eBook piracy - does it matter?

If you wanted to know how many pirated e-books are being downloaded, BitTorrent would be a good starting place. TorrentFreak, a blog that covers these speedy, P2P downloads, recently decided to check the numbers. The question: did e-book torrent downloading become more popular after the iPad’s launch?

The answer was a resounding “kinda.” While almost none of Amazon’s top ten appeared on public torrent trackers, six out of 10 books in the business category were available. When TorrentFreak checked the before and after numbers, it found that the number of BitTorrent book downloads grew by an average of 78 percent in the days after the iPad went on sale. Even so, the numbers were still tiny compared to the traffic in movies and music.

What does this mean? First, e-book piracy is still a small problem. Right now it’s a very geeky pastime, which is reflected in the skew of these titles (Getting Things Done, Freakonomics and The Tipping Point were on the TorrentFreak list). This matches up with the usual early adopter profile, the people who would have bought the iPad on its opening weekend.

But where geeks go first, the general public will follow. This happened with music. Now almost nobody I know buys CDs: They pirate, and even my most hardcore book-loving friend is now a Kindle convert. So will the iPad bring this attitude to books?

First, there is the problem of digitizing books. Right now, the best place to download e-books is via irc (Internet Relay Chat), online chatrooms that predate the web. The shared books are tiny text files. Storage and download speed are no problem, but the subject matter is heavily skewed toward popular trash and sci-fi. Original files come from those with enough time and patience to scan, OCR (optical character recognition) and proofread the resulting files, but the majority of what you find are duplicates of these. Contrast this to music, where you pop a CD into your computer and wait a few minutes while it rips the tracks and downloads the metadata.

It is unlikely that there will be a way to scan books so easily at home anytime soon, but what about sharing e-books themselves? If Apple makes its iBooks app available on the Mac or PC, then copying an entire book, even if protected by DRM, will be as simple as automating screenshots of pages and sending them to an OCR program. Only a single copy of a book will need to be pirated thusly and it will then be compromised forever.

Blaming the iPad is stupid, though. If it causes a rise in book piracy, it is only because it is driving demand. The book industry should embrace this and give us what we want: cheap books, published day-and-date with their paper equivalents, along with all back-catalog titles made available. And preferably DRM-free.

There is evidence that this is happening already. The iBooks Store will be rolling out with the iPad as it goes on sale across the world. The iTunes Music Store, by contrast, took years to negotiate itself into non-U.S. markets, and in many countries you still can’t get movies or TV shows. That these deals are in place mere months after the iPad was announced shows that the book industry is at least trying to move into the digital future.

The iPad is fast shaping up to be the go-to e-reading device. Between Apple’s iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle for iPad and the slew of other e-readers in the App Store (although curiously, our favorite Stanza is still absent on the iPad), you can buy and read almost any e-book out there. Blaming the iPad for kicking-off book piracy is foolish. It’s an opportunity, and if book publishers mess it up, they have already seen what happened to the recording industry.