E-Book Piracy facts

[I. J. Parker]

This information may be interesting. It comes from "Publishers Lunch":

"On the hot-button topic of piracy, Verso's survey found that "over 28 percent of e-reader owners have used unregulated file-sharing services, such as RapidShare, Megaupload and Hot File to download at least one e-book within the last twelve months, and 6 percent have used such services to download ten or more titles during this interval. (Sixty-four percent did not download any ebooks from such services.)

Their survey also indicates that "questionable downloading, while affecting all age and gender brackets, is concentrated disproportionately among younger male readers. Among males aged 18-34, over 45 percent report engaging in such downloading activity within the past twelve months. Nearly 13 percent have downloaded ten or more e-books from file-sharing services, more than twice the level of the survey population as a whole." McKeown will have much more data and analysis to share in his DBW presentation."

[John McFetridge]

It is funny to see ads for Coke and thingslike that on torrent sites, but other than the usual suspects (hardware makers, ISP, cable companies, however you get your connection and the advertisers) no one else is making any money from this.

[I. J. Parker]

People have to buy memberships to those sites, I believe. Money is involved. Why would someone go to that much trouble to make books available to others for free? That doesn't make any sense to me.

[Eric Christopherson]

What lame self-rationalizations for stealing.