Piracy of digital books on the rise
With the popularity of e-books increasing, the proliferation of the digital piracy of e-books is also growing fast, leaving the publishing industry in a quandary about protecting their interests.
Book publishers do not wish to see publishing go the same route as music publishing, with free download sites around the world, sticky issues of policing, and many people not even seeing digital theft of a song as a problem. It is not uncommon for a book to sell more copies as an e-book than as a physical paper book, especially with new releases. That happened with Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” on Amazon. That made a lot of headlines.
But lesser known is the fact that less than 24 hours after Brown’s book sold its first copy, it was available for free on a number of file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent, according to a CNN story. Within days, it had been downloaded for free more than 100,000 times. With the publishing industry already nearly in free fall, these are problems that they need to solve and solve quickly. With electronic reading devices like the Kindle, the Sony Reader, the Nook, apps on smartphones and Apple’s much-rumored iTablet increasing the demand for e-books, experts say the problem may only get worse.
Publishers, like Hachette Book Group say, “Piracy is a serious issue for publishers. [We] consider copyright protection to be of paramount importance.” Authors, like novelist and poet Sherman Alexie agree. Alexie has said, “I’d be really worried if I were Stephen King or James Patterson or a really big bestseller that when their books become completely digitized, how easy it’s going to be to pirate them. … With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership — of artistic ownership — goes away.”
In some ways, all of these means of distribution are exciting for authors and publishers alike. There are so many new ways to reach an audience today. At the same time, though, the piracy issue is terrifying to both groups and solutions need to be found. A way needs to worked out to make the transition from physical books and music to digital books and music, if for no other reason than that the change is inevitable. The fair way, whatever it is, will protect the owners of the intellectual property rights, and not unfairly take advantage of the consumer. Part of it might involve the removal of the many sticky layer of business and middlemen between the owner and the user.
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