Ebook piracy flourishing in Russia

[MartinC]

Interesting article here about the huge black market for pirated ebooks in Russia. Appoarently there is a thriving translation industry.

http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/...oard&cat=books

[Zetmolm]

With the level of professionalism that the article indicates I would not say that the 'black translation industry' is exactly thriving. But it is remarkable that it exists.

[Serpentine]

I've actually read a few chapters of some older sf novel that I couldnt find elsewhere. Besides the lack of styling (which is nice, compared to many retail books), I only worked it out after seeing a diagram containing a whole bunch of cyrillic characters

That said, you can't really blame them, while the US has seen the large platforms expand quickly, even Europe is only getting there now. The third world (I'll include you guys, Russia) has pretty much nothing, besides for tiny independents or extremely limited Adobe-DRM brick and mortar online presences which insane pricing. Throw in translations and fan rips - it only proves the importance of the technology and market; it is merely a matter of time before companies work it all out. Just look how long it's taken for -good- digital distribution of games (Which the ex-Soviet block still gets treated badly with, but it's improving and they have figured out pricing more or less).

I cant help but smile at comments like :

"pirate market is expected to continue to gobble market share from legal book sellers"

Little do most people understand; How important the pirate rips of books had been, in order to show the potential of devices and drive the market to pick up the back-catalogs.
So quick to point fingers (not really in this article) once the commercial players show up, seemingly refereeing a game that started decades earlier.

[hidari]

After my 7 years in Russia....This is not a surprise at all...People wouldn't believe how huge the black market is in Russia.... too many stories to tell.... Western Europe and North Amerika are the ones living in the bubble..everywhere else is living in the reality of the black market to some degree....

Originally Posted by Serpentine

I've actually read a few chapters of some older sf novel that I couldnt find elsewhere. Besides the lack of styling (which is nice, compared to many retail books), I only worked it out after seeing a diagram containing a whole bunch of cyrillic characters


That said, you can't really blame them, while the US has seen the large platforms expand quickly, even Europe is only getting there now. The third world (I'll include you guys, Russia) has pretty much nothing, besides for tiny independents or extremely limited Adobe-DRM brick and mortar online presences which insane pricing. Throw in translations and fan rips - it only proves the importance of the technology and market; it is merely a matter of time before companies work it all out. Just look how long it's taken for -good- digital distribution of games (Which the ex-Soviet block still gets treated badly with, but it's improving and they have figured out pricing more or less).

I cant help but smile at comments like :

Little do most people understand; How important the pirate rips of books had been, in order to show the potential of devices and drive the market to pick up the back-catalogs.
So quick to point fingers (not really in this article) once the commercial players show up, seemingly refereeing a game that started decades earlier.

[holymadness]

Piracy thrives where products are not available for purchase legally. No surprise there.

[Ninjalawyer]

Gabe Newell from Valve Software would agree, and sees high Russian piracy as a service failure rather than a moral failure:

Newell: The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. For example, Russia. You say, oh, we’re going to enter Russia, people say, you’re doomed, they’ll pirate everything in Russia. Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market.

Ed Fries: That’s incredible. That’s in dollars?

Newell: That’s in dollars, yes. Whenever I talk about how much money we make it’s always dollar-denominated. All of our products are sold in local currency. But the point was, the people who are telling you that Russians pirate everything are the people who wait six months to localize their product into Russia. … So that, as far as we’re concerned, is asked and answered. It doesn’t take much in terms of providing a better service to make pirates a non-issue.