I was surprised to find that many people don't know what pirated books that are deeply hated by the publishing circle are actually. So I often see two very extreme situations. One is that people who often treat some genuine books with printing quality problems as pirated books and "shout and shout and kill" and are afraid of the well rope by inadequate propaganda; the other is that they do not care about piracy, let pirated picture books go into kindergartens in a bright and honest manner, blatantly sell pirated copies on the Internet, but still preach how important reading is to children.
01
What is a pirated book
What exactly is piracy? Please use your brain first to understand it literally.
"Stealing" first shows that this act is a kind of theft. Therefore, most of the articles that talk about the harmfulness of pirated books do not grasp the main point, and always only talk about the harm from the ink, paper, and printing effect. If this line of thinking is followed, then is it harmless if pirated books use qualified ink and good paper?
Of course not, the greatest harm is always a conscious hazard. The easy rust of inferior knives is a problem, but the awareness of "stabbing people with knives in confusion" is more harmful, and the two are not a problem at all.
It is precisely because many people do not realize that piracy is first and foremost a kind of illegal act similar to theft, so some amateur parents of children who sell low-priced pirated picture books, school teachers, and even some civil servants, they will instinctively avoid the source of low-cost pirated picture books, and they also do not realize that their behavior is selling stolen goods.
And the parents who buy these pirated picture books do not realize that they are actually buying stolen goods.
When I was in junior high school, a classmate's parent bought her a second-hand bicycle, and was later discovered by the owner and called the police. Although my classmate's family was not involved in the theft of bicycles, while being educated by the police uncle, the bicycles were returned to their original owners, and the loss of purchasing these two bicycles could only be borne by their families before the thieves were caught.
So, whether it's the people who make the pirates, or the people who sell and buy the pirates, their behavior is wrong. This is the biggest problem of piracy.
What exactly is piracy stealing?
"Edition" refers to copyright, which is a right of the copyright holder of a book. Just like you go to work to make money, book authors earn income by selling copyrights. Then piracy is equivalent to you doing work but not being paid; just like you make meat buns and sell them for money, but the pirates steal the meat buns.
The reason why it is clear what a pirated book is is also to avoid preconceived notions that "there is a problem with the printing quality = pirated book". The two are not absolutely equal. Piracy is problematic not because of the quality of the book, but because of the illegality of its behavior.
02
How are pirated books made?
Knowing how pirated books are made can help us distinguish which ones are pirated books.
From the perspective of piracy, books are divided into books with pure text and books with pictures.
Pirated books in plain text were often seen before. In the past, on the night market near my home, on the overpass and around the university, there were often stalls selling best-selling books, most of which were pirated.
There are two main ways to make a pirated book in plain text. One is to take and scan the pages of the genuine book and print them in the form of pictures. The text of this pirated book will be unclear. Because when printing normally, the format of the text part is not the image format. In the image format, the edges of thin lines are not smooth when printing, so the text uses vector format when printing normally.
The text of the pirated book
However, this is not to say that the text line is not clear and necessarily pirated. Because sometimes publishers will also use pictures format files to print text because of mistakes or lack of common sense. Therefore, some readers judge piracy by this, which is not very accurate.
In addition, whether the text is clear or not is different in the eyes of many people. Maybe I think the ambiguity is okay in the eyes of the average reader. Moreover, many pirated books that are a little more "professional" have their text printed after manual re-entry and typesetting, and they also print text in vector format.
The advantage of this, I think, on the one hand, is that there is competition between pirates, and on the other hand, the typography style of many genuine text books is that the word is sparse, and we sometimes joke that this behavior is selling paper. For pirates, because copyright is stolen, the biggest cost is paper and printing, so they can reduce the use of paper after retype. Some genuine books have 300 pages of typography, and pirates may only need 200 pages. There is less paper, and there are naturally fewer layouts that need to be printed.
However, re-entered pirated books bring a new problem, that is, the increase in typos, omissions and even omissions occur from time to time. Because there is a strict three-proofing system to avoid these problems to the maximum extent during normal publication, there is no such process when piracy occurs.
However, with the improvement of shooting scanning technology now, more and more pirated copies are filmed, and few are re-entered by themselves. The re-entry method is more used in picture books with less text, especially in children's picture books.
Many pirated children's picture books, in order to save costs, change the proportion of book folios, the text on the genuine page changes to ah position is not suitable for the proportion of pirated books, so pirated text will be remade.
The text of the pirated picture book produced in this way will not have the problem of unclear text mentioned above. However, it is easy to make typos and omissions. At the same time, whether these re-entered texts are made according to the font of the genuine book probably depends on the mood of the pirate and the "professional ethics of piracy".
However, the text of the genuine book is also manually entered, and the design of the genuine font is also the subjective choice of the publisher's editor. Therefore, we cannot say that the typo is pirated, and the typo is particularly ugly.
The same is true for the printing and binding of books.
Books are printed one by one (a print is a large piece of paper with multiple pages together). When printing, we can only ensure that the color is uniform when printing the same sheet. Generally, the book is printed, if no one especially stares at the color of the previous batch must be very close, and the printing factory does not particularly chase the color of the previous batch, then the color of the book printed by different batches is also common.
Also, each batch may be printed on a different paper. The paper at the time of the previous printing was gone, too expensive, and it was found that it was not suitable, so it was very common to change the paper used in the next printing.
Note that I'm using the same batch here, not the same edition. Because reprinting and reprinting are two concepts in publishing. Reprinting is generally the same version, with minor modifications. Republishes can be the same version or different versions. The difference is that a new ISBN is required for a reprint is made of a "new" book.
As for the binding problem, such as loading the wrong page, missing the page, bleeding while cutting the white edge... Even glue quality design issues lead to page drops, etc., these problems are not exclusive to pirated books.
In short, using color, paper, and printing quality as standards to judge piracy is a very mechanical behavior. All I can say is that these are references, but not absolutely.
Guess whether the pirated version is genuine or genuine
03
How to judge piracy?
So, how exactly is piracy judged?
Personally, I think that if you are not a professional, you don't need to study, and you don't have to use your own half-understanding methods to make random judgments, or even scare yourself. The methods you have at your disposal are not accurate methods of judgment.
Simply put, as long as the book purchased from a formal channel will not be pirated. Formal channels refer to regular bookstores and regular online stores.
Regular bookstores are easy to understand, but which ones are formal when buying books online? JD.com, Dangdang's self-operated stores, Taobao's Tmall stores, and second-hand bookstores like Catching Fish are all formal channels. There are also some social stores and online stores that have direct cooperation with publishing houses.
Many people often say that they have bought pirated copies in Dangdang, and I think that one is that they may not buy books from Dangdang's self-operated stores, and the other is that they themselves are not very clear about what piracy is. With the current status of the jianghu, there is really no need to sell pirated copies, it is as if those hot pot shops may use gutter oil, but once they are bigger, it is unlikely, and the brand maintenance cost is too high.
And I found that, for example, Taobao stores that sell pirated books, they don't write about selling genuine copies. This kind of shop books if you buy, directly apply for a refund they will not refute. As for pdd, I've never used it, but from the level of condemnation in the industry, if the average reader just wants to buy a genuine version, why do they have to risk it there?
Other than that, we can't guarantee where books will come from. Especially the kind of people who sell low-priced paperback picture books in the circle of friends, nine times out of ten are pirated. I actually think that these people are knowing the law and breaking the law, and it is clearly written here to break the illusion of parents who want to buy both genuine and cheap books.
There's no free lunch, there's really no money, let's go to the library.
Many kindergartens are interesting, and the shelves are paperback pirated picture books. I don't know if the people in charge of buying books in these kindergartens really don't understand, or if there is some gray area? Parents who have babies in kindergarten can pay attention to it.
If you buy books collectively in kindergartens and schools, I recommend going to the regular bookstores and online stores mentioned above, their discounts will not be high. Buying books from some private middlemen is risky, either pirated or, the likelihood of buying a genuine bad book with bad content is extremely high. Or where do middlemen's profits come from? (Except for those who provide professional book selection services.) Some people like to contact the publishing house directly, but nowadays the children's book discount is very fierce, if the amount is not large enough (hundreds of books per book), it will not be more cost-effective to go directly to the publishing house than the online store promotion.
At present, there are very few publishing institutions in China that publish single paperback picture books, dolphin picture book garden is one, and there are very few booksellers to do some, so most of the single picture books have not been published in paperback at all. Because the profits of paperback editions are too low, it is difficult for publishers to survive and are not willing to do more.
In short, if you are not greedy and cheap, it is incredibly cheap, and it is actually quite difficult to buy pirated books.
In addition, there is another type of piracy that is often overlooked, that is, the electronic version. Many public accounts share electronic versions of a large number of books for free. These public names believe that they have no problem without sales, and they also help everyone. But we all know that now traffic itself means revenue. The traffic brought by these free shares is the purpose of these public names. Moreover, what qualifications or rights do these public names have to beg others' grievances? You use stolen meat bags to buy people's hearts and call it "sharing resources", which is actually fueling greed and hurting the rights and interests of creators.
04
The dangers of piracy and others
Most of us work on labor in exchange for income. Book authors have also invested labor to produce books, forming intellectual items with copyright value. One thing that's different is that if a book is popular, the value of copyright is higher, and the income of book authors (in royalties) is higher. This is different from the relatively fixed labor income of our average person.
Most of the books that have been pirated are such popular books. Some people with a hatred of the rich feel that the best-selling authors have earned enough, and they should share the fruits of their labor for free. Others naively believe that these people who make and sell pirated books, so that more "poor" people can see cheap books, are robbing the rich and helping the poor, while those who buy pirated books at least have the opportunity to read books.
Either way, it is a whitewash of their own illegal behavior.
In "Ode to Joy", Fan Shengmei's parents use similar ideas to exploit their daughters, thinking that you have made so much money why you can't support your brother with your family. But it is not that the purpose seems good, and any action to achieve the goal is right. What's more, you have no right to demand from others, and you have no right to distribute what does not belong to you.
If the act of stealing is not condemned or punished, then the result is "we all steal." After all, stealing from others is always much easier than doing it yourself.
In addition to that, I would like to talk about the publisher. Here, the publisher is not a perfect victim.
The chaotic market of high pricing and low discounts makes it more difficult for readers to distinguish between genuine and pirated books, good books and bad books. In the past, we knew that supermarket books were mostly in the form of high prices and low discounts, and this kind of book had its own fixed readership. But now? All books sell like this, leaving most readers without discernment to follow the price.
The quality of many genuine books' own text and printing is also worrying. I've seen many readers say with certainty that a book is pirated or fake, only to find out that there are typos or misalignments. It is difficult for the reader to understand why a picture book with a small number of words would have typos if it was genuine.
Are paperback picture books necessarily abandoned because of low profits? Do so many kindergartens buy paperback picture books just because they are cheap? When children read on their own, isn't the weight of hardcover picture books and the sharpness of the corners something publishers need to consider?
And, those that are made more and more refined, so refined that it is difficult to say whether we are looking at the contents of the book or what the book looks like. Isn't it our publisher's responsibility to make a book a kind of ornament?
Domestically, book piracy is a long-standing problem. In the past, it was a street of individual vendors walking the streets at night, and small bookstores were secretly open in the corner. Now, even more and more ordinary people are participating, and they are selling on the Internet with great fanfare and no guilt. If this way of connecting with books is to make people become ignorant and gradually lose the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, then we will not read such books.
Source: Summer Star
Author: Aiwowo, who loves to think
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