Fire and Fury, for free: inside the book industry's piracy problem

Fire and Fury, on sale at Waterstones - but available to download illegally online
Fire and Fury, on sale at Waterstones - but available to download illegally online

In the first two days that Fire and Fury – Michael Wolff’s peek behind the curtains of Donald Trump’s White House – was on sale, 29,000 physical copies, 100,000 audio books and a further quarter of a million e-book versions of the book were sold in the United States.

The numbers are impressive, but plenty more people have managed to read Wolff’s warts-and-all tale of the chaos inside Donald Trump’s presidency thanks to a raft of websites specialising in pirating the latest book releases.

The sites – which share bootleg copies of books in PDF or EPUB formats (which are readable by major e-book software and hardware including Amazon Kindles) – have become a major problem for the industry. One of the biggest and best-known websites, hosted on a Russian server, boasts on its homepage that it has more than two million titles on offer to download for free. Among the two million are three versions of Wolff’s tome.

“Piracy has always been around, but with the advent of digital editions of books it has become more prevalent in some places,” says José Borghino of the International Publishers Association, an industry body.

Russia is a particular bugbear for the publishing industry, with one survey saying that one in every three e-books downloaded in Russia was a bootlegged copy – and in some sectors of the market such as academic publishing, where the cost of books is often higher, it neared 50 per cent of all downloads.

Michael Wolff is interviewed by Stephen Colbert
Michael Wolff is interviewed by Stephen Colbert Credit:  CBS

Wikileaks, the controversial website run by Julian Assange, shared a link to an illicit version of the book in an attempt to dent Wolff’s sales. But it was just one cog in a massive piracy machine that has had an indubitable effect on the total number of sales of Fire and Fury.

According to the Intellectual Property Office, 46 per cent of British readers reported paying for every e-book they read in 2017, up from 40 per cent a year before. However, 17 per cent of e-books – around four million in all – were obtained illegally.

MUSO tracked 407 million separate visits from British browsers to specialist publishing piracy websites in 2016. “It’s a massive problem,” admits the company’s Chris Anderson. Worldwide, 10.8 billion visits were made to book piracy websites.

The popularity of pirated books can be summed up simply: “It’s easier, it’s quicker and it’s free,” explains Anderson.

“There’s an element of the early Noughties music industry,” says Caroline Sanderson, associate editor at publishing industry magazine The Bookseller. “There’s a perception that authors are wealthy people”, fuelled by big-figure headlines for superstar authors. (A recent Bloomberg headline pegged Wolff’s potential earnings from Fire and Fury at $7.4 million as a minimum.)

That, however, isn’t true of most authors. The last survey conducted of British authors in 2013 found median annual earnings were a paltry £11,000. A shrinking industry – fewer physical book shops and the rise of Amazon, which ekes out every penny of profit at the expense of publishers and those who pen books – is squeezing authors. When last surveyed in 2005, authors’ incomes were 29 per cent higher.

One author who has felt the impact of piracy on his bottom line is Nick Mamatas, an American science fiction author, who estimates he has lost “a couple of hundred dollars” worth of sales to bootlegged version of his books.

“A decade ago, piracy didn't mean much, honestly,” he says. “Now, pirate editions definitely have an influence on the bottom line for ebook publishers and self-publishers – they harm the ability of writers to sell publication rights to English-speaking countries outside of the US, have hurt fiction series that depend on new readers.”

Part of the blame lies at the door of publishers. The industry has been sluggish to see what had happened to the music, television and film industries before it. “They should have looked at music and learned from their mistakes,” says Anderson. “There was a mentality of: ‘Actually it’s not that big a problem, or having the effect we thought it’d have.’”

Now, publishers are spending as much time monitoring piracy of their products as they are in getting new books to market. “Publishers are having to look over their shoulders all the time, worrying about where their IP is and wasting time caring about copyright piracy when they should jut be publishing books,” says Borghino.

Others are avoiding electronic publishing entirely. Borghino has spoken to Latin American publishers who refuse to release e-books, fearing they’ll be immediately pirated. “Publishers are holding back the progress of digital publishing because they’d rather the devil they know than the one they don’t.”

A torrented version of Fire and Fury
Fire and Fury tops the torrent charts

Although a protracted release schedule – Fire and Fury was released four days ahead of its planned publication date to try and head off legal threats from Donald Trump that could have halted the release – may have buoyed the trade in pirated version of Wolff’s book because of a lack of physical copies available at book shops, the issue is more ideological than that.

Publishers’ inaction towards piracy has resulted in a major problem for the industry: a generation of readers who expect everything at their fingertips – and for free. “They’ve pirated all the content they’ve consumed, and they expect to continue to do so unless something changes,” says Anderson.

Consumers of pirated material generally know what they’re doing. According to MUSO data, 57 per cent of British book pirates went directly to a website that hosted illicit content; a further 23 per cent were referred direct to the underground websites by forums and blogs. “They’re not going to Google,” says Anderson: “they’re going direct to their favourite website.”

Michael Wolff's book Fire And Fury
Michael Wolff's book Fire And Fury

Whereas once chancing your luck on downloading an illicit version of your favourite book, album or film meant risking shady filesharing applications such as Kazaa or Limewire, the websites that host much of the offending content are smoothly-run, slick-looking enterprises. “Some look better and behave better than legitimate websites,” says Anderson.

He believes that those digital piracy natives can be won back to paying for their favourite books. “We just need to make them aware the legal options are there and free or very well-priced,” he says. Throwing up hurdles in the way of would-be pirates can also help. “If you make the user experience of piracy very annoying or very difficult, the option left is to go back to legal content.”

However, piracy is likely to continue unabated for a while yet. And though Wolff’s travails with pirates has thrown into sharp relief a wider problem, it likely won’t affect the moneyed author all that much.

“In a way it’s great that Fire and Fury is highlighting the issues with piracy,” says Sanderson, “but it’s a shame it has to take a book like that to highlight it. Michael Wolff is going to do very well out of this book, despite the piracy, but there’s a lot of authors out there whose income is being detrimentally affected by this.”

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