Tim O'Reilly once said "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy". I discovered and purchased almost every Rosenfeld Media book from OReilly.
This independence day weekend there were a lot of sales, so I purchased:
* "Programming Clojure, Third Edition" from pragprog (30% off sale)
* The entire collection of "Enthusiast's Guide to ..." from rockynook (each for $10)
* "The Quick Python Book 3e", "Serverless Architectures on AWS", "Event Streams in Action", "Get Programming with Haskell" from Manning (50% off)
These sales are the only way I can afford the volume I read. Some of that money would have gone to OReilly authors, but they deleted my full cart with $100 worth of stuff before I could purchase!
EDIT: OReilly catalog seemed large & redundant with publishers (packt) offering the same materials on their sites. Some like Wiley / MKP only offered very few items from their catalogs. Others like Rosenfeld / rockynook / no starch now provide DRM free options directly from their sites. I'm hoping at least OReilly reconsiders selling their Animal books again.
Referenced below and applicable here, O'Reilly state they continue to support DRM-free formats (available from outlets that support them, like Google Play) and acknowledge the PDF issue in this post by Laura Baldwin.
I agree with O'Reilly's quote. Better to be more widely read. I use Leanpub for my books, and I let people read my books free online and the eBooks themselves are DRM free with a Creative Commons license.
>Perhaps some part of the equation has changed since then.
This is actually what I'm most interested in, but don't really see analyzed or talked about anywhere. Online distribution of general digital media (beyond glorified text documents and images) at a serious, mass scale, is barely 20 years old. We are only just now, like in the last decade or less, seeing people enter the economy (i.e. having their own income streams) who grew up with most media in general available on the web.
Hand-in-hand with that is the ability to "pirate" media easily, freely, and without consequence. Even in the last decade, piracy was sorta vaguely "niche". I mean, yes, millions of people did it regularly, but even though I spent my life around very technical people, I was often a sort of "go-to" to acquire things or explain how to actually be a "pirate". People were comfortable with it, but as far as I could tell, even in my "pirate" heavy demographic, it wasn't like some sort of ubiquitous, default thing. People were comfortable with it, and did it regularly either directly or indirectly, but I suspect that I am/was part of a fairly tiny but still rapidly growing minority that would automatically transition from "I want something" to "I'll just pirate that thing". For most people there was a decent amount of friction, not because of technology, but because of their own attitudes and knowledge, so it happened far less than it could have.
All of this is a preface to what I started off trying to say, which is that as a society and culture, we really haven't figured out the social norms and expectations around digital distribution and piracy. They exist, as do the legal ones, but it is so new that the rising demographics and future trends are going to rapidly and significantly change them, and have been changing them.
Patterns of marketing and distribution have already somewhat adapted to the expectation of large-scale piracy, but that is only the beginning. Who knows how this stuff will be viewed or treated in another decade.
FWIW, I don't think that piracy is ethical, I do it anyway (though far less nowadays that I have a paycheck and with all the subscription services available), and I suspect (opposite of the author of this article, but still without evidence) that piracy is actually a benefit to creators. The quote you lead with is a great way to phrase the idea in a way that I'd never thought to articulate it.
I believe the author also thinks that piracy is, overall, a benefit to creators: "My feeling is that most people who choose pirated books are unlikely to pay for them, even if that's the only way to get them. As such, I'm inclined to think the marketing effect of illegal copies exceeds the lost revenue."
I think O'Reilly just wants to be on the "recurring payments" dark pattern bandwagon and push people into Safari. Recurring payments might fall out of fashion one day, but until the Democrats get some electoral traction I don't think there is going to be a crackdown on them.
The discounts you mention are a big controversy for downloadable sales. Go tell a game developer that "I get a lot of great free games with my PlayStation Plus subscription and usually buy games when they are deeply discounted" and often they will go berserk because they believe eroded pricing power takes a chunk out of their paycheck.
Another factor is that O'Reilly is not the company it was 20 years ago. The animal books were great (and are great sometimes today), but the books they've made on other topics (say graphic design) are not up to same standard. Those books aren't bad, but the animal books are hard to measure up to.
In recent years O'Reilly has been capitalizing on the strength of their brand, so you see Neo4J giving away a free O'Reilly book to promote their product, O'Reilly promotes their own conferences, etc.
Outside of New York, I don't see Democrats being gung ho to crack down on bad behavior. However, so long as the Republicans are in control, it won't happen at all. (Even if they wanted to crack down, they could not, because they don't have the staff.)
Political risk is only one horseman that threatens the recurring payment dark pattern. Another would be improvements in the payment system.
Credit cards are not really designed for recurrent payment, in particular, you cannot ask your credit card company to turn off a recurring payment without getting a new card number and turning off all of your recurring payments.
Even legitimate companies, such as the New York Times, will make you talk to a customer retention specialist who will give you a hard sell to turn off their service. Other companies are not responsive at all.
If you could go to your payment provider, see a list of all your recurring payments, and cancel any ones you want to cancel with a button press, that would go a long way towards legitimizing the business model.
After O'Reilly moved to DRM-free books, their 2009 sales went up by 104% http://toc.oreilly.com/2010/01/2009-oreilly-ebook-revenue-up...
In other interviews, he seemed confident that DRM wasn't worth it https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/focus-tim-oreilly-me...
Perhaps some part of the equation has changed since then. I'm looking forward a deeper analysis of the business reasons for this.
I'm also interested to hear what more authors think - I wonder how many agree with Martin Kleppmann (Designing Data Intensive Applications) https://twitter.com/martinkl/status/880336943980085248
This independence day weekend there were a lot of sales, so I purchased:
* "Programming Clojure, Third Edition" from pragprog (30% off sale)
* The entire collection of "Enthusiast's Guide to ..." from rockynook (each for $10)
* "The Quick Python Book 3e", "Serverless Architectures on AWS", "Event Streams in Action", "Get Programming with Haskell" from Manning (50% off)
These sales are the only way I can afford the volume I read. Some of that money would have gone to OReilly authors, but they deleted my full cart with $100 worth of stuff before I could purchase!
EDIT: OReilly catalog seemed large & redundant with publishers (packt) offering the same materials on their sites. Some like Wiley / MKP only offered very few items from their catalogs. Others like Rosenfeld / rockynook / no starch now provide DRM free options directly from their sites. I'm hoping at least OReilly reconsiders selling their Animal books again.