Comments on: Majority of pirated files are not hacked ebooks: they are scanned pbooks, manuscripts and galleys

By: Blue Tyson

Blue Tyson — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 16:07:46 +0000

No, the only defense against copying is not to publish at all. That is amazingly obvious.

By: Mark Smith

Mark Smith — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 15:40:18 +0000

The comments of the panel and the responses above are so astonishingly out of touch with the real world, it’s not even funny.

At least 90% of pirated ebooks are NOT scanned copies: they’re ebooks from every single major publisher with the DRM removed. It takes literally seconds and the DRM is so insecure in the first place, it’s laughable.

Once the DRM is removed, the ebooks can be converted to ANY ebook format (again in seconds) and distributed at will to owners of Kindles, Sony eReaders, and iPads, all of whom can simply load up the ebooks and read them for free.

That, I’m afraid, is the state of the market. Unfortunately, publishers are sitting by and letting it happen, all the time uttering meaningless nonsense like “the majority of pirated files are not hacked ebooks”.

They are. The elephant is already in the room and with sales of Kindles and iPads increasing at a phenomenal rate, it’s about to break free.

There’s only defence against ebook piracy: don’t publish ebooks.

By: Blue Tyson

Blue Tyson — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:47:43 +0000

That is pretty hilarious. They only sell in the USA because they are not competent enough to handle different territorities? They change daily?

So Ireland moved to Africa recently? Or New Zealand joined the Russian Federation? Next week they’ll switch?

Or in other words, it appears that going forwards people not in the USA may as well do the same thing they do for other media for products from these companies.

By: ficbot

ficbot — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:55:58 +0000

Regarding this: “enforcing territories by the billing address of the purchaser seems to be becoming the standard.”

How about instead we move to a standard where concepts such as ‘territories’ which are outmoded in this digital age are done away with and customers are allowed to buy books with their money regardless of where they live?

I get why we used to have territories where physical books were concerned, but they truly make no sense in this day and age, and all they do is cost authors and publishers money by preventing legitimate customers from spending money they want to spend.

By: ficbot

ficbot — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:55:21 +0000

“enforcing territories by the billing address of the purchaser seems to be becoming the standard.”

By: Felix Torres

Felix Torres — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:37:45 +0000

Hmm, the publishers have Blio on the Brain.
Do they know something we don’t?

On piracy: what do the BPHs mean by piracy? The for-profit counterfeiters or the nickel-ndime “hobbyists”?

By: Rob Preece, Publisher

Rob Preece, Publisher — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:38:59 +0000

Not sure what this means from a behavioral standpoint. Should we decide that piracy is simply an intractable problem and go on? Or perhaps we should eliminate the paper option as soon as possible. One thing to consider–if eBooks aren’t being pirated, could this be because DRM actually works–at least in terms of increasing the cost of piracy. I don’t really believe it’s easier to scan a pBook than to break DRM but it is at least a plausible argument that needs some facts to contradict it if we’re going to use this statistic as a justification for abandoning DRM.

Again, as a caveat…I don’t like DRM, don’t use it for books sold through my site or most of my distribution. But that doesn’t mean I don’t see piracy as a significant threat to our industry.

Rob Preece
Publisher

By: Timothy

Timothy — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:29:17 +0000

I’ve been enjoying these summaries and have found them helpful. Interesting about piracy happening from Galleys (perhaps ARCs?) and the like. As a publisher, we’ve had similar problems with advance data–not in terms of piracy of course, but in terms of early metadata “polluting” vendors’ websites with inaccurate informatoin when vendors don’t bother updating from our ONIX feed.

Speaking of which . . . Paul, could you please correct the spelling of Onyx? Let’s not perpetuate this error. Onyx is a black gemstone. ONIX is an acronym that stands for “ONline Information eXchange.