You can find almost anything on the Internet if you look long and hard enough. And pirated versions of copyrighted files are there for those who want them. While music and movies are the main media illegally shared on the Web, software, TV shows, apps, and books are also available. And that last category, books, may be about to send eBook readers and hardware mainstream.

The music industry really didn’t cope too well when Napster came along in 1999 and made the business of sharing files online a mainstream, everyday convenience. That was the same year that music sales peaked, and ever since they have been dropping, no doubt partly due to the availability of copyrighted files online.

Now, the publishing industry faces a similar problem. Until now, books have been available as physical objects, to be bought, read, and then kept on bookshelves for years to come. But eBook readers such as the Amazon Kindle, which has today been lowered in price and gone international, are changing that long-held status quo very quickly.

There are already a great deal of pirated copies of books available online, with The New York Times claiming that there were 166 different copies of The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown’s latest epic, available on the Internet. These were available on 11 different sites, with RapidShare accounting for 102 of the instances. All of which amount to blatant piracy.

I believe that it’s this piracy that will lead to eBook readers going mainstream. While a certain amount of people will pay the asking price both for the hardware and then digital copy of each book they want in their collection, it won’t be enough to send the business mainstream. But once the presence of pirated copies of these books becomes common knowledge the whole thing becomes, rightly or wrongly, much more appealing.

Which means that the publishing industry faces the same problem that has hit the music, movie, and games industries in recent years. How it chooses to deal with it could alter the course of books and writing for future generations.

None of which will really bother the manufacturers of the eBook readers, which will likely find demand scaling up as a direct result of piracy.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 8:27 pm under Internet, Opinion, Piracy, Technology.

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