As the music and movie industries continue to combat online piracy, book publishers hope to avoid a similar problem as the popularity of e-books continue to expands.
Although Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other companies currently offer legitimate e-books, there are even more illegal copies of books available online through peer-to-peer networks, Megaupload, Rapidshare, and other online portals.
It wasn't long ago when publishers didn't have to pay very much attention to online piracy. Now, e-books and e-readers are one step closer to the mainstream market, as I noted in this earlier news post, leading to an even higher overall threat of people seeking free books.
"We are seeing lots of online piracy activity across all kinds of books -- pretty much every category is turning up," Association of American Publishers director Ed McCoyd said. "What happens when 20 to 30 percent of book readers use digital as the primary mode of reading books? Piracy's a big concern."
The NYT article I linked to in the above paragraph has a more in-depth look into online book piracy, and it's something certainly worth checking out.
If book publishers hope to convince people to avoid services such as RapidShare, they must do a few things: Firstly, educate consumers about the reasons they should purchase content instead of pirating it through P2P and other services.
Secondly, the price of e-books must drop a bit lower, so readers believe it's a fairer price to pay for a digital copy of the book. Textbook publishers, notorious for overpricing books, continue to claim a large portion of the cost is related to printing the book and shipping it -- two aspects that are removed with e-books.
I look forward to seeing how the e-book market develops -- and how book publishers attempt to combat piracy in the months to come.
