That’s what TorrentFreak says about some research they did after the iPad launch. Here are some snippets:
To determine if Apple’s iPad has had en affect on eBook piracy we looked at the number of downloaded titles before and after its introduction. We decided to focus our research on the 10 best selling eBooks on Amazon which seemed to be a good starting point. The problem, however, is that none of these books are available on public BitTorrent, nor could we find them on file-hosting services or Usenet.
This is interesting information just by itself. Maybe ebook piracy isn’t as bad as publishers perceive.
Since that didn’t work, they decided to check out the 10 best selling paperbacks in the business category. 6 of these were available on BitTorrent.
… we tracked the download numbers from Saturday till Thursday, a week before the iPad launch and the days after. By comparing the data from these two samples we found that the number of unauthorized eBook downloads on BitTorrent grew by 78% on average, a significant increase. It is worth noting that all of the six eBooks had more downloads after the iPad launch than before.
However, the absolute numbers are tiny: 134, 192, 52 and 82. Nothing to put the publishers out of business yet. Check out the article for more details.
This news makes so much sense. Books are not consumed by morons. People with no morals will download and watch a movie, or rip and listen to music, but they don’t read a book.