Is the iPad Driving E-Book Piracy, and Does It Matter?

If you wanted to know how many pirated e-books are being downloaded, BitTorrent would be a good starting place. TorrentFreak, a blog that covers these speedy, P2P downloads, recently decided to check the numbers. The question: did e-book torrent downloading become more popular after the iPad’s launch?

The answer was a resounding “kinda.” While almost none of Amazon’s top ten appeared on public torrent trackers, six out of 10 books in the business category were available. When TorrentFreak checked the before and after numbers, it found that the number of BitTorrent book downloads grew by an average of 78 percent in the days after the iPad went on sale. Even so, the numbers were still tiny compared to the traffic in movies and music.

What does this mean? First, e-book piracy is still a small problem. Right now it’s a very geeky pastime, which is reflected in the skew of these titles (Getting Things Done, Freakonomics and The Tipping Point were on the TorrentFreak list). This matches up with the usual early adopter profile, the people who would have bought the iPad on its opening weekend.

But where geeks go first, the general public will follow. This happened with music. Now almost nobody I know buys CDs: They pirate, and even my most hardcore book-loving friend is now a Kindle convert. So will the iPad bring this attitude to books?

First, there is the problem of digitizing books. Right now, the best place to download e-books is via irc (Internet Relay Chat), online chatrooms that predate the web. The shared books are tiny text files. Storage and download speed are no problem, but the subject matter is heavily skewed toward popular trash and sci-fi. Original files come from those with enough time and patience to scan, OCR (optical character recognition) and proofread the resulting files, but the majority of what you find are duplicates of these. Contrast this to music, where you pop a CD into your computer and wait a few minutes while it rips the tracks and downloads the metadata.

It is unlikely that there will be a way to scan books so easily at home anytime soon, but what about sharing e-books themselves? If Apple makes its iBooks app available on the Mac or PC, then copying an entire book, even if protected by DRM, will be as simple as automating screenshots of pages and sending them to an OCR program. Only a single copy of a book will need to be pirated thusly and it will then be compromised forever.

Blaming the iPad is stupid, though. If it causes a rise in book piracy, it is only because it is driving demand. The book industry should embrace this and give us what we want: cheap books, published day-and-date with their paper equivalents, along with all back-catalog titles made available. And preferably DRM-free.

There is evidence that this is happening already. The iBooks Store will be rolling out with the iPad as it goes on sale across the world. The iTunes Music Store, by contrast, took years to negotiate itself into non-U.S. markets, and in many countries you still can’t get movies or TV shows. That these deals are in place mere months after the iPad was announced shows that the book industry is at least trying to move into the digital future.

The iPad is fast shaping up to be the go-to e-reading device. Between Apple’s iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle for iPad and the slew of other e-readers in the App Store (although curiously, our favorite Stanza is still absent on the iPad), you can buy and read almost any e-book out there. Blaming the iPad for kicking-off book piracy is foolish. It’s an opportunity, and if book publishers mess it up, they have already seen what happened to the recording industry.

This piece was written by Charlie Sorrel and can be found here: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/05/is-the-ipad-driving-e-book-piracy-and-does-it-matter/

Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/tag/e-books/#ixzz0qothii8S

eBook Piracy "Surges" after iPad Launch

This blog was written by Ernesto on TorrenFreak. Here is the original address: http://torrentfreak.com/ebook-piracy-surges-after-ipad-launch-100409/ 

Here is the blog: 

With 500.000 iPads sold in the first week, Apple’s new multi-gadget is already a force to be reckoned with. As book publishers see the iPad as a potential threat to their revenues, we take a look to find out what happened to eBook piracy in the last week. The results are surprising.

The introduction of Apple’s iPod marked a significant change in the music industry’s business. When it was first released in 2001 there were no digital music stores online. By the end of that decade the number of digital music sales had outgrown physical sales by far. 

This year the book industry may see the definite breakthrough for eBooks, and again an Apple device is expected to play a facilitating role. Having watched the changes in the music industry where piracy is often portrayed as a huge threat, some book publishers already fear the worst.

The million dollar question is whether or not these fears are justified. How big of a threat is eBook piracy for the book industry? Is there a noticeable iPad effect? We have some interesting numbers to share.

To determine if Apple’s iPad has had en affect on eBook piracy we looked at the number of downloaded titles before and after its introduction. We decided to focus our research on the 10 best selling eBooks on Amazon which seemed to be a good starting point. The problem, however, is that none of these books are available on public BitTorrent, nor could we find them on file-hosting services or Usenet.

This in itself is quite an interesting observation, and clearly a signal that eBook piracy is not (yet) as widespread as that of music and movies. In order to come up with some comparison material we decided to change our sample to the 10 best selling paperback books in the business category, which should also fit well with the demographics of iPad buyers.

From this list 6 of the 10 books were available on BitTorrent. Although we have to note that BitTorrent may not be the only source of eBook piracy, it should give us a good indication of the iPad effect, if there is any. To do so, we tracked the download numbers from Saturday till Thursday, a week before the iPad launch and the days after. 

By comparing the data from these two samples we found that the number of unauthorized eBook downloads on BitTorrent grew by 78% on average, a significant increase. It is worth noting that all of the six eBooks had more downloads after the iPad launch than before.

David Allen’s productivity guide ‘Getting Things Done’ was by far the most downloaded eBook with an average of 435 downloads a day, up from 277 before the introduction of the iPad. However, this 57% increase is relatively small compared to some of the other titles we tracked.

‘Freakonomics’, another classic in the business section, saw a 104% increase in downloads, going from 187 to 381. ‘How We Decide’ saw an even bigger surge in downloads – 140% – as downloads went from 56 to 134. 

The three remaining books from the list that we tracked on BitTorrent are ‘The Tipping Point’, ‘How Women Decide’ and ‘The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People’. These three titles all saw an increase in downloads, 21%, 47% and 71% respectively, with absolute download numbers after the iPad launch of 192, 52 and 82. 

Interesting data, but what can we conclude from the statistics?

First of all, there seems to be a significant iPad effect if we assume that the increase in downloads is in part related to the iPad introduction. On the other hand it is clear that the absolute download numbers are relatively small compared to those of music and films, where popular releases can have more than a million downloads in one week. 

This low piracy figure can in part be explained by the fact that the number of people with an iPad or other eBook reader is still relatively low. Another key factor is that most books are simply not available in a pirated version, so buying a book through an online store is far more convenient and faster than trying to find an unauthorized copy.

The convenience factor and the overall user experience are going to be the key advantages for the book industry. When the iPod was launched there were no digital download stores, making file-sharing networks the only option to get music easily.

As a final note we have to stress that piracy does not equal lost sales. In the academic publications that looked into the link between piracy and (music) sales, there is still no consensus on this topic. For now, the book industry is best off putting all their efforts into making a great product for consumers and we’re sure that the iPad can be of assistance there. 

In the months to come we will keep en eye on how eBook piracy evolves.