From Publishing Perspectives:
s the plans and programming for Frankfurter Buchmesse‘s (October 16 to 20) Guest of Honor Italy are being prepared, the chance to include book piracy as an internationally persistent challenge may well be worth organizers’ consideration.
When the Association of Italian Publishers (Associazione Italiana Editori, AIE) commissioned the market research firm Ipsos to study piracy’s presence and impact on the book market, the results indicated that the cost of piracy is higher than a quarter of the market’s overall valuation, or 28 percent.
This, in fact, the third Ipsos study AIE has commissioned, and the organization this time has learned that as many as 4,900 jobs are being lost to piracy.
- Thirty-one percent of the general Italian population older than 15 reportedly is using books, ebooks, and audiobooks illegally.
- Much higher levels are being reported for students and professionals, who were tracked at 78 percent and 49 percent, respectively.
- Some 70 percent of respondents who said they used illegally obtained publishing products also said that they don’t think they’re likely to be punished for it.
- Nearly 300,000 acts of piracy are committed daily in Italy, according to Ipsos’ study, a figure that’s actually down eight percent from 2021
- In economic terms overall, the loss to the country’s system is estimated to be some €1.75 billion (US$1.9 billion), with €298 million in lost tax revenue (US$326 million).
- In a single year, the rep0rt says, there may be as many as 108.4 million acts of piracy committed in Italy.
As in the previous two studies commissioned by AIE in 2019 and 2021, researchers say it seems that many members of the public are ignorant about the seriousness of piracy and the consequences. There are observers in other parts of the publishing world, however, who say they remain skeptical of this, as consumer populations become increasingly media-savvy.
However authentic the claim of being unaware of the illegality of piracy from one consumer to another, the new Italian report indicates that things may be going the wrong direction: The percentage of those who have told Ipsos researchers that they are aware of the illegality of piracy is 79 percent in 2023—as compared to 84 percent in 2019.
AIE president Innocenzo Cipolletta during the course of the presentation clarified that he doesn’t see even the mild rollback on attitudes about piracy as real progress: “Italian publishing,” he said, “is experiencing a difficult economic context, characterized by rising costs that are only minimally offset by cover-price increases, while the demand stimuli present in past years are no longer present or have been scaled back.
“In this framework, the loss of a quarter of the potential value of sales because of piracy is an unsustainable cost that has repercussions on the number of companies that can no longer keep going; on employment; and on authors’ compensation.
“In 2023 we see the first signs of a reduction in acts of piracy, but there are many factors that can influence this, and I’d not yet speak of it as an established trend.
“Institutions and law enforcement have done a lot in recent years, and these data should spur us all to do even more and even better. We also consider stimulating public awareness to be fundamental: the number of people who consider this phenomenon to be not very serious is confirmed to be high, and in any case they say they are certain that the perpetrators will not be punished.”
. . . .
And the president of the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers, Andrea Riffeser Monti, pointed at the vendors and purveyors of pirated intellectual property, especially those online.
“Piracy of intellectual works is a central issue for the entire content publishing industry,” he said. “An ongoing economic and technological evolution today represents the most complex challenge for the authorities engaged in countering piracy.
“It must be made impossible for those who do business on illegal content to hide behind the anonymity of the Internet: people must be aware that they are committing an offence and must know that they can be punished for it.
“The phenomenon of digital piracy contributes to the growing and general impoverishment of publishing companies, but there are also risks for readers who, in the absence of quality information content, will be increasingly exposed to fake news and disinformation online.”
Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives
PG wonders if the Italian ebook market includes the equivalent of the 99-cent ebook or Prime Reading.
Not sure how many years it has been since I heard anything about DRM.
People don’t care.
It’s gotten that even the folks that used to do the de-DRM tools quit and found better uses for their time, like playing STARFIELD or PALWORLD. 😉
By now nobody outside the BPHs expects Amazon to vanish in a pull of smoke and brimstone.
> It’s gotten that even the folks that used to do the de-DRM tools quit and found better uses for their time
Sorry? Then all the new developments to de-DRM the books I buy from Amazon to allow read them on my Kobo might be a figment of my imagination.
Or all the instantly available series and movies oficially released just yesterday
Or all the sports events that are supposedly available only under subscription streaming channels.
Is there a new “aprentice” active after Harper quit? That is new to me. Thanks for the update. 😉
And video is a different story; the pirates rip off DVDs right at the factory and streaming using HDMI video capture cards. No DRM removal required.
The fallacy of these studies is that they assume everybody who pirates IP would’ve actually bought it. A majority of all pirates pick up the product because it is available. In digital products, many just grab everythung they can get even though they might not like it or even live long enough to consume it. (Particularly true of the torrents with thousands of random ebooks.)
The question nobody asks the claimants it what they want to see. Sympathy? Subsidies? Pirates drawn and quartered? In over a decade of these reports (usually from purveyors of elephant repellent) I’ve not heard of them ever getting anything of value.
It gets tiresome, their plaints.
I will bet money that of that 78% of students who pirate, the vast majority of them are pirating overpriced textbooks.
Agreed.
When I was in college, I quickly learned the virtues of used textbooks. In addition to the large price discount from new, some of them were nicely underlined and annotated.
I thought the used book vendors were missing a good opportunity by failing to ask the selling students what grade they received in the course. I would have paid a premium for a used book that had been underlined/annotated by a A student.