Idiotic ideas never die, apparently...

[prusik]

At the Futurebook blog, Agent Orange's bright idea to kill ebook piracy is essentially SFWA's infamous and repudiated Shades of Gray project. That is, publishers seed the internet with corrupt versions of ebooks. Never mind that if a non-corrupt version isn't already available, people would quickly generate one. Never mind that based on feedback, people would quickly figure out which versions are corrupt and which versions aren't. In the worse case scenario, people won't care and all those people will read the corrupt version thinking that it's the real thing. Maybe they'll just complain about typos and rather than getting the message that they should buy ebooks, they'll just think less of ebooks as a whole, or think less of that publisher if they put in a note admitting to corrupting the text. A publisher making consumers less interested in their books is not a winning strategy no matter how you spin it.

Based on the rest of his blog, I don't think he's seriously proposing anyone try Shades of Gray again. (e.g., he has a blog post called "Fighting piracy is the dumbest thing you can do.") However, he does think that this idea would work. That and the fact that he makes no reference to Shades of Gray makes me think he hasn't done his research. If he doesn't know what he's talking about, why should I listen to him?

Comments

[mme_hardy]

", people won't care and all those people will read the corrupt version thinking that it's the real thing."

This. This. It doesn't even have to be people not caring, it can be thousands of copies all over the Internet and the casual torrenter not knowing the difference.

"Readers are, mostly, older, richer, wiser and more caring. "

ER. Met a lot of readers, has he? In any case, setting up a system that in any way encourages/supports readers being older and richer is not a long-term survival strategy for the publishing industry. (Don't get me wrong; I don't approve of torrenting books.)

[prusik]

Like I said, I'm not sure why I should listen to him. His argument, as a whole, doesn't make much sense.

My current thought is that the publishing industry has enough accumulated cruft over the years that anyone who claims to have a simple solution has probably overlooked something (or is willing to throw something under the bus). I usually stay out of the whole "future of publishing" discussion. This, though, just struck me as particularly idiotic especially because we've been there before. (i.e., nothing has changed to make Shades of Gray suddenly a good idea. Also, the archivist in me cringes at the notion of deliberately corrupting a text. Cut off my arms, why don't you...)