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2nd December 2008

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Piracy could 'drive sales'

21.11.07 Tom Tivnan

Digital pirates should be allowed to download illegal e-book and audio files. That was one of the more controversial views put forward during a lively panel discussion at the end of the Independent Publishers Guild's "Digitisation and the New World" seminar on Monday.

As part of a response to a question from the floor about the effects of digital piracy, media consultant Douglas Smith questioned the usefulness of publishers policing aggregator and peer-to-peer download sites. He suggested digital pirates could even be used as "opinion leaders" and actually drive sales. He said: "Say 20% of the book audience are downloading a book illegally. What if each of them are telling people that it is a great book and they should buy it?"

But former Cambridge University Press m.d. Michael Holdsworth disagreed, saying Smith's notion was "a fashionable argument" that could be applicable to the trade side but not in academic publishing.

The panel discussion ended the wide ranging-seminar, chaired by Faber sales director Will Atkinson, where over 150 IPG members heard talks on digitisation from industry insiders.

Fionnuala Duggan, Random House digital director, outlined the trade group's marketing strategy and said independents could also exploit widgets, social networks and targeted email marketing. But she warned that resources need to be used appropriately and have to be able to attract customers: "A lot of publishers out there are spending a lot of money building ghost town
websites."

The novelist John Lanchester, who has written widely on digital issues, spoke of the difficulties of finding new digital business models. He pointed to Radiohead's recent "pay what you want" download offer for its new album--which he said was still downloaded, illegally, from peer-to-peer
sites. He added: "Even when people could get it for free, they still want to steal it. I don't think this is the way forward."

The BA's Tim Godfrey introduced the BA's new bookseller/publisher digital interface batch.connect. Holdsworth begun the day by outlining five "blindingly obvious" digital core competencies that publishers needed to engage with.

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