Ebook Piracy- Do Publishers Need To Be Worried?

Ebook Piracy- Do Publishers Need To Be Worried?

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Ebooks are getting popular by the day. A look at the statistics released by International Digital Publishing Forum for 2010 seconds that fact. The sale of ebooks in USA alone was USD 119,700,000 for the third quarter of 2010. Thats up from USD 4,900,000 for the same quarter in 2006, a jump of almost 25%. However, theres a dark side to the popularity of digital content, and thats piracy.

Although there are no clear numbers to suggest the extent of piracy in the epublishing domain, its definitely there and seemingly on the rise. However, so far, publishers and other research agencies have failed to quantify the extent of ebook piracy because of the lack of proper tools. There are software like Attributor which track the content, but the methodology adopted by it to track ebook piracy is inconclusive.

In laymans terms, Attributor tracks the occurrence of all the links for a particular ebook on piracy platforms like Piratebay and counts them as piracy. And thats where the flaw lies. Just because a link is on Piratebay does not mean that the users are downloading it, and hence, the flawed data.
Its the lack of comprehensive data which is preventing experts from saying anything conclusive about piracy of ebooks. However, if we draw a broad picture of the whole scenario, theres enough reason to be worried.

According to analysts, the instant availability of songs is what triggered piracy in movies and music. Of course, theres the whole issue of freebies as well, but thats a close second. Instant availability is what is triggering ebook piracy too. Users, through piracy platforms, can download a few thousand books in less than an hour. Compare that to a print library of 50 books, which takes years to build; definitely a huge temptation for ebook readers.

And if you thought you can incorporate strict Digital Rights Management (DRM) in your ebooks and thwart piracy, you are mistaken. DRM can easily be broken into by a person with basic technological knowledge. In fact, most of the pirated versions of ebooks available right now on the internet once had DRM.
So, where does that leave publishers? It leaves publishers to think about innovative ways to minimize the piracy phenomenon. They can take a cue from Apples products in India. We dont know whether Apple is aware of it or not, but piracy is rampant for Apples products in India. It started with iPhone and has now moved to iPad 2; the reason- lack of availability. The time gap between the global launch of Apples products and an Indian launch is usually one year, which triggers piracy.

Taking a cue from that, if publishers can make their ebooks available to a larger audience instantly, it can and will encourage readers to go for the authentic version. For example, releasing only the English version of ebooks and then waiting for a couple of years to release them in other languages isnt smart. Thats traditional and traditional is dumb in this age of epublishing.
The internet is a global space and its impossible to stop users from reaching out to information available out there. Instead of stopping them, publishers need to be proactive to meet their demands before pirates can.

Second is the issue of price. Its common knowledge that most home users use pirated Windows and other Microsoft products because of their hefty price tag. That leads to a big chunk of revenue lost for Microsoft.

Instead, if Microsoft could bring the price of its products down, users would be encouraged to buy authentic products. The same goes for ebooks.
The need of the hour is to be innovative. Tracking down pirates and shutting them down is not the solution, because they will resurface as someone else. Understanding the readers and satisfying their expectations is whats needed, and publishers must act sooner rather than later, because piracy spreads like wildfire in the online world.

About the Author:
BookGenie is one of the well known service providers for K-12 book publishers, STM Publishers and Trade Publishers across the world. Publishers and online libraries or eBook stores get the best support for the services like epublishing, typesetting, epub conversion, data conversion, XML conversion, ebook conversion, content management solutions, DTD development, scanning and imaging, OCR conversion, digital imaging.
Visit http://www.bookgenie.in



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