Brian F. O'Leary Challenges Scott Turow on Piracy

Brian F. O'Leary, founder and principal of Magellan Media, has written an open letter to Author's Guild President Scott Turow challenging his concerns about book piracy. In the letter, O'Leary points to a GalleyCat interview in which Turow tells GalleyCat's own Jason Boog that "...the larger problem for us is the pirating of books." O'Leary challenges Turow, asking him how he knows that piracy is a real issue and points to data suggesting an apparent correlation between piracy and an uptick in sales. For O'Leary, the issue instead with digital books is not piracy, but obscurity. "...in this increasingly digital landscape, that the greater threat to many authors is obscurity, not piracy," says Turow in the letter. While O'Leary does admit that book piracy has hurt book sales in college textbooks, he questions the way piracy is studied. "There are no reliable studies of the impact of piracy in the book business. Because our sample set is limited, I include our own work to date in that bucket. The studies that are cited most often are based on sampling techniques that try to track the instance of piracy, then apply an assumed number for 'substitution rates' (lost sales)." O'Leary also challenges Turow for talking about the death of the music industry, pointing out that the music industry does still exist. "There are studies that suggest that the more likely shift in buying patterns occurred when vinyl owners finished replacing treasured albums with CDs. As replacement sales declined, purchase patterns also shifted from whole albums to individual songs. This was a trend that the music industry actively resisted, in the end fostering the piracy it wanted to prevent. The lesson here could be more readily distilled as: 'Don't take actions (like delaying the release of e-books) that frustrate consumer demand."

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Brian F. O'Leary Challenges Scott Turow on Piracy

Dianna Dilworth

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Dianna Dilworth