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By Paul Biba

baby pirate.jpegThe Financial Times has a short article today about digital piracy and it quoted Gail Rebuck, chairman and CEO of The Random House Group:

At current levels, Dame Gail said, the industry could cope with the pirates’ challenge, but when e-books reached a significantly higher level of overall sales, “that is going to be a huge cost for the publisher”.

Now let’s go back to Digital Book World in January. In a TeleRead article I covered the presentation by Macmillan President Brian Napack. In his speech he said that very few legitimately protected ebooks have been hacked and then went on to say that the most common stuff found on line is pre-publication manuscripts. Where do you think these came from?

Ignorance is rampant enough so that I have never heard one mention from any publishing source of the probable major wellspring of piracy: scanned books. After all, the Harry Potter books never went digital, but pirated copies from scanned pbooks were on the web within hours of the books’ release.

The same Financial Times article, though, does quote Tom Weldon, deputy chief executive of Penguin as saying:

“The only way to fight piracy is to publish digital content across as many formats as possible, through as many channels, at a fair price. If we go for exclusive or proprietary formats, we’re completely screwed.”

 
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