Rogue websites dedicated to free or monetized distribution of pirated ebooks that are found through Google and other search engines.There are a number of sources for ebook piracy. At the moment, I have about 400 such offers of my own books in an email folder labeled “Thieves.” Richard Conniff, writing in The New York Times, starkly sums up the impact of piracy on authors: Authors need to eat, too, and we get by (or not quite, these days), by showing up at our writing places at a designated time day after day and staying there till we have fretted out our quota of words, to be sent off, after a time, to a publisher, in the hope that, two or three years down the road, a few pennies may come trickling back under the ludicrously grandiose name of “royalties.” These days, though, what comes trickling back are mostly email alerts about websites in brazen violation of copyright law, offering free downloads of books the authors have spent years of their lives producing.
In 2018, mean writing incomes for full-time professional authors went down to $20,300, a 42% reduction in real dollars from a decade prior. There is a clear correlation between the growth in piracy and the decline in incomes of authors. And a new issue has developed in the last couple of years with the rise of pirated commercial ebooks sold at low cost on the same platforms as legitimate copies: unknowing readers innocently buy the illegal copies thinking they are just getting a good deal. Studies have shown that the vast majority of illegal book downloads occur because they are so easy to find and acquire, and that the users who acquire ebooks illegally would have acquired the book legally (by buying a legal ebook or print copy or checking one out from the library) if the “search costs” of pirated ebooks were higher-in the other words, if illegal ebooks were more than a few clicks away.
Since then, based on the amount of ebook piracy reported to the Authors Guild, that number has probably doubled. A study by Nielsen and Digimarc in 2017 indicated that pirates were selling 315 million dollars of stolen ebooks a year of illegal downloads,with pirated ebooks depressing legitimate book sales by as much as 14%. Preston said “In the last decade, the number of piracy complaints handled by the Authors Guild has skyrocketed.
“The notice-and-take-down system is not working - at least not for authors, other individual creators, and small creative businesses,” Preston informed the Senate Subcommittee. Many of the Guild’s members are struggling due to piracy, he says, because the DMCA doesn’t work as intended. This week on June 3rd, a new meeting took place and the Authors Guild is mad about piracy, Google and how the DCMA program is fundamentally broken.ĭouglas Preston, president of the Authors Guild, which represents over 10,000 professional writers. Earlier this year, it held a hearing to see what could be learned from copyright policies in other countries. The US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property is looking for options to address online piracy. Piracy is rewarded with millions of dollars in revenue from the Adsense program. The Authors Guild has accused Google of promoting ebook piracy in their search engine results and paid services such as Adwords.