Thursday, January 14, 2010

Who's Stealing Our Books?

According to Attributor Corporation, a privately held technology company that uses a content monitoring and programming platform to enable publishers to protect their content wherever it appears on the Internet:

  • Over 9 million pirated book copies were dowloaded in a recent study of 1,000 books of various genres
  • The pirated downloads represent potential losses of nearly $3,000,000 to the book publishing industry
  • Online book pirarcy represents approximately 10% of total U.S. book sales
For the entire Attributor U.S. Book Anit-Piracy Research Findings studfy, click here:  http://www.attributor.com/docs/Attributor_Book_Anti-Piracy_Research_Findings.pdf

Publishers Weekly cited the above study earlier today:  http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6714772.html?desc=topstory

PCWorld.com had an article about online book piracy on 12/23/2009:  http://www.pcworld.com/article/185335/ebook_piracy_the_publishing_industrys_next_epic_saga.html

The New York Times posted a scary article about book piracy online on 05/11/2009 - and it was about print book piracy on the Internet:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/technology/internet/12digital.html

Thank you to Nadene Carter of NorlightsPress for spotlighting this issue via a blog post by Doris Booth of Authorlink.com.
We writers need to spread the word; feel free to link to this blog post to share the information.

1 comment:

  1. You're right, Linda, it's a serious issue. There's been an ongoing thread about it in most of the online groups I'm involved in. Hard to know how to handle it - it seems so bloody sophisticated and there always seems to be a new variation of it.

    ReplyDelete