Online Book Piracy Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $3 Billion
Jan 15th update: At the request of a few authors, we’ve disabled the links to the infringing copies in the Example section.
Book publishers frequently ask us how much online piracy is impacting their revenue. Today, with the release of the first study to quantify book piracy in the U.S., we’re pleased to announce new capabilities to help book publishers answer this critical question.
Key findings of the research are listed below, and the full study can be downloaded here (.pdf).
We plan to update and add more depth to these findings regularly as we expand our anti-piracy services. If you publish books or journals and wish to see how FairShare Guardian can protect your titles, please contact us.
Key Findings
- Significant amounts of pirated book downloads are taking place online, representing potential losses of $2.75-3 billion, representing roughly 10% of the total United States book sales
- Across the 913 books included in the study, nearly 10,000 pirated copies of every title in the study was available for free download.
- The Business and Investing, Professional & Technical and Science genres have the largest potential lost sales per title.
Source: Attributor January, 2010
Source: Attributor January, 2010
Examples
Listed below are examples of pirated titles and a link to just one of the 25 sites included in the study (Copies downloaded figures are as of 01/14/10).
- Arts and Photography
- Architect’s Drawings by Kendra Schank Smith, 10,010 copies downloaded
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama, 2,850 copies downloaded
- Business & Investing
- Freakonomics by Steven Levitt, 1,132 copies downloaded
- Culinary and Hospitality
- Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, 659 copies downloaded
- Fiction
- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, 1,732 copies downloaded
- Bed of Roses by Nora Roberts, 1,156 copies downloaded
- Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, 8,177 copies downloaded
- Science
- Advanced Calculus by Wilfred Kaplan, 3,526 copies downloaded
- Molecular Biology of the Cell by Bruce Alberts, 3,584 copies downloaded
Methodology
- FairShare Guardian™ service monitored piracy for 913 popular books in categories representative of the industry across the the top 25 one-click hosting sites starting in October 2009 for a period of 90 days. Download .pdf copy to view list of sites.
- FairShare Guardian captured the number of successful downloads completed for each of the 913 titles as reported on four file hosting sites that make the download data available (4shared.com, scribd.com, wattpad.com and docstoc.com). Across these four sites, a total of 3.2 million downloads occurred.
- Across the top 25 one-click hosting sites, a total download figure of over 9 million copies was projected using the 36.4% share of one-click hosting sites that the four above-mentioned sites represent. Download .pdf copy to view share figures.
- The retail value of these 9 million copies was calculated to reach $380 million. Each book’s retail price and category/genre information was collected from Amazon.com.
- The 913 titles in this study represent works from publishers totaling 13.5% of the U.S. book publishing market. Projecting this $380 million value to the entire industry results in total potential piracy figure of $2.8 billion.
- This study does not to answer the question, “How many of these pirated books would have been purchased legally if piracy was not an option?” Previous piracy studies assume a one-to-one substitution, meaning all pirated material would have been purchased and thus the market value of pirated books is equal to the actual loss, though Attributor feels this is an overly optimistic assumption. This issue will be addressed in a future research phase.
o Science
§ Advanced Calculus by Wilfred Kaplan, 3,526 copies downloaded
§ Molecular Biology of the Cell by Bruce Alberts, 3,584 copies downloaded
New Study from Attributor Shows a Large Amount of eBook Piracy « ResourceShelf Said, January 14, 2010 @ 10:27 am
[...] Access Key Findings (6 pages; PDF) ||| Access Findings and Methodology (HTML) [...]
Eric Hellman Said, January 14, 2010 @ 11:36 am
Here are some follow-up questions
1. How is a download defined? For example, when a search engine robot follows a link and retrieves a copy of the book, is that counted as a download?
2.How is copyrighted content verified, using metadata, file signatures, or textual analysis?
3. Are book files generated from scanned print detected?
4. Many collections of books are distributed as torrents; are these included in the study, and are they counted as single or multiple downloads?
I’ve written about other companies in this field; I’d like to also cover Attributor.
Eric Hellman Said, January 14, 2010 @ 12:04 pm
Also, isn’t the “$3 Billion” in the title a bit sensationalistic? Your sample presumably measures only the most pirated market segment.
Rich Said, January 14, 2010 @ 1:04 pm
Eric – thanks for the questions. I’ve responded below, but feel free to contact me at rich(at)attributor.com if you have additional questions.
1) We are relying on the host sites download statistics to aggregate the download totals.
2) This is a two step process.
a) Our crawlers identify the files using our content ID technology, ranking the potential infringements on the factors you mention plus a couple others.
b) Our professional service staff visually verifies the potential copy and sends the takedown notices as appropriate. We then automatically verify that the file has been removed.
3) Yes, we detect books that have been scanned.
4) This study excludes torrents completely. We offer detection and removal of links to torrents on indexing sites such as mininova, but we do not go any further than this.
As for your question about the “$3 Billion” figure, this study was designed to be representative of the industry and included titles from 14 different genres, including those such as “Culinary and Hospitality” which are not typically thought of as the most pirated. We recognize that any time you put a $ number, you invite criticism which is why we tried to be as transparent as possible in our methodology. As you point out, you could say that the figure is conservative since it excludes peer-to-peer.
Rich
Wil Johnson Said, January 14, 2010 @ 3:45 pm
I’m curious as to whether you would be willing to supply a full list of titles you tracked. Specifically, I’m in interested in the time lag involved between first publication and piracy, what editions are being pirated, and similar information.
Rich Said, January 14, 2010 @ 3:49 pm
Wil – yes, we are discussing an expansion of the study to answer this question with the Association of American Publishers. We need to get publisher permission before we can do this, but this is a great question.
Rich Said, January 14, 2010 @ 9:12 pm
At the request of a few authors, we’ve disabled the links to the infringing copies in the Example section.
links for 2010-01-16 « Your Friendly Neighbourhood Librarian Said, January 16, 2010 @ 5:04 pm
[...] Online Book Piracy Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $3 Billion – attributor (tags: magister) [...]
DRM: My Hypothesis Said, January 18, 2010 @ 8:41 am
[...] debate around DRM is couched in moral rhetoric (DRM is fascist!! vs. You are all thieves!!!), and sensationalized balderdash (piracy = $3 billion in lost sales!!! gasp!), and I look forward to the day when that is behind [...]
A Book Piracy Study with Surprising Results | PlagiarismToday Said, January 19, 2010 @ 8:55 am
[...] with the results of another study, this time on the topic of book piracy.Though the title “Online Book Piracy Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $3 Billion” may be a bit of an exaggeration, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute, the study [...]
Library ‘piracy’ dwarfs e-piracy figures | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home Said, January 19, 2010 @ 12:33 pm
[...] in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 [...]
warsystems » Offline Book “Lending” Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion Said, January 19, 2010 @ 1:02 pm
[...] in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 [...]
Notes of an Itinerant Photographer › Offline Book “Lending” Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion Said, January 19, 2010 @ 3:04 pm
[...] in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 [...]
Using The Same Advanced Projective Mathematics… | The Naughty Bits Said, January 19, 2010 @ 4:29 pm
[...] in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 [...]
Digital Crows Nest » The Piracy Question Part 1: How do you measure the impact of piracy? Said, January 21, 2010 @ 12:19 pm
[...] specific piracy research is hard to come by. Attributor has released preliminary results from their study and I’ve been working with Magellan Media on an ongoing p2p based piracy study, but both studies [...]
Offline Book “Lending” Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion « Either/Or/Bored Said, January 28, 2010 @ 5:52 am
[...] in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 [...]
To DRM or to Not DRM that is the question… « Her Name is Ed Wilson Said, January 28, 2010 @ 9:39 am
[...] was a study released recently by the Attributor that suggest just that. It didn’t work for the music [...]
La pirateria avanza anche sui libri, le nuove tecnologie le danno una mano | ciaoblog Said, January 29, 2010 @ 5:42 am
[...] recente studio della Attributor ha dimostrato che la pirateria ruba all’industria letteraria statunitense [...]
Levi Bean Said, January 29, 2010 @ 7:44 pm
I saw a reference to this in the Publishers Weekly article and found it interesting though there seam to be to some assumptions that make it a bit presumptive. Your singling out one protocol for distribution of pirated material for instance. Though a bit more complex to automate the monitoring of, IRC and NNTP as well as many P2P technologies are still extremely popular and serviced by servers residing in the US with little regard for Copyright or Content Infringement.
I am curious however how successful you Fingerprinting methods are at matching client content that has been packaged in archives along with other materials or packaged with highly effective compression algorithms? Any modern compression algorithm should take advantage of the redundancy of language structure for this type of data.
Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog » Copyright madness Said, February 1, 2010 @ 10:55 am
[...] Using the same sorts of measurements that the music and movie industries use, they are claiming to lose $3 billion a year to online piracy. A more interesting analysis takes the same methodology and applies it to libraries, finding that [...]
Wayne Martin Said, February 11, 2010 @ 10:09 am
Rather than trying to push e-book prices up to the same price as paper books, maybe publishers should recognize that libraries buy sometimes only one copy of a book, but this copy stays in circulation forever–being circulated dozens, if not hundreds of times. If publishers would recognize that public use libraries are not contributing very much to their bottom lines, perhaps they could create a new license for these entities and charge them, say, 10 times the price per copy over the suggested retail price that individuals pay. While this higher cost might reduce some libraries willingness to buy as many books as they do now, their payment for books that they do buy will increase the bottom line of the industry, however.
People who buy e-books are clearly willing to participate in the economics of the publishing industry, whereas the patrons of public libraries do not want to contribute anything–expecting that the public money be used to provide them access to the books they want to read. Therefore, it only makes sense that the publishing industry should expect to get more back from the books sold to public use libraries, rather than less.
Lessons about Digital Publishing, DRM, and the Future — Publishing Trends Said, February 27, 2010 @ 9:49 am
[...] available. Attributor grabbed lots of headlines with its recent study claiming that piracy is a “$3 billion problem,” leading publishers like Macmillan to announce detailed “piracy plans.” But more data is [...]
eBook Piracy « Wir sprechen Online. Said, March 2, 2010 @ 11:39 pm
[...] Attributor (PDF): eBook piracy costs U.S. publishers $2.75 to 3 billion; mainly professional genre; http://j.mp/d7bn4R [...]
Four Reasons Why the iPad does not promote book piracy « Make This Do – Making The Web Work For You Said, May 29, 2010 @ 8:50 pm
[...] publishers lost $3 billion a year through illegal book downloads. Somehow I doubt that number. A recent study by Attributor, a firm that specializes in monitoring content online, came to some spectacular [...]