David Flanagan (JavaScript Definitive Guide author) on piracy

He makes a good point. Since Google recently went after the content farms that hurt their search results, it would be nice if they extended that to authors and legitimate content producers.

Honestly, this has recently given credence to the idea that Google is just broken recently. I can hardly find anything I'm looking for anymore. Even for freely available books, searching for the PDF just links me to a content farm that doesn't even have it. It's just a maze of "herbal Viagra" ads.

The content farm issue has different incentives from the authors and content produces. In the content farm the user is usually landing onto substandard content and the click is basically a user search that has "failed" because it has not produced a high quality response. For the ebooks its likely that the user is looking for precisely the book, and not providing the book would in fact be the "failed" search.

What I found in this article: unrealistic suggestion that Google should decide which page on the internet contains or doesn't contain copyrighted material.

What I didn't find:

1. A single piece of data, even of the anecdotal variety, that piracy is responsible for his declining royalties. By his own admission: he doesn't know and there are other trends that might explain decline in print sales.

2. A description of how he tried to find new ways of making money in the world of declining dead-trees sales.

I've bought several technical, self-published books as PDFs. I believe some people (e.g. HN regular Amy Hoy) make decent money doing that. Has the author tried that? No.

I bough 30+ books on my kindle. Did the author try to self-publish on kindle in order to get higher royalties (70% vs., say, 15% from print) hence more revenue (even with lower price)? No.

His books would be perfect for such an experiment because he already has an audience thanks to 4 popular books he wrote in the past.

Also posted this in the comments on the site, thought I'd join the discussion here.

I appreciate David's perspective on piracy, but I also embrace and understand where Tim O'Reilly is coming from (Far worse to be irrelevant . I think I have the solution. Why not create an entirely new genre of content that offers a greater level of utility than static digital eBooks?

Knowledge is getting created faster than it can be certified, and we need early-adopting gurus like you to light the path forward to new technologies. I'm particularly happy to pay for content on its own, particularly if I perceive that the original content creator is taking a lion's share of the profit.

I know that may not even cross many author's minds, but if there were messages like "95% of the profits from this eBook will be contributed to the author, so that they will continue producing high value content", I believe more people would be inclined to purchase.

Also I won't mention the name of my company here and get flamed for self-promoting, but I will say that I think there's a huge opportunity for publishers, authors, and content creators to disrupt a much larger, adjacent industry, education and its steady "diet" of certifications.