree with that premise. In fact, I think it’s downright silly as well as offensive.)

So let’s now analyze that issue. Just how easy is it, anyway, to steal copyrighted material?

Again, I will bend over backward to satisfy my opponents in this debate. I won’t even get into the issue of how easy it is to pirate copyrighted material in the first place. Which it isn’t, actually. Most “pirates” get a paper copy of a book and scan it. Even if they don’t do any proof-reading at all to remove scanning errors, which takes many hours to do properly, they still have to take the time to scan the book. That usually has to be done manually, one page at a time.

Instead, I will begin with the assumption that someone has already produced pirated editions of every book ever written and made them available somewhere on the internet.

Okay, now what?

One of my standard debater’s tricks when I give a public speech on this subject, and get to this point in my argument, is to start waving my arms enthusiastically and urge everyone in the audience to—

Please! As soon as you get home, go to your computer and STEAL ONE OF MY BOOKS!

And I predict that they will discover that’s easier said than done. Especially for that ninety-nine percent of the reading public which does not have any expertise on these matters.

Here’s what most people will do, if they want to find a pirated edition of one of my books. They will enter my name into the search bar in Google and see what turns up.

The results, of course, will vary slightly from one day to the next. But, as of the day that I’m writing this essay—Sunday, July 20, 2008, at 12:41 Central Standard Time—here’s what turns up:

On the first page, all ten entries refer to me (not some other Eric Flint) and all ten are legitimate sites. As follows:

Site 1: This is Google’s own site, identified as: “Books 1 - 10 of 376 on inauthor:Eric inauthor:Flint.”

And—oh, joy!—this site goes on and on for pages, listing all of my books (most of them, anyway; I didn’t do a precise count) and where you can find legitimate copies of them. Many of them for sale.

Let’s hear it for Site 1. Moving on . . .

Site 2: http://www.ericflint.net/

This is my own web page. I’m all for it. Nothing here but legitimate copies—some free, mind you, at my choosing. But most are for sale.

Site 3: This also takes you to my web site and it’s a reference to my recent appearance as the Author Guest of Honor at MidSouthCon in Memphis, Tennessee.

Also legitimate, needless to say.

Site 4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Flint

This is a long entry on me in Wikipedia. A site like this, from a narrowly commercial standpoint, is entirely in my favor. It amounts to free promotion.

Site 5: http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=EFlint

This will take you to my catalog page in the web site of my publisher, Baen Books. In other words, it is as legitimate as it gets. And, naturally, you can buy my books here.

Site 6: http://www.baen.com/library/eflint.htm

This takes you to my page in the Baen Free Library, where you can obtain books of mine for free. This is also a completely legitimate site.

Something of interest here: Even this site, which is completely legitimate and contains nothing but free electronic texts of mine, ranks no higher than sixth in a Google search.

Site 7: This is another Google site, and will take you to a list of reviews of my most popular novel, 1632. That novel is available for free in the Baen Library and has been for years, by the way. A site like this is simply more promotion, from a commercial standpoint, even though it didn’t cost me or my publisher anything.

Site 8: http://baens-universe.com/articles/McCauley_copyright

This takes you to the web page where I put up Macaulay’s speeches on copyright, which I have frequently cited in these essays in this magazine.

Site 9: Another Google site, this one referring to the first volume of the Grantville Gazette. I publish the Gazette as an online magazine—we’re now putting out the nineteenth issue—and Baen Books publishes the paper editions of it. This is another perfectly legitimate site and one which helps to promote the Gazette in particular and the 1632 series in general.

(If you’re interested in the Gazette, by the way, you can find it here: http://www.grantvillegazette.com/)

Site 10: This is another legitimate site offering free books of mine: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Flint%2C%20Eric

Shall I go on?

Site 11 is a Google site providing reviews of another novel of mine, The Course of Empire, co-authored by Kathy Wentworth. (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 12 is an interview with me concerning my novel 1812: The Rivers of War. (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 13 take you to a page in Barnes & Noble where my works are offered for sale. (LEGITIMATE SITE. SELLS MY BOOKS. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 14 is a Google site providing reviews of another novel of mine, The Wizard of Karres, co-authored by Mercedes Lackey and Dave Freer. (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 15 takes you to one of the better-known sites listing SF authors and provides a comprehensive bibliography of my work. (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 16 . . . Ha! That takes you to this very magazine and links you to the essay I wrote in this column for the last issue. (LEGITIMATE SITE. PART OF THE RIGHTEOUS FIGHT AGAINST DRM. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 17 is a Google site providing reviews of another novel of mine, In the Heart of Darkness, co-authored by David Drake. (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 18 takes you to the Amazon page where my novel 1632 is offered for sale. (LEGITIMATE SITE. SELLS MY BOOKS. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 19 takes you to Baen’s Webscription service where you can buy electronic editions of my work. (LEGITIMATE SITE. SELLS MY BOOKS. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 20 is a Google site providing reviews of my first novel, Mother of Demons. It’s worth noting that that book came out eleven years ago, has been available for free in electronic format in the Baen Library for eight years—and it’s still in print. In fact, Baen is planning to produce another edition of it soon. (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Well, that’s the first twenty sites. But let’s keep going, shall we? Surely we have to run across a Nefarious Pirate Site before too long. The internet equivalent of Port Royal or Tortuga, so to speak.

Site 21 takes you to Simon & Schuster’s web page where you can buy my books. (LEGITIMATE SITE. SELLS MY BOOKS. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 22 takes you a review of my various essays against DRM. (LEGITIMATE SITE. PART OF THE RIGHTEOUS FIGHT AGAINST DRM. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 23 is a Google site providing reviews of another novel of mine, An Oblique Approach, co-authored by David Drake. (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 24 is the web page of an artist who asked my permission some time ago to post his illustrations of various novels of mine. The site also contains links to other sites which, one way or another, serve to promote my work. (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 25 is a highly critical review of my novel 1812: The Rivers of War. In my opinion, it’s an extremely stupid review as well, in the sense that reviews which are obviously driven by the urge to find fault no matter what invariably wind up being stupid. But, admittedly, mileage varies. Someone else reading this review might think it was the best thing since sliced bread.

I can’t honestly say this is a site that “promotes” my work, but . . .

(LEGITIMATE SITE. NOT A PIRATED COPY TO BE FOUND.)

Site 26 is a Wikimedia site about me. (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 27 also takes you to the Amazon web page where my novel 1632 can be purchased. (LEGITIMATE SITE. SELLS MY BOOKS. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 28—oh, well, it had to happen sooner or later—takes you to a web page referring to some other Eric Flint than me.

That said . . .

(LEGITIMATE SITE. NOT A PIRATED COPY TO BE FOUND.)

Site 29 takes you to another bibliographic listing of my work. (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

Site 30 also takes you to another bibliographic listing of my work. (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

That’s thirty sites—and I still haven’t found a pirated edition of one of my works. Dammit, what happened to all the Cap’n Blackbeards and Morgans supposedly infesting the internet? By the time anybody works their way through all these web sites, they’ve been bombarded with what amounts to a blizzard of promotion concerning my work—not to mention a number of sites offering to sell them legitimate copies.

What’s a hardworking crook supposed to do?

Keep going, presumably. But I think we can satisfy ourselves from here on in with a quick summary.

What we find in sites 31 through 50 referring to “Eric Flint” are:

31: a reference to an upcoming appearance by me at an SF convention; (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

32: another link to Webscriptions; (LEGITIMATE SITE. SELLS MY BOOKS. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

33: a very positive review of 1632; (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

34: a positive review of an essay of mine posted in Baen’s Library; (LEGITIMATE SITE. SELLS MY BOOKS. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

35: a site where you can buy electronic editions of 1812: The Rivers of War and 1824: The Arkansas War; (LEGITIMATE SITE. SELLS MY BOOKS. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

36: a web page in Alibris where used copies of my books are available for sale; (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.) They also sell my work, but since I don’t get any royalties from used book sales the net effect for me is simply promotional. Damn good promotion, though.

37: another very positive review of 1632; (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

38: a link to the Grantville Gazette; (LEGITIMATE SITE. SELLS MY BOOKS. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

39: this is the second site that refers to a different Eric Flint, so it’s irrelevant. (However, for the record, it’s perfectly legitimate. Not a pirated copy in sight anywhere.)

40: the site has a very positive assessment and analysis of the entire 1632 series; (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

41: this is a legitimate site which distributes free copies in PDF format of some of my books available in the Baen Library. (Baen’s Library does not offer PDF as a format.) (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

42: this site refers people to the Baen Free Library; (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

43: another bibliographic reference site, listing many of my works; (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

44: another Wikipedia entry about me; (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

45: this is the third site referring to an “Eric Flint” who is not, grumble, me. Still, it’s perfectly legitimate and not a site where pirated books can be found.

46: another bibliographic reference site, listing many of my works; (LEGITIMATE SITE. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

47: Random House’s web page where you can buy copies of 1812: The Rivers of War and 1824: The Arkansas War; (LEGITIMATE SITE. SELLS MY BOOKS. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

48: a link to Grantville Gazette III, along with links to places selling the book; (LEGITIMATE SITE. SELLS MY BOOKS. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

49: a link to a legitimate site selling electronic editions of my books; (LEGITIMATE SITE. SELLS MY BOOKS. HELPS PROMOTE MY WORK.)

50: this is a rather weird site whose logic I don’t understand—I can’t actually find me anywhere in it, despite the link to my name—but which seems perfectly legitimate. It’s certainly not a site where pirated books are being hawked.

****

All right, enough. The pirates seem to have made themselves scarce.

Here’s the summary. Out of the first fifty sites referring to “Eric Flint” in a Google search:

All 50 of them are legitimate.

47 of the 50 refer to me. (For the record, the three other Eric Flints are a musician, an athlete and a radioneurologist.)

45 of them, in one way or another, help promote my work.

15 of them—which is to say, 30% of the total—directly sell my books.

And . . .

Not one of them—that’s “not one” as in ZERO, folks—provides a pirated copy of anything of mine.

****

In my next essay, I’ll deal with the objections that some people will raise to my use of search engines as a way to test the proposition that online piracy is well-nigh ubiquitous. And I’ll show that they’re all spurious. But, for the moment, I want to end this essay with what, by now, should be the obvious and central point:

The mere fact, in and of itself, that pirated copies of books exist somewhere on the internet, does not lead to the conclusion that such illegal editions are “readily available.”

That depends. On what? Mostly, on how readily available you make legitimate copies—measured in terms of ease of search as well as price.

We just saw that, in my case, legitimate copies of my work are in fact readily available. All anyone has to do is use a search engine—I used Google but you’d get about the same results with any other—and they will immediately turn up dozens of sites where legitimate copies of my work can be obtained. Much of it for free, but even those copies made available for sale are usually priced no more than five dollars a copy.

And, on the other hand, they’ll have a hard time finding a pirated copy. That’s because they’ll have to struggle through a veritable online blizzard of sites referring to me and my work that are perfectly legitimate.

So what’s their time worth? When obtaining a legitimate copy costs $5.00 or less and takes almost no time at all?

The answer is that most people will be perfectly satisfied with the legitimate product. Most potentially paying customers, I should say. I’m not interested in people who might be using a search engine to find pirated copies because they never had any intention of buying a legitimate copy in the first place. To be sure, such people are annoying in the general scheme of things. But they are irrelevant to this discussion. A virtual theft is simply meaningless, in terms of the loss to an author or publisher’s income. Zero from zero is zero.

This is a key point, by the way. One of the sleazy logical tricks played by advocates of DRM is to assume that every illegal download of a copyrighted item represents a “lost sale.” But that’s just nonsense. It would only be true if one of two conditions applied:

1) The downloader would have bought a legitimate copy otherwise.

2) Because of the illegal download, a legitimate copy of the text is now missing and is therefore not available for sale to a paying customer.

The second condition is simply irrelevant to electronic texts. And to call the first proposition “highly dubious” is to put the matter gently.

In reality, in my experience, what most people are doing when they read or download free electronic texts—and this is true whether the texts are legitimately provided or pirated copies—is sampling an author’s work to see if they want to pursue the matter further. And, if they do, they’re most likely to go find a legitimate copy for sale, not to keep hunting for pirated copies.

PROVIDED, at least, that the publisher was smart enough to make such copies available at a reasonable cost and in an unencrypted format.

All right. That’s enough, I think, for this month’s essay. In the next issue, I’ll pick up where this leaves off.

****