I’ve been reading about this whole Scribd copyright issue for the past couple of months, and I thought it had died down unresolved, but maybe I just had my eyes on the Book Fair. Today, I read this piece by Tammy H Nam, Scribd’s Vice President of Content and Marketing and, linked at the end of the article, seven questions from Peter Cox of Litopia to Trip Adler, CEO of Scribd, dated April 17th.
I listened to the Litopia After Dark show when Trip Adler was due to speak to Peter Cox live on air, because I wanted to see what he’d say for himself and expected a balanced debate, but to be honest, the tone was disturbing before it even kicked off. I know Litopia is a writers’ place; I know that copyright violation is not ok and that essentially downloading copyright protected texts from Scribd is stealing income from an author, and that Peter Cox was mad about it. But his opinions were voiced in a snide manner and when Trip Adler didn’t answer his phone, frankly, I wasn’t surprised. I won’t quote from it, because one listen was enough for me, but you can hear it here. What resulted from Adler’s absence was a long voicemail and an invitation to call back any time for an open discussion. I have serious doubts that anything resembling an open discussion could have been possible under the circumstances.
Let me be clear: I’m not standing up for Scribd or Adler, nor am I bashing Cox, or Litopia and the point that Scribd’s opposers are making. But read Peter Cox’s seven questions. He calls Adler by his first name seventeen times in a nasty, faux-friendly, aggressive kind of banter. What’s the point? Why is there a need for this kind of sniping? Cox is a well-known and -respected figure and he has a community of people who rely on him for information. A sneering letter to a 26-year-old, practically spitting the questions at him, doesn’t fit the image, and has put me off reading anything else he might have to say on the matter.
Whose views is Cox representing anyway? I read a lot of blogs, and I’ve heard a lot of savvy publishing folk speak at conferences, and whenever I come across the notion of ‘piracy’ met with a sort of gung-ho, ‘Let’s stampt it out!’ attitude, I tend to be cynical. I know the future’s a bit murky and uncertain, and we can’t tell how popular ebooks will be and whether free content online will take more of a toll later than it does now. But take for example the keynote digital speech at the LBF: Tim Hely Hutchinson (Hachette UK) said himself that he’s somewhat removed from the digital generation, and although he spoke well and I have great respect for him, I felt that Victoria Barnsley of HarperCollins UK seemed more at home with the idea of ebooks and the implications of piracy on them. She seemed resigned to the fact that piracy will happen, and that the way forward is to add value and make it really easy for genuine customers to get the content they want in the format they want at a price they see as reasonable. If that means adding value, to the consumer’s mind, that’s what she plans to do. The point is that Barnsley knows that if you spend all your resources trying to stamp out piracy, and if you spend half your budget in fighting pirates in court cases as Hely Hutchinson and perhaps Gail Rebuck of Random House plan to do, you won’t get very far.
There’s also the argument that giving it away for free online helps print sales rather than cannibalising them. Mike Shatzkin has been talking about this, and speculating that this may not be the case in years to come when reading on a screen is a more popular option than reading a physical book. But for now, Paulo Coelho and Cory Doctorow and a whole heap of other authors are quite happy to put their work out there online and watch the copies fly out of shops. It’s a big gamble, of course: all you have is content, and giving it away is counterintuitive when you’re used to what is still, in most cases, the dominant print-first business plan.
But these are all things to think about. Scribd says its working on filtering out copyrighted content; they don’t want it on their site. Whether you believe them or not is up to you, but I wouldn’t rely on their biggest critics for a balanced version of events, or for a rational critique of the site and its CEO.
