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That’s not exactly what Allan Adler, a lawyer-lobbyist for the Association of American Publishers, said. But in a Cnet article on e-piracy–tied to the latest Harry Potter book–his observations were going off in that direction. Here’s some context from the article:

So is the trade in bootleg books the next Napster?

Not until people become more accustomed to reading books on PCs, say traders and industry associations.

“With published books, most are released in hardcopy print first,” noted Allan Adler, vice president for legal and government affairs for the AAP. “File sharing requires conversion through scanning, and just as consumers have not indicated that they are wildly accepting of e-readers, it’s not clear that most readers would find unauthorized scanned works downloaded online to be a preferable form for them.”

Adler pointed out that e-books have yet to become popular with consumers because of issues such as incompatible formats, short battery life and hard-to-read screens. Given these obstacles, Adler said, “it’s not clear we’re going to have the same kinds of problems” that the recording and software publishers have experienced.

Notice? Incompatible formats happened to be among the issues mentioned. Meanwhile I congratulate Adler, one of the most clueful people at AAP, for not panicking over the piracy. It just isn’t that big a revenue-loser now.

But piracy could well be a major threat in the very near future if the industry does not act sensibly. E-book technology has gotten much better in recent years, just like scanning. I actually would rather read books on my Dell Axim than on paper. With a combination of ClearType and TinyReader, even ASCII text looks great, and you can control just about everything from type size to the space between lines and paragraphs. Plus, the battery lasts more than a dozen hours. For me, the future has already come.

So is it time for oppressive Digital Rights Management schemes? No! Proprietary formats tend to use proprietary DRM, and the combination can be a disaster to the industry. Novelist Kate Saundby, confirming a hunch in an earlier TeleBlog post, emailed me yesterday:

I don’t use Secure MsReader…because Microsoft decided not to support the upgrade, which would have enabled me to do, for my Jornada 540 which it chose to term an “older Pocket PC.”

Since I’d had my Jornada 540 for slightly over six months at the time of this announcement, I began wondering what Microsoft calls “younger.”

Suffice it to say, MsReader became an instant dirty word with me and I’ve been happily using, and touting, the much more customer-savvy MobiPocket ever since.

Problem is, Kate Saundby can’t find all the books she wants in MobiPocket format. A little Catch-22 here.

The best solutions to the potential piracy threat? Fair prices and convenient shopping. And, ideally, TeleRead-style national digital libraries in the States and abroad. They could reduce the incentives for piracy by putting many copyrighted books on line for free (while compensating copyright holders).

And if the industry wants DRM? Then at least use a nonproprietary flavor–in a standard consumer-level format, as suggested by Jon Noring.

One hopes that the AAP will catch on and not allow software vendors and conversion houses to call the shots. Surely there are better ways of coping with e-piracy than letting the format mess hobble the industry.

 
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