From Publishing Perspectives:
During the course of the still-ongoing coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, book piracy has cost the Italian book publishing industry €771 million (US$856.7 million) as well as an estimated 5,400 jobs.
That’s the top-line finding of a second round of research conducted by IPSOs and just released today (March 29) by Gli Editori, a research partnership formed by the Association of Italian Publishers (Associazione Italiana Editori, AIE) and the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers (Federazione Italiana Editori Giornali, FIEG). This is the follow-up to the 2019 study, on which we reported when it was released in January 2020.
To get a sense for how big a chunk of the potential revenue is evaporating because of piracy, consider that the figures put together for this report represent a third of the overall market, 31 percent, excluding the educational and export sectors.
Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives
PG does not condone book piracy in any form.
However, studies of piracy as discussed in the OP always assume that anyone who pirated a book or read a pirated book would have purchased the book for whatever price it was selling for.
While PG, to the best of his knowledge, is not acquainted with anyone who pirates books, he suspects a significant portion of book pirate community would not purchase most of the books they pirate if piracy was impossible.
“Copyright piracy” is just a special case of “counterfeiting and passing off.” I won’t bore you with thirty-four pages of history supported by 275 footnotes…
…even though I could…
…but the history of commerce in nonbespoke articles (that is, “manufactured” in some sense, not created individually by a craftsman/woman/team) demonstrates that one minimizes counterfeiting-and-passing-off by ensuring a close relationship between {actual audience of purchasers’ perception of the value of “genuineness”} and {actual audience of purchasers’ perception of the improved quality and fitness for purpose of the genuine article}. Whenever there’s a disconnect, piracy will flourish. It can’t ever be reduced to zero — the laws of thermodynamics apply to piracy! — but it can be kept “tolerable.”
Those of us old enough to have been shopping for our own casual outerwear in the mid-1980s might recall the “Members Only” brand… and fiascos thereafter. The “iconic” Eisenhower-style jacket with the “distinctive” (but only decorative) double-looped epaulets and horizontal chest seam was readily copied by lower-cost manufacturers, especially in South Korea. This cut into sales, so the “authorized source” tried to protect revenues by raising prices — and went bankrupt, because as the price of the authorized article was raised the public perceived less relationship between the authorized article and both value and quality.
Application to publisher pricing policies since 1978, when the 1909 Act’s requirement that publishers prove that both typesetting and printing-and-binding had been performed in the US (compare the duelling Ace and Ballantine editions of The Lord of the Rings), is left as an exercise for the increasingly frustrated student. Which, given textbook pricing, is all too on point.
All three, but especially the last three.
Reasonable availability is the single biggest driver of “unauthorized editions” of any content ranging from video to scientific journal articles and textbooks.
“Reasonable” starts with the effort required to get the item and runs through pricing.
The classic example is digital music in the Napster era where you had to buy a CD at $12-15 to get a copy of a hit single versus getting it “free” via Napster. Once the music studios wised up and brought *back* a legal way to get a copy of just the desired song, music piracy declined significantly, some would say to nuisance levels. And then streaming changed the entire environment.
Also, a lot of people forget “reasonable pricing” is a function of local/national income levels. Most of the global streaming services, for one example, offer very different pricing in India than in europe and the US. It holds down piracy through ready availability at affordable prices. It brings in less than first world customers but a lot more than piracy.
Anywhere the culture prizes ripping off the man. Anywhere readers think books are vastly overpriced. Anywhere there are no lending libraries.
Technology just makes it easier.
It’s even worse because the article says the study is using “satellite” effects to multiply the amount lost. So when a $20 book is pirated, the retailer loses $20, the publisher loses $10, the author loses $5, and so on until each lost sale takes $50+ out of the economy.
P.G. makes a good point.
Possibly a Med. nation issue in particular?
I live in Madrid.
Whenever someone in Spain asks me what ebook reader they should buy (as a Brit author with books translated into Spanish by their local publishers, I’m obviously a tech expert, too), it’s always, always, prefaced with something like: “You know, the ones that allow you to get all the books for free.”
I never have that discussion back in the UK when people ask what ebook hardware they should get.