Book Piracy on the Web

With all the talk about DRM, it seems there is little publishers can do about it if people want to pirate books and it doesn't take a Dimitry Sklyarov. All you need is a copy of the book you want to "give away" and a scanner with optical character recognition software and the patience to scan the book, clean it up and post to a web site. It is not difficult to do. In fact this is what the volunteers at Project Gutenberg do (but with books that are in the public domain). Envisional found nearly 7,300 copyrighted titles available for free through file-sharing networks such as Gnutella, including more than 700 individual copies of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. Envisional says the files it found are simply the tip of the iceberg. "It's a relatively conservative estimate of the number of illegal books out there," says an Envisional executive. The books can be downloaded in a variety of formats from plain text to abobe e-book ready for reading on the screen or printing if the recipient wishes to go through the trouble. And why not print it if you're getting it for free? To get these books you don't need to be a hacker, just the ability to download a file.

Why would people do this? It isn't for personal profit, the books are given away for free. The person placing the book already owns a copy, so why do this. Well, I think it is for the same reason that people share music on the internet - they can't afford (or justify) buying the product and they see the producer of the product as a large multinational, faceless conglomerate. Which in a lot of cases is true. However, it is still the artist (who gets the smallest cut of the pie) who suffers the most. The reading public can't understand anymore than people who buy music, why the prices of the product keeps going up while everything else goes down. The most common comparison is videos and DVD's. The public sees them in the same arena as books and music because they use them in the same fashion. They are sources of entertainment for leisure time. Yet movies get cheaper and books and CD's get more expensive everyday. Until the music and book publishers find a way to sell their product at lower prices, they are going to be prime targets for piracy.

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