I’m feeling on a rant right about now, so forgive me, but ever since I became an author, I’ve been reading articles about digital publishing, including articles about piracy. Hate to say it, but I almost always come down on the side of the pirates.

I’m old enough to remember when the only options for visual media were (broadcast) TV and the movie theater. The first commercial DVD I ever wanted to buy was Dances With Wolves, and for some reason, my parents refused to drop $100 for it. Because this was pre-Internet, mostly we didn’t know what we were missing. When I first discovered Doctor Who, I thought Tom Baker was the only Doctor. Then I went to college and discovered there were four more! My first exposure to piracy was watching video-taped Doctor Who episodes that had been recorded by setting a video camera in front of a TV. Someone went to England a couple of times a year to video stuff for some friends in the U.S. I was lucky enough to be part of a club that received one of the 10 or so copies she made each year. Imagine my surprise when I finally saw a broadcast episode of a John Pertwee Doctor and saw the real color of his coat!

Anyway, my point is that mostly we didn’t pirate because we didn’t know what was available. Fast forward to today. There are two BBC series I’d love to watch. I discovered them by reading about them on the ‘Net (and seeing a few clips on YouTube.) I’d happily buy them, but I can’t. Oh, I can buy the DVDs on Amazon, but they are Region 2, and I can’t play them on my DVD player. It’s almost enough to drive me to the Torrent sites…

Take a moment to check out this cartoon from the Onion.

See my point? Now, I’ve read many author rants about “the entitlement of readers.” Well, why shouldn’t we want to read or watch stuff we’ve heard about? What’s wrong with that? Why are we bad for wanting to read a book we’ve heard about but can’t buy in our country or in our e-version of choice? Why are we bad people for wanting to pay money to get stuff legally?

If your business sells physical goods, you might not have to worry about this. But if you offer a digital product or any type of intellectual property, think long and hard before you put barriers in front of your customers. Don’t assume we won’t use other means to get what we want. Some of your customers are too honest to pirate, but they’ll be left with a bad taste in their mouth, and believe me, you don’t want that.

Just in case you’ve been under a rock for the last week, the Department Of Justice is suing the “big 5″ book publishers and Apple for price fixing. This has been covered at length on many blogs, and I won’t go into all the details here. That’s not what this post is for.

This post is simple. The publishers are in this boat in large part because they refused to acknowledge that readers are their customers and that companies fail when they don’t give their customers what they want.

What do e-book readers want? It’s pretty simple. They want:

* decent prices
* availability
* easy purchasing
* portability

Let me break those down for a moment.

Decent prices is pretty easy. Remember that you don’t “own” an e-book, like you do a paper book. In effect, you are purchasing a license to read it. That means no selling or lending the book. Also, e-books cost less to produce and distribute than e-books, so readers feel (justifiably) that they shouldn’t cost as much as paper books.

Availability is pretty simple too. If a book is available in printed format, e-book readers would like to see it available in e-format. If it’s a new book, they’d like to see it available at the same time as the printed version.

Easy purchasing? Well, simple. Easy to purchase and download to an e-reader or e-reading app.

Portability? Now, this is where things get tricky. Maybe you own a Kindle today and you’ve bought a lot of books for it. Next year, Barnes and Noble comes out with a really neat Nook device, and you want to buy it. But, wait! All those Kindle books you bought? You can’t read them on your Nook unless you strip DRM (copy protection) and convert them to Nook format. Since DRM-stripping is illegal, maybe you don’t want to do that. So what do you do? Buy all the books again, knowing you might have to do it yet again in the future? Kind of awkward, right?

The Big 6 publishers (Random House is the 6th and isn’t included in the law suit) have consistently failed to give readers all four of those things. They wanted to protect the status quo (paper book sales and distribution), and to attempt that protection, they put all sorts of hurdles in place to slow e-book adoption. Amazon, however, recognized what their customers wanted and attempted to give them at least three of the four (minus portability). So what did the publishers do? According to the DOJ, conspired with Apple to keep Amazon in its place by requiring prices to stay artificially high.

And now they are in trouble. Big surprise. The sad thing is that all of it could have been easily avoided. There’s nothing stopping the publishers from giving readers what they want. They can set reasonable prices and release e-books in a timely fashion. They can convert back-lists so new readers can discover older books. They can release books DRM-free, which would go a long way to keeping Amazon from getting too big. (If people can buy books for their Kindles anywhere, competition will be fostered and encouraged.) And there’s nothing stopping them from selling books on their own sites and making it easy to purchase. The last time I tried to buy a book from a publisher’s site, it was a HORRIBLE experience. Never again!

Don’t let your own business make these same mistakes. Listen to your customers. Give them what they want. You’ll stay out of jail and be successful. What’s not to like about that?

Feel free to comment below on either the lawsuit or listening to your customers.