The article I chose to comment is from the Sunday Times. It was published June 7th 2009 under the title “Internet piracy hits books sector”. It is related to the presentation I made about Apple because it has become a provider of ebooks through its online ibooks store.
I found this article very interesting, and thought it presented the subject very clearly. The book industry is in a position that is both known and new. Other content industries have faced and are still facing the threat of piracy. In their case piracy started before legal online distribution. In the case of books, it would take too long to digitalize entire books for this kind of piracy becoming a threat (even if some books can be found as scans online). What the article explains well is that it is the new market of ebooks that makes this piracy possible. Hackers manage to break the ebooks copying protections and make them available online for free. This is why the book industry cannot miss its entrance in the digital world. If it failed it would have triggered its own downfall.
I would like to comment on an extract of the article: “publishers are keen to avoid the mistakes made by the music industry”. The question I will try to answer in this paper is the following: What can the book industry make of the errors of both the music and the film industry regarding piracy?
The first question that should be asked is whether or not it is smart to compare these different markets. They are very different. Of the three, the book market is probably the one more different. First of all: apart from the physical media, the experience for the customer is essentially the same whether the movie is read from a DVD or from a file. The same goes for music. As far as books are concerned it is not the same experience to read a book and to read an ebook on a screen. This makes the ebook market a lot harder to evaluate.
The fact is that people have started to download illegally books. Even if this represents an