[OPLIN 4cast] OPLIN 4Cast #252: Ebook piracy

[Editor]

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. 
<http://www.oplin.org/4cast/>
OPLIN 4Cast

OPLIN 4Cast #252: Ebook piracy
October 19th, 2011

<http://www.oplin.org/4cast/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/pirate_logo.png>Occasionally, 
the topic of ebook piracy generates some press, though not as often as 
you might expect. Last spring, for example, there was a flurry of 
interest around a British survey 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8518755/E-books-drive-older-women-to-digital-piracy.html> 
that concluded older women pirate more ebooks than music. The topic came 
up again last week at the Frankfurt Book Fair 
<http://www.buchmesse.de/en/>. Certainly if you search for "ebook" on a 
BitTorrent index site, such as Torrentz <http://torrentz.eu/>, you will 
find a huge number of files listed, and even if you weed out all the 
amateur pdf scans of books by specifying a commercial ebook format, like 
"ebook epub," you'll still see an amazing number of files being offered 
for sharing. But some people don't feel that ebook piracy is necessarily 
a problem.

    * German book association decries e-book piracy
      <http://news.yahoo.com/german-book-association-decries-e-book-piracy-135542491.html>
      (Associated Press) "Gottfried Honnefelder, head of the group that
      represents publishers and booksellers, said at the fair's opening
      news conference that around 60 percent of e-book downloads in
      Germany are pirated through Internet sources such as filesharing
      sites."
    * Digital piracy casts shadow over ebook world
      <http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jMuok4zpjRc4lkSBGFIAxkiOYkEw?docId=CNG.8d379ab35fae43da3f5517d7bf0e1907.21>
      (Agence France-Presse/Kate Millar) "Thomas Mosch, of the
      Federation of German Technological Companies, believes it is a
      question of finding a balance and not scaring off well-meaning
      people willing to pay for legal content with over-rigorous
      measures. 'You will never be able to do anything about 10 to 20%
      of piracy,' he said. 'But with 80 to 90% of people ready to pay,
      the publishing industry should be able to live.'"
    * Book piracy: a non-issue
      <http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/book-piracy-a-non-issue/>
      (TechCrunch/Paul Carr) "Perhaps it was because 'the kids' care
      less about stealing books than they do about cracking the DRM on
      movies [...], or maybe because the book industry learned from what
      happened to their audio and visual cousins. Either way, devices
      like the Kindle, Nook and iPad - and publishers willingness to
      embrace them - allowed a legitimate, and lucrative, electronic
      publishing industry to grow up before the pirates seized the
      initiative."
    * Net pirates turn over a new leaf
      <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/net-pirates-turn-over-a-new-leaf-20110812-1iqmm.html>
      (The Sydney Morning Herald/Linda Morris) "The publishing industry
      well understands the first step to preventing piracy is making
      sure all titles are available as ebooks in the formats they want
      at a price they can afford, Tim Coronel, publisher of the leading
      trade magazine /Bookseller+Publisher/, says."

*/Publishing fact:/*

The German ebook market makes up only about 0.5% of all book sales, 
while in the U.S. ebooks currently comprise about 9% of book sales.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The */OPLIN 4cast/* is a weekly compilation of recent headlines, topics, 
and trends that could impact public libraries. You can subscribe to it 
in a variety of ways, such as:

    * *RSS feed.* You can receive the OPLIN 4cast via RSS feed by
      subscribing to the following URL:
      http://www.oplin.org/4cast/index.php/?feed=rss2.
    * *Live Bookmark.* If you're using the Firefox web browser, you can
      go to the 4cast website (http://www.oplin.org/4cast/) and click on
      the orange "radio wave" icon on the right side of the address bar.
      In Internet Explorer 7, click on the same icon to view or
      subscribe to the 4cast RSS feed.
    * *E-mail.* You can have the OPLIN 4cast delivered via e-mail (a'la
      OPLINlist and OPLINtech) by subscribing to the 4cast mailing list
      at http://mail.oplin.org/mailman/listinfo/OPLIN4cast.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.oplin.org/pipermail/oplin4cast/attachments/20111019/ba888300/attachment-0001.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: kubrickheader.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 38379 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.oplin.org/pipermail/oplin4cast/attachments/20111019/ba888300/kubrickheader-0001.jpg
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: pirate_logo.png
Type: image/png
Size: 24700 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.oplin.org/pipermail/oplin4cast/attachments/20111019/ba888300/pirate_logo-0001.png