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French survey: 95 percent of pirated e-books are NOT online in legal editions
October 21, 2009 | 2:11 pm
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By David Rothman
Make e-books available legally and conveniently at fair prices. That’s the best single anti-piracy measure.
Now consider a new piracy study from France. Ninety-five percent of the pirated e-books discovered—perhaps 6,000 or so—are not online in authorized editions.
Granted, this isn’t proven cause-effect; the above percentage could simply reflect the slowness of French publishers in getting their wares online. Just eight percent of the top 50 bestsellers in France are legally buyable in E.
Cause-effect or not, I hope that French houses will still consider the wisdom of using attractive legal editions to preempt the pirated ones. Same for American publishers who fantasize that they can delay e-book editions in hopes of spiking up p-book sales. Readers will seek out the material when they want it and in the formats they want. Harry Potter books, not legally available in E, are among the favorite illegal titles in P2P. While the numbers are small compared to French publishers’ total output, you can bet the number will grow, as the price of e-book readers declines and the technology improves.
Here are some other findings from the study—by Mathias Duval (via Nicolas Gary and our other friends at ActuaLitte):
- Scientific, technical and medical books comprised 1,000-1,500 of the pirated text-focused books.
- 3,000-4,500 were comics.
- 200-300 were audio books.
Below is an except from the study, via a rough Google translation and a little tweaking:
On average, there is therefore mainly PDF files and PDF text image. No ePub? "No, actually ePub files are converted to PDF," explains Mathias Duval. With an average of 27.9MB for a pirated book, we find the predominance of files shown. In fact, 38 percent of the books are PDF images vs. 42 percent in PDF text and 36.1 percent for BD and 62.1 percent in image format.
The variety of the authors most prone to piracy is fascinating: Deleuze, Werber, Nothomb, Beigbeder Rowling…Sartre, Camus, Pennac, and Bradbury.
Image: Part of a Wikipedia-reproduced drawing from a performance of The Pirates of Penzance.
Technorati Tags: France,French publishing
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Comments:
BTW, “BD” in the translated excerpt is short for “bande dessinée” or “comic-book” in English.
Yes, I am afraid we have the same situation in Spain, if not worse. Publishers can whine all they want about piracy, but it is them who should be ashamed for turning customers into pirates.
Personally, I buy the pbook and then grab a pirate copy. I have recently bought an Opticbook scanner to do the scans myself when there are none available.
PDF and comics? Sounds like it’s another case of checking the wrong places for pirated content. PDF has long been popular for technical material, but comics and manga are primarily distributed as jpg files in archives (lzh, rar and cbr for instance). Fiction can easily be found in torrents and on irc, and they’re usually distributed in lit, txt, rtf and html. There’s also a lot more of it than a measly 6000 titles, and the fact that they don’t even mention the existence of it sounds like they need to do better research. Either that, or it’s just a situation that’s peculiar to the French
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Indeed. 6000 titles is laughable. Maybe they’re only looking in France or something.
Yes, the study focused only on copyrighted titles in French published by French publishers.
PS: a note to the author of the article : my name is “Daval” and not “Duval”
Pirated pdf’s of books is crushing the publishing business. A major plus for Communists. Sites like library.nu/ifile.it and piratebay are the major ones. The sad thing is that library.nu/ifile.it is out of Ireland. I thought that Ireland was an ally of the US.