A study by a company that helps track pirated digital books estimates that there were 9 million illegal downloads of co
pyrighted books in the final months of last year. Attributor, which works for publishers including Hachette Book Group and John Wiley & Sons, scanned 25 Web sites that offer readers downloadable content, looking for 913 titles across categories ranging from business and investing to fiction.Rich Pearson, general manager of Attributor, said although not every pirated copy represented a lost sale, the potential loss to the publishing industry could be as high as $3 billion. Some analysts doubted that piracy was as big a problem for the book industry as the study suggested. Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of Idea Logical Company, a book industry consultant, said many people who might illegally download an e-book would never have bought it in the first place.
2 comments:
wow. I figured that would start happening but the pace is pretty fast.
A can of worms for sure. The public expects anything that comes via a computer screen to be free. They'll pay only for the hardware.
The debates I've seen on various blogs confirm this with the uninformed defending their "right" to share IP with all their "friends" and making comparisons with public libraries, where books can already be borrowed and read "for free".
Mind you, many of these comments were made by Americans unaware that much of the First World has at least made a start on PLR (Public Lending Right) schemes, even though it has yet to work out how to make them compatible globally. It still bugs me that a German be paid UK PLR on his books in British libraries but a New Zealander can't!
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