That's the problem. No one knows. The publishing industry saw what was happening to the music industry fifteen years ago and thought there was no way the same thing would happen to them.
I'd like to see book publishers band together to fund group of pirate-stalking hitmen -- I mean crack intellectual rights attorneys -- to make some high-profile examples and lobby the government to negotiate with countries currently providing cyber safe harbor to those who feel entitled to give away or illegally sell our products.
E-piracy is a tremendously important issue, and individual authors (or publishers working alone) have no chance to make a dent.
I have heard someone speaking for one of the publishers that they feel that the availability of reasonably-priced e-books from reputable (read: virus-free) vendors is their best deterrent. I think that's a good point.
Price is not the point. The pirates may say it is, but they aren't telling the whole truth.
As we see on Astatalk, if they get an e-book "free" and like it, they request the next one. They won't buy it.
Within hours of the next book in a series being released for sale, it is released on pirate sites.
The truth is, piracy pays the pirates. Pirates won't reveal all the ways they make money on the backs of authors. They cheerfully upload copyrighted material to file storage/file sharing sites in breach of the TOS, and collect commissions for all the unique visitors who swarm to download "free books". They set up sites on Blogspot and Wattpad with paid advertising placed through Google, or Yahoo, or AdBrite.
Adverts pay. AdBrite has very good TOS barring bloggers from publishing copyrighted works, but the pirates ignore the TOS they signed.
And those are the pirates who pretend to be goodhearted "sharers" who aren't monetizing their theft.
Then, there are the pirates who go on EBay, iOffer etc etc and sell bootlegged ebooks, or burn them onto discs and think that makes copyright infringement legal. Or, they think its OK to sell one paperback and give away "as a bonus" the same authors' entire works on ebook to sweeten the price of the one paperback!
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E-piracy is a tremendously important issue, and individual authors (or publishers working alone) have no chance to make a dent.
I have heard someone speaking for one of the publishers that they feel that the availability of reasonably-priced e-books from reputable (read: virus-free) vendors is their best deterrent. I think that's a good point.
As we see on Astatalk, if they get an e-book "free" and like it, they request the next one. They won't buy it.
Within hours of the next book in a series being released for sale, it is released on pirate sites.
The truth is, piracy pays the pirates. Pirates won't reveal all the ways they make money on the backs of authors. They cheerfully upload copyrighted material to file storage/file sharing sites in breach of the TOS, and collect commissions for all the unique visitors who swarm to download "free books". They set up sites on Blogspot and Wattpad with paid advertising placed through Google, or Yahoo, or AdBrite.
Adverts pay. AdBrite has very good TOS barring bloggers from publishing copyrighted works, but the pirates ignore the TOS they signed.
And those are the pirates who pretend to be goodhearted "sharers" who aren't monetizing their theft.
Then, there are the pirates who go on EBay, iOffer etc etc and sell bootlegged ebooks, or burn them onto discs and think that makes copyright infringement legal. Or, they think its OK to sell one paperback and give away "as a bonus" the same authors' entire works on ebook to sweeten the price of the one paperback!