Found our first pirated e-book today

[Spike89]

Actually, it was the authors who brought it to my attention--we don't have the resources to monitor until a problem arises. We're a small, non-profit academic-style press--piracy was pretty much not on our list of worries for the first 30 years (I've been here a bit longer than a decade). However, e-books have changed that. Between authors and management (and the inevitability of it all) we've been forced to offer our books in e-book format.

We've been selling the e-books for a bit more than a year now and if you took all the e-sales for all our books this year, it would almost pay 1/4 of the e-production costs for one of those titles! Another way of saying it is we'll break even on our average e-book if we can keep sales at this level for about 20 years (but they are technology books with a selling life of about 3 years). The point is that we lose money on e-books, even if we don't count all the costs we charge against the paper editions (copy editors, proofreaders, production editors, artists, etc.).

Now, some pirate site is offering at least one of our e-books for free (but they'll give you faster downloads of the books they've stolen for a small fee!) This pirate site actually comes up in a variety of searches, it is basically a pirate mega-site sorta like pay-pal for pirates. It is incredibly upfront and brazen, they even have a link for content owners to apply for a cut of the pie (not offering us our legitimate cut, or giving us the option to participate or not, just promising to send us something every time someone pirates a copy of our content.

I'm bummed, I like being able to tell prospective authors that we'll promote their work in paper and electronic formats, but taking a loss on every title we send to the iTunes store was bad enough. When pirates get into the game and blatantly take what few sales publishers like us can hope for, it becomes very difficult to support the future.