Vox, in an article by Phil Edwards, talks about how the book
industry in Elizabethan England through the nineteenth century faced issues
that foreshadow media piracy today. It is titled “What Elizabethan Book Pirates
in the 1500s Cam Teach Us about Piracy Today”, link here.
In those days, publishers were “licensed” to print and
distribute certain content, especially religious or political. Publishers accommodated to piracy in order to
control it. Licenses were sold, but
underground, illegal presses existed.
The idea of “licensing” the right to publish might have seen
natural in early centuries after earlier books were copied by hand. A copy of a book was itself a valuable
commodity. How different that seems
today, where companies and authors have physical and digital copies of their
work (the later often free or much cheaper) competing with each other. That’s true with music and video, too.
But fiction was popular, and “fan fiction” was sometimes
included with pirated copies.
The article notes how “John Wolfe” became the “Martin Luther
of printing” for printing works that he didn’t have a license to produce. In those days, government saw public speech
as a privilege to be regulated.
Today, "print on demand" makes the physical copy less significant than ever. It would seem that even traditional trade publishers could move toward POD technology after filling initial store wholesale (through distributors like Ingram) and initial online purchases with a print run. But then how would the book distribution business change? There might be less difference between trade and subsidy publishing, and a lot more of it might be "cooperative" as well as POD. Branding in publishing would then be affected.
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