Will Piracy Be an Issue With eBooks?

People are increasingly turning to eBooks as opposed to reading physical books. But will piracy become a big issue with books, just like it is with movies and music?

With eBooks becoming even more widespread, there is someconcern among book publishers that piracy will begin affecting the revenues ofboth authors and publishers.As it is right now, pirating a physical book takesa rather considerable amount of time.If someone wants to distribute an onlinecopy of lets say some romance novels, they would need to scan or photographevery page, put it together in a PDF document and then upload it to sharingsites.Although this form of piracy has been seen occasionally, it is usuallylimited to some expensive reference books such as some college textbooks andstudy guides, in addition to maybe a few very hard to find fiction books.Butwith eBooks, the content is already in digital format, making it much easier todistribute pirated copies of a book.As such, there have been a few fictionbooks such as popular romance novelswhich have been distributed on piracysites; however this form of piracy, for now, is largely limited to certainniches of books.The most pirated eBooks right now are reference materials(usually business guides and internet marketing courses) and adult content suchas Romance Books.However, with the increased popularity of digital bookdistribution, this could all change for online book sellers.So how do websitesthat sell other kinds of books like romance books online protect themselves?Whilethere are technological measures already in place to make copying moredifficult, such as the use of proprietary formats that can only be opened withan authorized reader application, this can be easily circumvented by skilledhackers who can convert it to a different format and scrap all securityfeatures of the document.But in reality, not much hacking is needed to piratean eBook.In the case of text on a screen, all that would be needed to bypassany form of security would be to take a screen capture of each page and thenput the pages together in a new PDF document.The best measure to discouragepiracy would be to offer books at low prices, which will encourage readers toget them from legitimate sources, rather than spend time finding them onunderground sites.Also, online book sellers could give incentives andpromotions to their customers to keep them loyal.Furthermore, with theavailability of different devices to read eBooks, book sellers need tounderstand that they should avoid using proprietary formats that will only workon certain platforms.Rather than reducing piracy, these can actually encourageit.Say if someone really needs a certain book, but it can only be read on aWindows PC and they have an iPad.Many would have no qualms about searching fora pirated version of it that is available in a platform neutral formatBusinessManagement Articles, even though they were originally willing to pay for thebook had it been available in a format that would have worked on the iPad.