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murrayp · 04-07-2006, 06:33 AM

I think that the Harry Potter books are the exception that proves the rule. I'm sure many of us have downloaded at least one pirate ebook, probably because there was no official version available to buy, but I suspect that most of the HP downloaders have little or no awareness of ebooks - they just want to get their latest HP fix without paying for the hardback.

The number of people currently using ebooks is probably tiny compared to those who use digital music files or even digital video files, and as noted above only a small dedicated group of people have the means or the time or the will to create new pirate ebooks from paper originals.

So with the exception of some blockbusters like the HP series I doubt that the current scale of pircay will of much concern to publishers. But the relative difficulty in creating priate ebooks from paper (compared to music from CD or video files from DVD) might make the publishers even more focused on DRM because there's likely to be more effort made to crack and share the official releases.

04-07-2006, 06:33 AM	#10
murrayp Junior Member Posts: 3 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jan 2006 Device: Dell Axim X5	I think that the Harry Potter books are the exception that proves the rule. I'm sure many of us have downloaded at least one pirate ebook, probably because there was no official version available to buy, but I suspect that most of the HP downloaders have little or no awareness of ebooks - they just want to get their latest HP fix without paying for the hardback. The number of people currently using ebooks is probably tiny compared to those who use digital music files or even digital video files, and as noted above only a small dedicated group of people have the means or the time or the will to create new pirate ebooks from paper originals. So with the exception of some blockbusters like the HP series I doubt that the current scale of pircay will of much concern to publishers. But the relative difficulty in creating priate ebooks from paper (compared to music from CD or video files from DVD) might make the publishers even more focused on DRM because there's likely to be more effort made to crack and share the official releases.