A couple of weeks ago, I started seeing a pile of blog discussion about ebook piracy. It all started on January 12th, when Australian fan lucyham tweeted to author Sarah Rees Brennan:
Apologies. Have just torrented The Demon’s Lexicon. Will buy when laggardly, pickpocketing, luddite publishers in Aus get around to allowing Australians to buy books off Amazon. So sick of “Aussies can’t purchase this book” message.
A twitter storm ensued, which quickly made it to various blogs. Author Saundra Mitchell posted on her blog and also on her LiveJournal, saying:
If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list. If the 800+ downloads a week of my book were only HALF converted into sales, I would earn out in one more month. But I’m never going to earn out. And my book is never going to be available in your $region, not for lack of trying.
Things took off quickly; there were almost 20 posts that day, mostly in response to Mitchell. In the next two weeks, or a little more, almost a hundred posts on the subject sprang up, more than two-thirds of which were on LiveJournal or Dreamwidth (a LiveJournal-like site, based on the same code; many people crosspost between the two.)
Reading these posts as they flowed past, I noticed several interesting things about them. Firstly, many of them were addressing the issues of ebook piracy from an angle I had never seen before, criticising the capitalist structures of book distribution and intellectual property from a social justice perspective. Secondly, most of the posts seemed to be by women. Thirdly, nobody outside the circles of LJ/DW fandom and social justice circles seemed to be noticing. It seemed a pity. I’m a regular reader or visitor to many tech blogs, including O’Reilly Radar, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and pop-culture-meets-tech blogs like Boing Boing, any of which might have picked up this story and run with it, if they’d been in the loop.
I wondered, though, whether I was missing something. I know that we tend to follow people most like ourselves online, and read things that reinforce our own views and opinions. If men disproportionately follow other men, maybe I’m disproportionately reading posts by women, and there were a whole bunch of posts by men that I’d missed. It’s happened before, after all.
Tonight I decided to investigate. Using Google Blog Search and following links from any posts I found, I put together a spreadsheet of posts, 112 in all, on the subjects of ebook piracy and international distribution, between Jan 10th and Jan 27th. (Why Jan 10th rather than 12th? Turns out that O’Reilly Radar had posted an article about ebook piracy and DRM on the 10th, which was referenced by other bloggers over the next few days, so it seemed worth including. More notes on my methods and choices made are at the bottom of this post.)
I then took the spreadsheet and ran it through a few lines of Perl to generate the following GraphViz graph:
Visualisation of the ebooks discussion. Version 1.0, 2011-02-01. Full image: SVG, PNG
Key:
- A