eBook Piracy And How To Prevent Them
Have you ever downloaded a pirated ebook? Do you realize how much it harms the author and the entire market? And if you’re an author how do you prevent them? First, let’s take a look at some figures about eBook piracy in the US market.
eBook Piracy in the US
| Characteristic | Key figures |
|---|---|
| Number of illegal downloaders | 16,500,000 |
| Number of books illegally downloaded | 31,514,064 |
| Number of legal e-book purchases lost | 5,473,875 |
| Total loss of sales due to illegal downloading (in million U.S. dollars) | 315,000,000 |
Current Ebook Piracy Situation
Each year, American publishers lose $300 million to ebook piracy.
Ebook piracy is not limited to the United States; it is a global issue, with $300 million in publisher profits lost each year as a result of online piracy. Ebook piracy does not appear to have diminished in recent years, indicating that this figure may rise more in the future.
41% of adult ebook pirates are between the ages of 18 and 29.
According to research sponsored by the anti-piracy firm Digimarc and performed by Nielsen, 41 percent of adult ebook pirates are between the ages of 18 and 29. Furthermore, data reveal that 47 percent are between the ages of 30 and 44, with the remaining 13 percent being 45 or older.
In 2017, there were 16.5 million illicit ebook downloaders in the United States.
Downloading music and movies is common, but books are not an exception. In 2017, there were about 16.5 million ebook downloaders in the United States, costing publishers millions of dollars in sales, according to online piracy data.
The most popular book pirate site in the United States.
According to piracy data, according to a 2017 survey, 50 percent of respondents claimed they used 4shared.com to unlawfully access ebooks. 4shared.com is the most popular book-sharing service for customers looking to illegally download a book. Books.org and Uploaded.net are also popular options.
The situation around the world.
According to the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office, 17% of ebooks are consumed illegally. Pirates are often from better-off socio-economic categories and between the ages of 30 and 60. When their usual pirate website gets shut down, many people turn to social media for help in finding a new one.
According to GfK study, only 10% of all German ebooks on devices were paid for, with the majority of digital books being pirated. In the Netherlands, an e-reader contains 117 ebooks on average. Eleven of those purchases were made through legal websites. The remaining publications were pirated, and 92 percent of Russian ebook readers acquired their books illegally by downloading the material.
How Can Publishers Avoid eBook piracy?
1. Use Watermark
To secure their material, a growing number of publishers and writers are using digital watermarks. These watermarks are put into eBook files and are virtually undetectable. It works similarly to putting a tracking device to your eBook, if you found your ebook on the internet it can trace back to the original buyer.
The fact that digital watermarks are hard to be erased or altered makes them an effective security measure for combating online copyright theft.
You may prevent people from copying and sharing printed copies of your work by utilizing dynamic watermarks.
Only users may legally access watermarked eBooks, thereby providing a strong security layer to their material, in order to prevent illegal use of any sort.
2. Use Digital Rights Management Software
As a publisher, you put a great deal of time and effort into complete eBooks, and DRM ensures that your efforts are safeguarded from volatility and that your material is protected by copyright.
Get DRM software to ensure that you control fully what people do on your eBooks. It offers different key e-Book protection features that enhance your capacity to publish your e-Books in a safe manner.
Obtaining Digital Rights Management controls may be quite beneficial since they allow you to impose additional restrictions on your material.
Good eBook protection systems, for example, employ DRM to allow publishers to limit the number of devices on which the eBook may be loaded and used, or to allow the eBook to be used exclusively from a specified place (range or IP address), such as a school, library, or similar.
This allows publishers to manage eBook access in a more flexible manner.
3. Use PDF files to prevent eBook piracy
To combat piracy, publishers must follow a variety of best practices while releasing their material. One example would be to convert your files to PDF before submitting them to make them more secure. Because the PDF format allows data encryption, it is a safe method of transferring data over the internet.
Furthermore, the format lets you tailor the user access level and protect the material from viruses and other similar malicious assaults.
4. Use Google Alerts
Set different search alerts for your name and eBook titles to keep you aware of all online activity all the time to protect your material and expose online pirates.
Google and other search engines allow you to set up free alerts that will send you an email whenever there is a search match.
Aside from establishing alerts, it is advised that you perform a self-search every few weeks for red flags by writing your titles, common misspellings, or short titles.
If you come across any pirated copies of your eBook, avoid clicking any links since they may be replaced with some virus links or may be corrupted.
Instead, a smart approach would be to gather as much information as possible about the website and bookmark the page and contact us if the files were watermarked by us we might be able to track them back to the buyer.
Bottom Line
eBook piracy is a continuing issue for publishers, but with enough work, they can certainly secure their property from digital thieves. The first step in safeguarding your work is to understand your rights and alternatives. With the anti-piracy methods discussed above, you can safeguard your eBooks from theft while also avoiding the issue of lost money.