Book piracy sites tend to be based in countries like Russia, countries that either don’t have the same copyright laws as in the U.S. and western Europe or that have more important problems than policing internet sites. It’s never been clear to me whether the attitudes toward pirated materials are different in, say, Russia, or the fact that books - a culture driven by English authors and titles - are so much more difficult to get without piracy drives the pirates. In either case, it’s easier to get American sites shut down, so the bias is for sites elsewhere.
Piracy takes some work. Yes, you can slice open a book and feed it page by page through an OCR scanner. But that takes time and effort. And destroys the book. It’s simply much harder to do than copying a CD.
Pirates want something in return for all that effort. That’s why the most heavily pirated books in the early years of the internet were science fiction and modern bestsellers and other titles favored by the kind of people who live on the internet. Stereotypes are sometimes true. The pirates are mainly guys, and they don’t dig romance novels. Nor do they care about random books published 50 years ago, which is why the OP isn’t finding them in pirate sites. The Long Tail is 99% nonsense. Most people want the same 1% as everybody else. Amazon gets the other 99% for virtually no effort. Pirates need to work to create them. Why should they? There’s also a lot more books around. Thousands of books, perhaps a million, have been pirated. For all that effort, even a million books is less than 1% of the world’s stock of books.
Most people will be happy to pay a small amount of many for a well-copied ebook. Conversion to electronic formats is still iffy, especially for books with lots of fonts and indents and footnotes, but it keeps getting better. The big current problem is cost and who gets what percent of the cut. That issue won’t get solved soon. Piracy will diminish in correlation with a drop in prices, although I can’t see it going away completely in my lifetime.
Right now book piracy is a nuisance, not as big a threat as, say, Napster was. In a 100 years it will be a footnote in history tweets.
My dad probably has 5k-10k pirated ebooks. Most of those were created via old-school methods – scan via OCR, then proofread the OCR output.
As far as I know, most of these were created by hobbyists to share with “ebook community” rather than by someone trying to make money.
Not every book is out there, but I would say that 90% of new releases and a majority of all science fiction and fantasy (and other genre novels) can be found.
Book piracy has been around at least since photocopiers became widespread, you know, a lot longer ago than scanners. While 30 years ago most people in the developed world didn’t have access to the equivalent of Cave’s Bookstore, access to a photocopier was quite common.
Book publishers count hand-me-down and lending among individuals as piracy too, good luck stopping that.
IIRC, in the BBS days Harlan Ellison was a mighty wind in the fight against book piracy; suing a large number of sites over the usenet postings they hosted of his books. Mind you, if you’ve read anything about Harlan Ellison, it couldn’t happen to a nicer, I mean more appropriate, guy.
Yeah, the big problem with book piracy as mentioned above, is the effort required to create an electronic copy - significantly more than music or video and infinitely more destructive. If the people making these copies are ones who “like books” odds are they are less inclined to destroy them.
I have hundreds of books. Even the ancient paperbacks, I don’t think I’ll slice up and scan. Plus, unless your office has the equipment or you are dedicated to the “cause”, a page-flipping page-feeding scanner is a significant luxury.
I’ve tried Kindle on my iPad and so far am less than satisfied. The “Table of Contents” seems to be erratic, even on a book that cost over $15. The lack of page numbers or some other reference where you are, other than the slider at the bottom, is confusing. Maps in the Rough Guide seem to be fuzzy and legends unreadable. Maybe these will get better, maybe there’s a limit to what graphics they can fit in a manageable file size.
The other issue is DRM. I still have my textbooks from the early 1970’s, and I can still read them, although the $10 price tag seems to be a work of fiction today. What happens when Kindle, or iBooks, or whomever, goes out of business or decides to discontinue support for their format? If you are lucky, they offer what Microsoft did for one of their music services and you get a one-time offer for free unlock. However, nothing stops Microsoft or whomever from saying “we will no longer activate software XYZ”. After all, why should the continue to support obsolete software for decades? And a sudden bankruptcy (in the interent world??) would put any such services in limbo, or open to extortious choices… Files with DRM will die a slow death as the service no longer recognizes your 6th iPad or Kindle or Nook purchase… Or the server goes off-line and stops sending you a fresh download. (It seems every time I try to read a Kindle book on my iPhone, it wants to re-download it from the Kindle server…)
Harlan Ellison seemed to have just the right temprament to be playing whack-a-mole with usenet carriers over the content users posted, with the hubris to think that usenet would have any significant effect on the the market.
I especially liked the fellow in one blog who described being on a panel at a con and getting into a pissing match; and almost getting Harlan’s head to blow up when he complimented him on his Star Wars novelizations. He said he was afraid Harlan was going to storm the stage and punch his lights out.
The guy’s a good writer, I have several of his books, but he has issues and I hear he’ll never work in Hollywood again…
Wow, I would really feel put in my place by this, were it not for one tiny detail.
The SGAE has nothing to do with books.
That quote’s from Wikipedia but when I go to their website I see the same thing.
But let’s say it were a book authors organization, along the lines of PEN International and the Authors Guild. My response would be the same. So what?
Book writers and book publishers are totally separate groups. They are as antagonistic as the employers and employees in every other industry. You cannot quote a writers organization and claim that it says anything meaningful about what publishers think.
If you can give me a cite that Spanish book publishers as an industry consider the sale of used books as piracy, then I will apologize here. But so far you haven’t done anything that remotely approaches that.
Like the record companies before them, Book Publishers Attempt to Determine How Much Milk They Can Squeeze From the Cow That Layed the Golden Egg: 2 E-Books Cost More Than Amazon Hardcovers
There a few things that make less business sense than making the buyer of an easily copyable item feel that they are being ripped off by the manufacturer.
SGAE includes actors, translators, book editors, movie distributors, etc; it is not limited to the music industry. The name means “General Society of Authors and Editors”, and that’s all kind of “editors”; it started from books. They have had problems with people refusing to join them and feeling harassed by their insistence that they must join; a friend of mine actually posted a police complain against them (“I don’t want them to protect my rights, yes I wrote a song but I want anybody to be able to play it any time”). Making photocopies pays a canon that goes to SGAE - even if what you’re photocopying happens to be your own intellectual property (printing doesn’t). Memsticks, external drives, blank media, carry a canon that goes to SGAE - it doesn’t matter whether what you’re storing is your own intellectual property or whether you obtained it outside the country.