Perhaps The Sequel Can Be 'Don't F**king Worry About Piracy'

from the just-a-suggestion dept

As I’m still a relatively new parent, way too many people have forwarded me copies or links to the PDF of the suddenly viral “children’s” book Go the F**k to Sleep in the last few weeks. If you haven’t seen it yet (and you’re a parent), it’s worth checking out, as it’ll probably give you a chuckle for putting into words what you’ve thought many times, delightfully packaged in a near-perfect replica of so many children’s books. Honestly, upon seeing it, I went searching to see where I could buy a physical copy (which, don’t worry, I’ll keep far away from the actual stack of baby books), and was disappointed to see that it wasn’t coming out until the fall.

Except… the viral nature of the whole thing has turned a silly faux-children’s book, with absolutely no marketing behind it, and which hasn’t been released yet, into a bestseller: Because of all of this attention, the publisher, Akashic, has moved up the publication date to June, and has planned a much bigger print run. It also resulted in the movie rights (yes, the movie rights) already being sold. And it’s all because of what could technically be called piracy.

And here’s the really ridiculous part. Despite all of this, Akashic appears to believe that it’s still in its best interests to go after those hosting copies of the PDF or graphics, and have them take it down.

And Akashic [has] been doing what they can to control distribution of the document by asking people to take down any posted PDFs. This may not be much. “As the publisher of this book, our responsibility is to tackle instances of piracy when we become aware of them,” Ahmad said, “That’s just doing a service to our authors, ourselves, book sellers, distributors, to everyone involved in the successful making and promotion of a book.”

But, um, how is that “a service” to the author or the publisher? There appears to be a ton of evidence that the very lack of their ability to stop that is a huge part of the reason why the book is a massive success story. It seems like yet another case where people focus on the “but we must stop piracy!” without considering what that means for the bottom line.

Plenty of authors (and musicians and filmmakers) have already made this leap into recognizing that just because it’s available for free, doesn’t mean you can’t make a ton of money with it. It just seems weird that Akashic seems to recognize the value it got from all this “piracy” on one hand, while at the very same time, talking about how it needs to stop it “as a service” to itself and its authors.

Filed Under: books, children's books, piracy