The whole story seems a tad far-fetched, but a bunch of e-book pirates has made it their mission to compete against Amazon. Torboox is a pirate site which would have stayed in a darkened, cool underground cavern had it not been for an
interview with the operator of said site that resulted in a
lawsuit against two major German newspapers. A classic Streisand Effect. Anyhow, TorrentFreak, too, had an
interview with these guys and was told that their ultimate goal was to bring down Amazon's quasi-monopoly as an e-book seller.
Quote:
“If you look at it, they are very similar. Amazon is nothing but a hoster for the authors. No wonder they can offer 70% provision,” he [Spiegelbest, the operator of the pirate site] says.
“Amazon does nothing to ‘produce’ books. Thus they are very similar to Torboox. Both of us – legal and illegal – are book hosters, not traditional book publishers. The ebook market is shared between two book hosters.”
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The pirate claims that piracy "controls" around 50 percent of the whole e-book market with Amazon owning the majority of the rest. He goes on explaining how Amazon's size is bad for authors and publishers, and that the only way out was a flat-rate on e-books that, conveniently, the pirate site is planning to offer.
Quote:
“In the end the publishers have to talk to us. They have to find a way to make us legal. It is their job not ours. A flatrate will be 10 euros a month – no limit. Licensing will again be the job of the publishers. If a publisher isn’t wise enough to participate – no problem,” Spiegelbest says. [...]
We have the concept. The publishers have the content. Together we can indeed battle Amazon. And Amazon is not monopolizing films, games or music – why ebooks? For me the biggest problem is this: Will the publishers understand before they vanish? That’s 50-50, no more,” he concludes.
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Related: E-book customer sharing with anti-piracy group BREIN faces political backlash,
Rapidshare loses court battle against German booksellers