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]

Well, we've known for quite a while that men don't buy many books.

[I. J. Parker]

. . . but now we have proof that they do in fact read them? :)

[I. J. Parker]

No reason why mysteries can't do those things.

[I. J. Parker]

Well, you may be right. The girls (and their mothers) are into vampires, forsooth. And my books maybe sound like work, though I do a lot of action and a lot of men like them.

[Eric Christopherson]

Who is Verso and who paid for the survey? You know the Tobacco Institute used to come out with studies suggesting that cigarettes were good for you.

If it turns out this is a legitimate survey, then the findings bode poorly for the future, even the near future. Criminalize this shit, I say. Criminalize and prosecute.

[I. J. Parker]

Verso appears to be a "book advertiser."

[John McFetridge]

It would be silly not to think that there will be some pirating of books - there is shoplifting from stores, afterall.

It would be nice to see a breakdown of the books, see how many are textbooks, that kind of thing.

At Christmas my brother-in-law bought his daughter and iPod Touch, with the largest memory available and he was very proud that it could hold so many songs - I forget how many thousands. I was surprised and said, "Wow, how's she going to be able to afford that many songs?" She told me it was okay, the songs are free. I wish the iPod was free and you had to pay for the music.

[Jon Loomis]

I think the shoplifting analogy is pretty weak. It's more like breaking into the publisher's warehouse and cleaning the place out. The good news is that the study suggests that our demographic--predominantly women, predominantly 40+--is pretty unlikely to file-share us into oblivion.

[Joe Barone]

Isn't it funny? I own and regularly use a Kindle (and have for a year), but I didn't even know the name of these sites until I read them here.

[John McFetridge]

Here's an interview with a "Book pirate."

http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/confessions-of-a-book-pirate.html

Nothing new or surprising, pretty much says exactly what you'd expect.

[I. J. Parker]

Fascinating! He has uploaded 50 books in one month to the Piracy Site. Since he explains how he does this via scanning hard copy, the whole process was very time-consuming. Does one assume he earns a living doing this?

[John Dishon]

How would he earn a living by sharing things for free?