[Kitabi]

I think these comparisons with music industry are more of wishful thinking than reality. The music industry tried to slam the barn door when the horse had already bolted. There were already too many mp3's in the wild by the time Apple popularized buying music online.

There were enough people ripping music and then distributing it through the likes of Napster, Kazaa and Gnutella to force the RIAA to "deal with it". What's more, a lot of these "pirates" were younger people and suing them just boomeranged on the RIAA. Of course, RIAA also hurt its cause by demanding unrealistic sums of money from those they were able to nail. Instead of making examples out of these people, they just ended up making a caricature of themselves.

None of this is the case with the publishing industry. Online stores and hardware have come out before there are too many ripped books in the wild being traded without caution. The demographics of eBook readers are tilted towards the not-so-young who prefer buying content more than the mp3 pirates ever did.

IMHO the publishing industry has no motivation to "deal with it" like RIAA did. While RIAA managed to reduce piracy, it had to give up the sort of control it would have liked. I do not foresee a similar trajectory for eBooks.