Fri 29 Jan 2010
The Millions website has an interesting piece about book piracy plus an interview with someone who makes ebook files illegally and shares them across BitTorrent. According to the piece, book piracy now carves out $3 billion a year in potential revenue via file sharing, and this figure is bound to go up with the release of more pop readers like the iPad.
My favorite part is where the pirate spends up to 40 hours proofreading the OCR files. Fastidious.
Link to the article/interview.
Funny comments about the iPad.
February 1st, 2010 at 5:04 pm
When I was an undergrad I remember seeing students copy entire 300+ page books on the $.10/page copiers. The retail cost of the books back then were frequently much less than the $30.00 spent on copying. The only reasoning I could ever come up with was that the copy-ers did not want to wait the 4-8 week shipping time to receive a book, when compared to only an hour to make a copy. Approaching piracy with a purely dollars-and-sense logic is futile.
May 7th, 2010 at 2:23 pm
Publishers will have to copy the music industry and acknowledge that you can’t charge the same for just the intellectual rights as you do for the intellectual rights AND a physical copy. O’reilly have the right idea – I can buy an ebook for $5 for my iphone that costs $40 for the physical copy. When you are fighting people who can copy all of your intellectual property onto a thumb drive you have to fight back with a convenient, cheap and legal alternative.