Internet piracy begins to hit the £5 billion book market

Following the current and highly debated illegal downloading of music that has seen the music industrys revenues cut in half, internet piracy is now hitting the £5 billion a year book market in the UK by offering the free downloads of digital versions of new bestsellers like The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, and this is something that publishers and authors are now looking to stop.

Key chapters of the The Lost Symbol were recently being offered to the public prior to its official release on the 15th September by a popular national newspaper in an effort to entice people into buying the book, but at the same time illegal and complete digital versions of the same book were being released on a number of websites around the world.

The growth in demand for digital media has been stimulated by the release of compact electronic devices like the Apple iPhone and the Kindle from Amazon that allows users to read and carry e-book just as easily as they would a normal book and this has led to numerous website that are well known for offering pirate copies of movies and music now offering the novel.

With a number of high profile advertising campaign’s being used by electronics companies it is believed that the popularity of digital books is likely to increase a huge amount. One such example is the growth in interest in digital copies of its book reported by Random House, the publishers of The Lost Symbol.

Fionnuala Duggan, the digital director at Random House Group advised that their mobile phone downloads were “selling extremely well” and claims to be the only UK publisher to have its own iPhone App, although each copy come at a cost of £14.50.

Duggan went on the add ‘The scale of piracy grows as the market for e-readers grows and the technology used to access digital content changes so fast that trying to legislate against piracy is like taking a photograph of a moving train. We believe the answer lies in tracking consumer habits early on.’

Source – Daily Mail