- 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
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.
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.
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