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Anti-piracy company estimates e-book piracy has cost US publishers $2.8 billion
March 3, 2010 | 7:15 am
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By Chris Meadows
![image53[1]](http://www.teleread.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/image531.png "image53[1]")
VentureBeat has a story about a new study claiming that e-book piracy has cost American publishers $2.8 billion so far.
The study estimates that 10,000 copies of each e-book are downloaded via peer-to-peer (13,000 for best-sellers), and some books can lose as much as $1 million dollars each. The biggest source for illicit books is RapidShare, with a 35.6% share of e-book piracy, says the study.
The study comes from Attributor, a company that sells anti-piracy services to authors and publishers, which immediately set off some alarm bells for me. Of course, the biggest reason to take such studies with a grain of salt is that they necessarily assume that if the “pirated” e-books had not been downloaded, they would instead have been purchased. In fact, it is likely that the majority of downloaded e-books are never even opened by the downloader.
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Comments:
“In fact, it is likely that the majority of downloaded e-books are never even opened by the downloader”
Of course you meant to say “In my opinion,….”
I doubt it’s a verifiable fact.
Of course, the biggest reason to take such studies with a grain of salt is that they are done by a company that wants a cut of the supposed missing $2.8 billion! Pardon my French, but this ‘study’ is malarkey!
All the piracy studies, and in fact most studies in general, are bullcrap. Studies are funded by companies or organizations, most with an agenda, who want to see a certain result and alter data to get that desired result. So this study has as much validity as the same ones put out by the MAFIAA; studies that have always been able to be proven false and lying about the numbers involved. This is no different.