The effectiveness of these anti-piracy measures is often in doubt, since the pirated files usually reappear quickly elsewhere. But, according to new research they do have some effect.

Imke Reimers, an economics researcher affiliated with NBER and Northeastern University, examined the effectiveness of these takedown notices on book sales. The results, published in the working paper “The Effect of Piracy Protection in Book Publishing,” show that e-books sales increase as a result of the takedown efforts.

In her research Reimers compares sales of book titles before and after takedown notices are issued, to see the effect on book sales across different titles, genres and formats. The study is the first of its kind and reaches the conclusion that piracy protection increases e-book sales.

“This paper is the first to empirically analyze the interaction of online piracy and the legal market for books. It finds that piracy protection significantly increases regular unit sales of e-books, while the effect on physical formats is not as clear,” Reimers writes.

“E-books, the closest substitute for online piracy benefit from piracy protection by selling 15.4% more units, while there is no significant effect on other formats,” she adds.

A 15 percent increase in e-book sales is quite significant, and translates to millions of dollars in revenue across the industry. For other book formats, including hardcovers, paperback and audiobooks, no sales increase was observed.

The research controlled for a wide variety of third-party variables that could have influenced the results. Based on the current data Reimers is confident that the sales increase can indeed be attributed the takedown notices. However, she also spots differences in the impact on established and starting writers.

More specifically, piracy doesn’t appear to pose a threat to the e-book sales of starting authors and could even serve as a promotional tool.

“The effect varies by the title’s level of popularity. For well-known books and those by popular authors, online piracy mainly poses a threat to regular book sales, while authors who are just starting out could benefit from the additional platform. My results support this idea, at least for e-books,” Reimers writes.

TorrentFreak reached out to Reimers who notes that it might be a good idea for some authors to share some of their work online.

“I find no evidence that piracy protection is ‘bad’ for any books, but it seems that more obscure titles could benefit from the advertising effect of pirated versions. Some emerging authors offer their titles or excerpts of their titles for free on their websites – exactly to advertise their works. My results suggest that this might be a smart move,” she tells us.

The research is based on data from Digimarc, one of the leading piracy protection firms for the book industry. Needless to say, the company is happy to hear that their efforts indeed appear to have an effect.

“This new research strongly validates our position that Digimarc Guardian’s anti-piracy strategies provide a substantial return-on-investment for customers, in the form of increased legitimate sales and revenue,” Chris Shepard, Director of Product Management at Digimarc, informs us.

Digimarc assured TorrentFreak that they had no hand in the academic research other than providing the piracy takedown data.

The sales data used for the research comes from the leading independent e-book publisher RosettaBooks. Needless to say, they are also happy with the results.

“Rightsholders feel exposed or taken advantage of by piracy. We believe that Digimarc’s services improve our overall sales and the effect of dampened piracy greatly exceeds the cost of the service,” Greg Freed, eBook Production and Distribution Director at RosettaBooks tells TorrentFreak.

While the research indicates that takedown notices can have a positive effect on e-book sales, future research will have to show whether or not this can be generalized to other industries, including the movie and music business.

In any case, with the above in mind it’s expected that the volume of takedown notices will only increase in the near future, a trend that has been going on for several years now.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

According to a recent column in the Chronicle of Higher Education there are publishers that see piracy as a promotional vehicle.

At least, that’s what an associate professor of philosophy writing under the pseudonym Clement Vincent reveals.

When found out that one of his books, published by an established university press, was available on a popular file-sharing site, he informed his publisher about it.

“A lawyer for the press replied quickly, and his main points surprised me. He began by noting that while Web piracy is a problem for all publishers and authors, there is no direct proof that the piracy of any book leads to a decline in sales of the print version. His e-mail noted further that the circulation of pirated copies can in some cases lead to increased overall sales, as the pirated copies create a buzz around a work.”

The professor nonetheless asked the lawyer to send a take-down request, and the file was removed shortly. But was this really the best option?

“In that short time, however, I had become increasingly ambivalent about the situation. Had I just harmed the sales and the scholarly circulation of my work by having the pirated copy removed? The lawyer’s had implied that possibility. Was the press’s viewpoint an academic appropriation of the proverb “There’s no such thing as bad publicity”? I noted that in comparison with other academic presses, my publisher was far more generous in allowing previews of its books on its own Web site and other online outlets.”

Although there’s little research on the topic, even some of the best-selling authors are convinced that piracy is actually a good thing.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Considering the reputation of the SAS for using force and the years of training they undergo to make that response come naturally, it was refreshing this morning to hear McNab suggesting a rather different approach to problem solving, specifically the issue of piracy.

In an open letter, McNab details how piracy often stems from copies of books sent out to reviewers which are scanned and subsequently posted on file-sharing sites. He also notes, however, that these copies are often of poor quality and in the inconvenient PDF format, something which diminishes reader experience and enjoyment.

Despite these shortcomings, book publishers still spend a lot of effort trying to get these books taken down with DMCA notices and the like, but McNab says he prefers a different approach.

“Taking down illegal books from file sharing sites is only a short term fix and both a time-consuming and expensive business as we have already seen from the music industry. Maybe it is better for us to invest these resources in other ways, to stop consumers from migrating to pirate sites that are always going to exist anyway,” he writes.

Some book publishers feel that by not providing a digital version of their products, somehow they’re going to stop online piracy. McNab notes, correctly, that’s not the case and that publishers have the opportunity to do what pirates do, but better.

“Holding back on releasing a digital version of a book won’t stop it from being pirated. With so many of the illegal copies out there originating from printed proof copies that are then put up on sites, if consumers are going to read a digital copy, it’s better that they purchase them legitimately,” he notes.

But its not just the product itself, but the discovering and accessibility experience that McNab feels can be a leverage point for legitimate outlets to persuade, not force, would-be pirates into obtaining the real deal. Restrictive DRM and security, he suggests, are counter-productive.

“If you surround a digital book with too many security obstacles which makes it difficult to find, purchase and read, it will only force consumers to look elsewhere to get their book,” says McNab.

“It is also important to realise that digital books have a quality of content that can not be pirated. These include: immediacy, personalisation, accessibility, discoverability and authenticity. As an industry, we need to understand and use these distinct properties in the fight against piracy,” he says.

“In order to be successful, legal ebooks need to bring more value to the consumer than pirated ones and we can already see great progress in making this happen.”

All this from McNab without a single mention of a lawsuit, getting the law changed, arresting site owners, hijacking domains, disconnecting file-sharers and other similar negative-energy approaches to dealing with this complex issue.

In his previous role McNab was undoubtedly well-versed in sabotage techniques and asymmetric warfare scenarios. His training has served him well.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Both claimed that such technologies, and the file-sharing networks that sprung up to support them, have decimated their industries. And yet both groups have never been healthier financially.

With the increasing popularity of e-book readers such as Apple’s iPad, the Barnes & Noble Nook and Amazon’s Kindle, many in the publishing industry are starting to make the same claims as their music and film brethren.

At the start of the year CNN ran an article about e-books, their increasing sales and the fears of piracy. But how realistic are these fears? After conducting some early research on download statistics after the iPad introduction, we also touched on the subject and concluded ‘”Don’t worry about things.” It’s a position that seems to be borne out by the evidence. Let’s look at an example.

At the end of June, David Weber’s novel “Mission of Honor” was published by Baen books. Baen is a big supporter of e-books and has run a free e-book library of some of their titles over the last 10 years, called The Baen Free Library strangely enough. One of the other ways they support e-books is to include a bound-in CD with certain hardcover editions, containing the e-book files of that title in several formats including several DRM-free ones.

Mission of Honor had one of those CDs. Mission’s CD didn’t just contain one e-book though, it had e-books for a good chunk of the author’s published works, including all the previous books in the series. Again all these files were in multiple (DRM-free) formats – there’s even an occasionally audiobook version (and yes, you guessed it, no DRM on it either).

Here’s the kicker though, Baen has no problems with people distributing the contents of the CD in non-commercial ways. Fellow author, David Drake put it best in the Orientation on one of the earlier CD’s.

The files on this CD are not encrypted. Jim [Baen] doesn’t understand the logic of making his books hard for people to read. Neither do I, though we seem to be in the minority among publishers and authors. Read them. Copy them. Give them to your friends.[..]

You’re not supposed to sell the files. “Who’d be stupid enough to buy something they could have for free?” you may well ask yourself. If you do sell them, you are a Bad Person and may later exhibit signs of wanting to run for political office; but between you and me, I’m not going to come hunt you down.

If e-book pirates are killing the industry as some people seem to believe, this free CD would have guaranteed that the book will sell badly, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The hardcover went on sale June 20th and the e-book CD went up the same day. Yet the book was #13 on the New York Times (NYT) bestseller list for July 2nd. It had slipped a bit to #24 the next week, and then to #26 the week after. But if e-books are killing the industry, how could a niche book (book 12 in a sci-fi series) sell so well? Especially when sci-fi fans are the ones most likely to be technologically oriented, and thus more likely to read e-books?

Can e-books improve the publishing industry? Without a doubt. One of the more innovative methods Baen uses to promote books is a teaser section. It’s not ‘official’ but it’s strongly supported by Baen. Three times a week, sections of a chapter of upcoming books are uploaded to a website called “Collected Driblets of Baen: A Frankly Promotional Endeavor…” and the author decides how much or little of his as-yet unpublished work will be previewed. In the case of Matter of Honor the previews started in February 2010 and ran until July 2nd – scoring some 71,000 hits over the publication of the 18 chapters.

The preview concept is relatively new, but it could be a huge boon for the publishing industry. Never before has it been so easy to tease potential readers, and sell more books because of it. Aside from the previews, another advantage is that people can buy books on their e-book readers and start reading straight away. This as opposed to waiting a day or two for a book to arrive, or going to an actual book store.

The question then is how best publishers should act to encourage people to buy e-books and physical books. As with films and music publishers they should address the concerns of the buying public, and treat them with respect instead of pushing DRM and revocable licenses. Trying to hide away from e-books has not worked for Harry Potter or Twilight, so pre-empt readers and convert them.

In that way, music and TV/movies differ from books in that the physical object of a book is different from the digital version; holding a book in your hands is different from holding and reading an e-book. Rather than treating e-books like the great Satan (as many publishers and authors do), or a replacement (as Amazon currently does), Baen has done very well by treating them as promotion. Eric Flint, author, editor, and ‘Librarian’ of the Baen Free Library made the following observation back in 2000.

“Dave Weber’s On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a “loss leader” for Baen’s for-pay experiment “Webscriptions” for months now. And — hey, whaddaya know? — over that time it’s become Baen’s most popular backlist title in paper!

And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.

Sure enough, within a day, I received at least half a dozen messages (some posted in public forums, others by private email) from people who told me that, based on hearing about the episode and checking out Mother of Demons, they either had or intended to buy the book. In one or two cases, this was a “gesture of solidarity. “But in most instances, it was because people preferred to read something they liked in a print version and weren’t worried about the small cost — once they saw, through sampling it online, that it was a novel they enjoyed. (Mother of Demons is a $5.99 paperback, available in most bookstores. Yes, that a plug. )

E-books have the potential to increase sales of physical books as well as provide their own source of income. That is, if authors and publishers are willing to accept them and deal with their users fairly, instead of hiding behind curiously high prices or DRM. E-books are the future. Last month Amazon reported it was selling more e-books than hardcovers. E-books are not going to go away any time soon, nor are they a flash in the pan. The lessons should have been learned from the 10+ year music fight. Throwing money at enforcement and litigation doesn’t work. Instead embracing the medium can be beneficial.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.