CHAT BACK: Font shop

It occurred to me that the font industry is perhaps going through the same piracy issues as the music industry did and still does. In fact, with fonts, the story has been going on much longer.

Because they have long been distributed as digital files (unlike music), fonts have always been the victim of piracy. Especially today when people carry around hard drives with their entire libraries of thousands of collected fonts. They are easily shared and copied.

The internet makes the distribution of pirated fonts very easy. So much so that a little digging around can get you pretty much whatever you want.

That’s similar to music. Sure, there will always be people who will hunt around on the web for illegal downloads, but if the price is right, the convenience factor can outweigh the small fee.

Evident in the popularity of iTunes. The vast population of music listeners prefer the convenience of paying a couple of dollars for a track, rather than get bogged down with bit torrents or Rapidshare. The quality is high, it organises itself in your music library, and it’s a small enough price to not have to worry.

Could this also work for fonts?

The price of fonts, of course, varies from free to hundreds of dollars. There is a huge variation of quality within that spectrum. Of course, in the most cases the expensive ones are the ones that are worth having.

There’s the catch. In order to see if a typeface you’re looking at is suitable for the job, your best preview is a line of type on the website. Not ideal if you’re intending using it across a range of applications. Foundries would do well to build fonts with a 24 hour expiry on them to allow us to test drive them.

In order to truly test a font legally, you’ll have to buy it. This could easily be a $400 spend for a font that you end up deciding wasn’t right after all – there’s no refunds. It’s little wonder that people send out the emails to all their mates to see if anyone has the font. Piracy is almost encouraged. There’s often the intention to buy the font if the job gets through, but that can easily be forgotten about.

Fonts are now considered free public property by a large population. Their incredibly inflated prices doesn’t sit well with their ease of illegal distribution. Like music, if the price is too high and you can get it easily for free, the majority will choose the free route.

The price of fonts is so high because piracy is so rife. Fonts take a long time to create and a lot of craft goes into their production. The creators should be rewarded for their craft and skill but also for their intellectual property.

If they opted to sell for a low price / high volume approach – rather than a high price to offset piracy – I feel they would sell more fonts.

Imagine a service for fonts like iTunes which all the foundries join to sell their fonts through. They set their own prices at around a few dollars per weight and offer a 24 hour trial. The software would also serve as the font manager for your Mac or PC.

When you want a new font for a job, you pop into the font store and browse a properly keyworded selection of all the fonts from all the foundries. You click a few on and you can try as many as you like for 24 hours. Then you buy the one you want.

MyFonts has come closest to the service we need, yet prices are still very variable and there is no try before you buy option.

I think a lot of font designers would like to use more fonts that are outside their own collections. They’d like to do it legally. There needs to be a rethink of the way fonts are sold and distributed, so that designers can use the fonts they want to, and the type designers get rewarded for their work.