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Originally Posted by CommanderROR
ISo do you think the piracy scene will help us one again and force the reluctant publishers and authors to offer their content in digital form?
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Not necessarily. One reason for the success in the case of music was that most of the content was already available digitally in the form of the CDs. So everybody with a PC was able to convert his music collection into compressed audio files faster then it would take to listen through it. This had to two effects, the first being of course that every CD was available on p2p-networks hours after release. Secondly it familiarized people with the concept of music as data and showed them the advantages of playing music from HDs rather then CDs. The danger of lost sales through filesharing an the demand for “file-packaged” music from the consumers in essence created the “mp3-shops”.
With books on the other hand most content is of the dead tree variety. Converting them into a pdf is not simply a matter of pressing “start” on a ripping-tool. It involves scanning, OCR, proofreading and re-layouting. Not something many people will do with their complete library. So the percentage of books that is available on p2p is not only much smaller than in the case of music, but also of a very variable quality, thus not nearly as great a threat to publishers. And as almost nobody owns an portable ebook-reader there is not even an advantage in convenience over a real book.
I think that only when most books are also released in digital form will we see a greater number of pirated content.