Interestingly, the pdf sales model seems to be working in knitting design right now - there are several people making a living (and many more people supplementing their income) selling their designs in the form of pdfs. Many of the people doing well started with a free pattern, either via a site like Knitty.com or via their own blog.
The average price is around $5, you can either run a cart yourself or use a site like Ravelry (which is brilliant in many different ways - the use of metadata to let people really dig through their database is excellent[1]) to sell it and I rarely see much evidence of piracy. This has been a massive change in favour of the designers because before this became popular most designers sold to magazines who pay them a fixed amount per design. And this amount hasn't changed since the 80s, which means the real value of what they were making from them has dropped significantly in that time.
The most popular (I'm using made the most often as the metric for this) for sale design on ravelry right now is made by a woman who lives in Edinburgh, there are 8700ish versions of it made or being made and the pattern costs 3 quid. I've made that project twice, so even assuming some piracy and and some duplicates, 4000 times 3 quid is not to be sniffed at. It also isn't the only source of money for the designer, as a popular and well respected designer and blogger she gets paid to do classes too.
So digital versions doesn't have to automatically lead to piracy wrecking everything for the producers.
I wonder what the difference is. Wheher Knitters are just not the kind of people who break copyright for moral reasons, or for technical reasons, or something else.
I say this as a hooker (er, crochet-er) who loves the Rav: there's not a huge demand for knitting/crochet patterns, at least when compared to things like mainstream fiction, so your sharing options are basically a) send the file to a friend you know, or b) create a torrent that no one's going to know to go looking for to download. It seems to me like if I wanted the pattern and I didn't know a buddy who had it to share, I'd be better off just coughing up the few bucks than trying to magic some free version of it.
I think the 'few bucks' part of that statement is important, too, because I'm disinclined to pay $30 to someone I perceive as a rich and famous author (especially if I know a lot of it will be going to the publishing company), but I'm very pleased with the idea of giving the price of a coke or two to a fellow crafter directly.
Yeah - it seems to be the "niche" thing I mentioned earlier. Which is fair enough - it looks like niches will be safe from mass copyright infringement.
Depends upon the niche - I know lots of authors of role-playing game pdfs for whom piracy is a big issue/ I think you hit the knitting needle on the head when you said that knitters just aren't the kind of people who break copyright. I fear that role-players (at least some of them) just might be.
I think that roleplayers skew that was an unusual amount. As we're a massive bunch of geeks. Knitters less so, but they'd probably still have problems if they were mainstream.
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The average price is around $5, you can either run a cart yourself or use a site like Ravelry (which is brilliant in many different ways - the use of metadata to let people really dig through their database is excellent[1]) to sell it and I rarely see much evidence of piracy. This has been a massive change in favour of the designers because before this became popular most designers sold to magazines who pay them a fixed amount per design. And this amount hasn't changed since the 80s, which means the real value of what they were making from them has dropped significantly in that time.
The most popular (I'm using made the most often as the metric for this) for sale design on ravelry right now is made by a woman who lives in Edinburgh, there are 8700ish versions of it made or being made and the pattern costs 3 quid. I've made that project twice, so even assuming some piracy and and some duplicates, 4000 times 3 quid is not to be sniffed at. It also isn't the only source of money for the designer, as a popular and well respected designer and blogger she gets paid to do classes too.
So digital versions doesn't have to automatically lead to piracy wrecking everything for the producers.
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I think the 'few bucks' part of that statement is important, too, because I'm disinclined to pay $30 to someone I perceive as a rich and famous author (especially if I know a lot of it will be going to the publishing company), but I'm very pleased with the idea of giving the price of a coke or two to a fellow crafter directly.
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