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.

Over the past several months, we’ve spoken to folks at many book publishers including one whose official title was “Book Detective”.  As we investigated the problem, we were amazed at the ease in which anyone can obtain a full copy of their favorite best seller . . . for free.   Today’s agreement with Hachette Book Group offers all book detectives some help; specifically,  best-of-breed content monitoring technology to increase the effectiveness of your anti-piracy efforts while dramatically reducing the resources required.

Here are our findings:

• 2,806 sites lifted the book content
• Duplication by type of site breaks down as follows
• 54% Forums/Blogs (other than Harry Potter fan sites)
• 27% Splogs or other commercial sites
• 19% Harry Potter fan sites
• Across all sites, the percentage of full chapter text copied is ~71%
• Over 80% of the sites duplicating the content have ads on their pages
• Sites duplicating the book are based in 43 different countries.

By all accounts sales of the book are phenomenal, and judging by an informal Attributor office poll, the impact on the first weekend’s sales appears to be zilch.

That said significant portions of the book continue to pop up all over the web making the downstream impact of the duplication unknown.

One thing for certain– the hysteria over the book’s release has filled many sploggers pockets. We just hope they repaid Scholastic by buying a few copies of the book!

August 1st Update

After reading about the Spanish spoiler’s release via TechCrunch, we loaded the 1st 10 Spanish chapters of the book into Attributor.

Here are our findings:

• 440 sites lifted the book content in Spanish
• Duplication by type of site breaks down as follows
• 48% Splogs or other commercial sites
• 40% Forums/Blogs (other than Harry Potter fan sites)
• 12% Harry Potter fan sites
• Across all sites, the percentage of full chapter Sapnish text copied is 60%
• Over 85% of the sites duplicating the content have ads on their pages
• Sites duplicating the book are based in 11 different countries.

The increase in splog site duplication is further proof of how easy it is to monetize popular search terms using Adsense or Yahoo Search Marketing text links.

This is the first of a series of analyses we’ll be sharing in the coming months. We hope to provide insights on how the content economy works and how it could be better managed with web-wide visibility and accountability.

• We found 574 unique pages duplicating the spoiler content. New sites are coming in at a rate of ~20 per hour.
• The duplication is spread over 27 countries including the United States, Russia, the Netherlands, UK, China, Germany, Italy, Germany, Poland, British Virgin Islands, Argentina, Hungary, Brazil, Croatia, Samoa, Spain, Columbia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Peru, Mexico, Australia, Vietnam, Canada, Czech Republic, Indonesia and the Ukraine.
• Harry Potter fan sites represent ~10% of the duplication, indicating that many fans don’t want to know the ending before they buy the book; instead matches are primarily “splogger” sites–these are sites that place ads around the lifted content and game the search engines to appear high in search rankings. This enables them to profit from the increased Harry Potter search activity.

5PM Update

• There are now 708 pages duplicating the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows spoiler content. Many sites that appeared on our list in the first 12 hours have taken down the spoiler content; however, new sites are popping up at a faster rate. Attributor keeps a cached copy of all matches, and we will tally the gross match number in a future post.
• 9% of the sites duplicating the spoiler content are Harry Potter fan sites.
• 559 (79%) of the sites have ads on their pages.
• Most of the duplication is verbatim. The percentage copied across all domains is >80%
• Over the last 24 hours, duplication on Chinese sites has grown the fastest.

More info to come, including a thorough “post-game” analysis of what Attributor found.

Yesterday we added the web page that includes excerpts from the unreleased novel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Attributor’s monitoring platform immediately found 312 separate reuses of the spoiler page across the Web.

The top 3 sites hosting the re-used content are

1. livejournal.com
2. groups.google.com
3. twoj.net

With Attributor, instead of having to manually search and sort through a haystack of tertiary matches, we provide specific citations where your content are being re-used and enables you to act appropriately — by issuing a licensing request, or sending automatic DMCA takedown notices. We also enable more innovative approaches such as allowing a teaser portion of your content to be posted freely as long as the reuser links back to your site or includes one of your widgets to sell the full version.

We will update the blog over the next few days with the latest numbers and analysis of the sites that are re-using the content. Watch this space and let us know what you want to find out.