IT and society: Online Book Piracy Research

According to a recent U.S. Book Anti-Piracy research, 9 million illegal downloads of copyright-protected books were documented in 2009.

The Washington Post reports, that the independent study was conducted by the US online monitoring and enforcement webservice Attributor, which is targeted at publishers. It records the “travel” of copyright-protected materials on Internet, thus enables publishers of all sizes to protect their content wherever it appears on the Web. The survey indicates a lost sales scale caused by the activities of online piracy, therefore the company announced the necessity of implementing more efficient measures in order to protect text content.

Attributor’s service monitored piracy for 913 popular books. To identify these editions an analysis of 14 categories of books was carried out, after that their downloads were monitored on 25 free file hosting sites. On average, every book published was downloaded about 10,000 times. Thus the service discovered that over 9 million digital copies of famous book bestsellers were downloaded within the outgoing year.

“This new study confirms that book piracy on the Internet has reached epidemic proportions. Unchecked, that piracy will drain the creative energy of American publishing. Those 9 million pirated books should be a call-to-arms for policymakers, educators, and every reader who cares about the future of digital and printed books,” said Tom Allen, President of the Association of American Publishers.

The research shows that such genres as Business and Investing are the most popular among the pirates. Thus these segments average over 13,000 free downloads per title. Authors within the Business and Investing categories are potentially losing over $1million per title, summarized Attributor. Fiction appeared to be less popular – 6,000 downloads per title

These free downloads represent potential losses of $2,75 - 3 billion to the book publishing industry, estimates Attributor.