Why Pay for an e-book? ---- Part II: Everything for Nothing

In my previous article I couldn't explain why an e-book is more expensive than a paperback when it costs next to nothing to make it available. In my attempt to find the same book cheaper I found that most torrent copies available for free are usually full of mistakes and not really worth bothering with. So what happens now? Are you going to pay $11.59 for a 72 page e-book written 60 years ago (Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea), when you suspect that someone is taking more than his fair cut?

Of course not! There's that great institution called the public library. Nowadays you don't even have to go there. Just find one you can borrow from, fill-in a couple of forms and the book is yours for free for a week or two.

But let's say you want to own the book for free. Well, that's not so difficult either. Although most torrent copies circulating on the net are OCR copies of the books that haven't been proofread (in other words worthless), lo and behold there are some websites that have good copies of the actual book.
These have probably been obtained by removing the protection the e-publisher has installed. Why would someone break the law to give you something for nothing? Well he is not giving it to you for nothing. He makes money from the advertisements around it. Is he legal? It depends on where he is physically located. In some countries they have more important problems to solve than worry about the rights of authors or their publishers. Are we legal if we download it? It depends where we are located. But it appears that legality doesn't seem to matter much. How else can I interpret the statistic that 60-80% of people with computers in Western countries download movies or music illegally?

But you and me, we are bastions of virtue. Right? We are in that estimated 15% of the population who will wait for the traffic light to turn green at 4 am, even though we are the only ones awake in the entire town. So we apply our knowledge that legality varies from region to region. On our next holiday abroad to a country that has no copyright laws for the net, we get into the website and download to our smart phone all the books we want for free. We have paid nothing, and therefore declare nothing on our way back. We have legally downloaded the book and now own it.

Can someone break the protection of an e-book? Well, it isn't exactly the most difficult thing in the world. It will take you minutes. Just google what you want to do and you'll be quickly educated by a couple of u-tube videos. I don't know who made them or why nobody can take them down, but they are there. I am no expert and it only took me 15 minutes to remove the DRM from my own e-book. At this point you may well ask why would someone want to remove the DRM after they've paid for the book? For the same reason they put time and money to copy CDs and give them to their friends for free. People love to share. Worse, I've heard that friends or book clubs share the cost of a single e-book, remove the protection then share the unprotected copy.

But wait a minute now. If 60-80% of people download stuff illegally, others buy one copy and share, not many people are actually buying the book.

You are damn right they aren't. And the implications of all of this we will examine in part III of the article.