If you read the article to the end, it says that it wasn't the piracy that led to increased sales. The decisive part was the author engaging with the 4chan community and earning their respect.
The author's engagement is key, absolutely. But the fact remains that the good was freely available, regardless.
However, the spike in sales would never have happened if the book hadn't been freely available to start with.
This is a measurable demonstration of a working business model, and it is, clearly, not the model the publishing business is using. Indeed, it is precisely this model that they are lobbying, and succeeding, to make a criminal offence.
Isn't there an extent to which this worked for this author simply because his actions were more of an outlier within the industry, rather than the norm? And it was perhaps entirely because it was an unusual exception (though not without precedent) that 4chan resulted in a surge of sales.
If this were standard marketing behaviour, I don't believe it would be nearly as effective.
However, the spike in sales would never have happened if the book hadn't been freely available to start with.
For all the works that have their sales increased by the extra exposure that piracy can sometimes give, how many do you think have their sales reduced by piracy due to, y'know, piracy?
Piracy certainly affects sales, but as this episode has show, it doesn't have to.
This is my major problem with the riaa/mpaa/etc. They're trying to criminalize normal human behaviour (not paying for something), in the hopes that that will alleviate their piracy woes. Now, there are two parts to that last sentence. We may argue over the moral value of piracy, but that's not the point. The idea that, by criminalizing sharing, they will somehow prevent it, is ludicrous. If they had taken the tens of millions of dollars they've spent on lawyers and instead put it towards market research, if they had hired people to build them a workable economic model, then we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I can moan and complain all I want about the fact that people are copying my work without giving me money, but at the end of the day I'd be much more productive were I to spend that time and energy finding a way to entice them to pay for it.
The reason this hasn't happened is simple: The big money in recording is the production houses, and they're fast becoming irrelevant. They know as well as any of us do that a digital age economic model that sees content creators fairly compensated for their works will necessarily cut them out of the loop. So, instead of addressing the problem, they lobby and sue and try to cling to some semblance of relevance. Look at what Valve has done with Steam: It's no longer necessary for a game company to sign with the likes of EA or Activision in order to sell their games. The next step, of course, is to find a way to market independent titles effectively. The system isn't perfect, but it's improving, and it provides a model for content creators in other forms of media to emulate.
I don't think that there's yet enough information to draw this conclusion.
If it's the author's engagement that caused the spike in sales, what happens months down the road when the author's post is forgotten, but the pirated bits are still floating around in torrents?
While the effect looks positive today, it's entirely possible that the long-term result is negative.
Yep. People give money to artists because they like what they're doing and they have a relationship with the artist. Not because some middle-man arbitrates the price of the art of some unreachable "star" or because some lawyer mugged them with paper weapons.
Edit: I know that this probably won't work at "Madonna" scale. The artist can't possibly make a meaningful connection with a fanbase that large. That might be the point.
In the internet world this relies on every artist being an extrovert and a marketing expert as well as an artist.
Also, we don't live in a feudal system or aristocracy where a significant proportion of the wealth is controlled by a small elite who have little more to do than live idly.
So the conditions are different, an artist has to gain a lot more followers than in previous times through a method which is actually pretty specialised and tough.
But if you're that passionate about your art, maybe you're just going to have to learn how to gain a base of fans willing to patronise you.
> Also, we don't live in a feudal system or aristocracy where a significant proportion of the wealth is controlled by a small elite who have little more to do than live idly.
This is definitely wrong. Most of the wealth is actually controlled by a small elite, as a matter of fact.
We actually do live in a society where the super rich have nothing to do that live idly. Earth has never had as few people controlling as much money/power as we have at the moment.
(On the other hand, the poor are a lot "richer" nowadays as well)
So, free access to a digital version of the comic led more people to buy the physical vesion. What about when the physical version doesn't exist anymore or is more completely substitutable with a digital version?
Digital distribution is fantastic and is still in the process of changing many industries, but I think that this case likely would not have had the large beneficial effect for the author had it happened in a day when the distributed digital good was just as good/easy as the physical, purchasable one.
>But doesn't this example show that people want physical copies[?]
Depends. Sometimes they do so for higher quality + to "give" money to the creator. Graphic novel fans (and Anime fans) pretty frequently buy the item they downloaded if/when it comes out, and if they think it was good. Trans/Scanlations are pretty much directly responsible for creating originally-Japanese-media sales in the US; while this is an English one, it's still likely being read by a lot from the same group of people.
Right now, they do. But as digital substitutes get better, the physical market is going to shrink. Books and comics are just data, there is no reason they won't go the same way as music and movies, by which I mean, better and easier to deal with in digital form than in the physical.
Honestly, beyond that little truth, I don't think that it makes too much sense to draw lots of parallels between these industries. Use patterns for books movies and music are very different, as are their creation. Each industry is going to have to sort out on it's own how to deal with the brave new future.
Since I'm at -4, I just wanted to clarify that comics on the iPad are gorgeous. You can count on comic consumers desiring the physical product when the alternative is a PDF on their laptop. The experience on the iPad is far superior to that and a much better substitute for the real thing.
Piracy does lead the British to dominate the American literacy market when there was no foreign copyright recognized. Some even get paid. Charles Dicken doesn't like it though.
American writers were the one freaked out by all those competition.
which may be pertinent. The fundamental truth is still the Tim O'Reily aphorism that the main enemy of most authors isn't piracy but obscurity. There's some sense in which this is a form of freemium pricing -- use a lower-quality (in this case, crappy scanned) version to drive engagement, then use engagement to drive sales of the good, pay version.
There's a decent chance that the actual publishers get this -- near as I can tell, the real problems with understanding this idea come from the top of the multinational media companies that own the publishers.
That may be true for fringe authors/artists/musicians, but those are not the people being pirated the most. People mostly pirate blockbuster movies, big-name artists, and bestselling books.
Comic industry seems to get it better than other industries.
I can download digital comics through Comixology apps at a fair price and awesome quality which makes it easier and more convenient than downloading poorly scanned and heavy .cbr files from shady websites.
They just need it to release it the day it comes out in print.
Think about it - copyright and brand owners must hate 4chan. But 4chan hates marketers and insincere people who don't "get" it. So why not post a story about how some writer "engaged" with his audience there leading to a massive sales spike and all-of-a-sudden it'll be crushed under the weight of semi-earnest marketing types attempting to convince "anonymous" to buy their wares.
Genius, I say! Before you know it there will be "4chan social marketing" consultants popping up all over the place, touting their snake oil at advertising events!
I don't understand what you think the goal is. They posted an article to encourage people, who 4chan hates, to visit 4chan? It's not like they won't be found out.
…well, that's unrealistic. It's more likely that they'd completely fail to understand it - not in a "there's a deep meaning and they'll miss it" way, in a "there's a shallow meaning and a ton of in-jokes and they'll miss them" way - and give up. That or they won't be allowed to visit from work because the site is too offensive.
Someday publishers will learn that free products creates exposure that creates fans who buy products.
I can't even name how many bands I listen to because of Napster and Limewire in the early 00s, which led to me buying several albums from each band and attending many of their concerts - actually, I got into entire genres this way and now that I'm not a broke student, have spent a lot of money. If I hadn't been able to download full versions of songs and listen to them as much as I wanted, I never would have found out how much I like these bands.
I am no longer surprised by anything relating to 4chan. I decided a while ago that they basically break all the rules (in a good way) that we have come to understand, though only within their walls.
