Amazon became big by selling books and in recent years eBooks have become some of the fastest selling items. However, pirates are now directly targeting the company’s successful business model.

With a new Chrome extension pirates are entering Amazon, effectively transforming it into a pirate ‘store.’

When the LibGen extension is installed, it adds a new row on top of the Amazon product page of books that are also available through unauthorized sources.

The plugin uses data from the Libgen.org search engine which lists over a million books. Below is a screenshot of an Amazon book page, with a new row on the top linking to pirated downloads of the same title.

LibGen, short for Library Genesis, lists a wide variety of pirate sources for most books, including direct downloads, torrents and magnet links. It appears to work well, although there are occasional mismatches where links to books with similar titles are listed.

Needless to say book publishers are not going to be pleased with Amazon’s unofficial feature. Whether Amazon plans to take any action to stop the extension has yet to be seen.

The idea to transform Amazon into a pirate site is not entirely new. A few years ago a Firefox plugin integrated Pirate Bay download links into the site, which also worked for music and movies. This plugin was quickly taken offline quickly after the news was picked up by the mainstream media.

There are still other extensions floating around with the same functionality. Torrent This, for example, enhances Amazon with links to Pirate Bay download pages for all sorts of media, much like the “Pirates of the Amazon” plugin did.

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

Platforms that allow people to resell digital goods are meeting fierce resistance from the entertainment industries, who view them as a threat to their online business models.

For example, the major record labels previously pointed out that MP3s are simply too good to resell, as they don’t deteriorate in quality. Similarly, movie studios complained that the ability to sell “used” videos would kill innovation.

The book industry is also concerned and in an attempt to counter this threat several publishers launched a lawsuit against Tom Kabinet, an online marketplace for used eBooks based in the Netherlands.

The publishers fear that the site will negatively impact their business, and that it can’t prevent people from reselling pirated copies. The companies asked the Amsterdam Court for a preliminary injunction against Tom Kabinet, but the request was denied this week.

The Amsterdam Court concluded that selling used eBooks is a legal grey area and not by definition illegal in Europe.

Previously the EU Court of Justice previously ruled that consumers are free to resell games and software, even when there’s no physical copy. That case applied to licensed content, which is different from the Tom Kabinet case, so further investigation is needed to arrive at a final verdict.

The court therefore dismissed the publishers’ claims and ordered them to pay €23.469,56 in legal fees. Tom Kabinet, meanwhile, is still allowed to facilitate the sale of used eBooks.

It’s clear that the publishers didn’t get the result they hoped for. In fact, things have gotten worse, as Tom Kabinet’s visitor numbers have exploded. Shortly after the verdict was announced the site went offline because it couldn’t handle the surge in traffic.

These connectivity issues have been fixed now, and the site’s owner is happy with the outcome thus far.

“There is still a long way to go before legislation is clear on eBooks, but we’ve made a pretty good start,” Tom Kabinet informed TorrentFreak.

The publishers on the other hand are considering further steps, and it’s likely that the case will head to a full trial in the future.

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

Last week we reported on Torboox, an ebook site providing millions of unauthorized ebooks to the public. The site made the news after German reporters were subjected to a criminal complaint by publishers who didn’t want the site named. While that complaint has now been withdrawn, Torboox say that not only will they continue, but they have a serious plan to shake up the ebook market by targeting Amazon. Here’s how.

In Germany books are subjected to fixed pricing by law, which means that books can only be offered for sale to the public at a price determined by the publisher. This effectively means that there is no competition between rival sellers on the issue of price, value placed on books is not linked to the cost of making them, and supply and demand variables are a thing of the past.

“German publishers can set the prices that Amazon sells ebooks for,” Spiegelbest, the admin of Toorboox, told TorrentFreak. “That’s why Amazon is trying to become a publisher itself by offering authors much better conditions than the publishers can.”

Spiegelbest says that there are currently two players of significance in the German ebook market – Amazon and Torboox – and they have things in common.

Torboox and Amazon are just the same, only the price is different.

“If you look at it, they are very similar. Amazon is nothing but a hoster for the authors. No wonder they can offer 70% provision,” he says.

“Amazon does nothing to ‘produce’ books. Thus they are very similar to Torboox. Both of us – legal and illegal – are book hosters, not traditional book publishers. The ebook market is shared between two book hosters.”

According to Spiegelbest, publishers entering the German ebook market face many risks and a fierce competitor in Amazon, a company that has already prepared for a market without paper books.

“From the start Amazon saw themselves as a mere publisher of ebooks. Why let the publishers come into a market Amazon created and dominates already? So they do business with the authors willing to publish digitally,” he explains.

With the way that the market is arranged at the moment and as the paper market slows down, Spiegelbest says that German publishers are trapped. Amazon dominates the ebook market and is defending its market share. On the other hand is Torboox, a site offering ebooks much, much cheaper than anyone else in the market, Amazon included.

“We ourselves are not the born enemy of the publishers,” Spiegelbest explains. “We slash the prices okay, we steal their content if you want, but we see publishers as co-producers of books like the authors.

“For us it is not just hosting a book. That’s not enough. There is a lot more to it. It sounds strange but we love books. We are in it for the books not for the business. Amazon is our enemy – not life or death – but for the sake of the quality of future books.”

We asked how Torboox hopes to battle such a huge company, change the market and come out on top. The response is pretty controversial. According to Spiegelbest, piracy currently controls around 50% of the market, with Amazon on 40% and others holding the rest.

Send Amazon business – and then take them down.

“If you look at it you get a funny picture. At the moment we are doing a good job for Amazon. We are offering the best-sellers of the publishers for nothing. Thus the publishers make less money, can pay their authors less and will eventually lose them to Amazon. Very nice construction this is. As Amazon itself is already cutting prices with their titles you have a double effect of strangling the publishers,” Spiegelbest explains.

“At the moment you have high quality content of the publishers trying to enter the ebook market. But the prices are high and the conditions for the customers (DRM etc) are unacceptable. The publishers have no concept. You cannot sell ebooks like paper books.”

The solution, the Torboox admin believes, is offering a flat-rate, all you can eat service. He says he already has plenty of users willing to become customers.

“Our users could easily become customers of publishers with a sound concept. But publishers have to listen – not to us but to their would-be customers. They have superior content but have no answer to Amazons’s challenge,” he says.

The business model

“In the end the publishers have to talk to us. They have to find a way to make us legal. It is their job not ours. A flatrate will be 10 euros a month – no limit. Licensing will again be the job of the publishers. If a publisher isn’t wise enough to participate – no problem,” Spiegelbest says.

“The author gets the same as Amazon pays. If Amazon pays 80% we pay 80%. They get paid according to what the users read. Every read page is paid.”

Figures shared with TorrentFreak suggest that Torboox users are indeed consuming a lot of books which could conceivably translate into revenue if the userbase warms to the flatrate idea. Currently the site’s users are downloading around 2 million books per month, increasing to a predicted five million in the run up to Christmas.

At the moment the site operates on a donation model but as things grow the users will be expected to pay their way. It’s the publishers’ choice whether they get a look at that money, Spiegelbest says, while noting that the site continues to grow.

“If our server is grounded by traffic we will have our own cloud. We have plenty of time. Again if the publishers don’t want to talk to us it is okay. But one day without talking to us there will be a Christmas business without German book publishers that’s for sure. In a way it’s the Grooveshark thing. You want money for your files, you get it. You don’t want money for your files, we have them downloaded anyway. Be a wise man.”

In the end Spiegelbest believes that the publishers will have little choice but to come to him.

“We have the concept. The publishers have the content. Together we can indeed battle Amazon. And Amazon is not monopolizing films, games or music – why ebooks? For me the biggest problem is this: Will the publishers understand before they vanish? That’s 50-50, no more,” he concludes.

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

In years gone by it was fairly widely accepted that if you host infringing material without permission then that is illegal. Now we are used to the idea that linking to that material is also illegal, and even indexing a link that links to a page that links to a mere torrent file can be painted as infringement.

Book publishers in Germany, however, think they can take this never ending game to a whole new level.

Last Sunday Der Tagesspiegel published an interesting interview with a representative of a site offering ebooks without the permission of the authors. The site, which was founded in late 2012 and claims to be the largest pirate ebook site in Germany, says it serves up 1.5 million books every month.

“We are publishers, not shoplifters,” protested one of the site’s operators. “The servers we pay for with donations. I think the project is unique. In that sense, we are therefore a download platform for e-books that can be distinguished from others in that our offer is broad, like a library.”

The interview explained how publishers had developed an interest in the site and had tasked anti-piracy group GVU with an investigation.

“I say it openly: we are not interested in the legal opinion of German publishers,” the site’s owner responded. “We see ourselves as a supplier in the market, such as Amazon and [regular] bookstores.”

By now many readers will be wondering which site this is. Der Tagesspiegel obviously thought the same so quite reasonably named it as Boox.to.

The reaction from the publishers to that revelation was quite astonishing.

According to Buchreport the publishers filed a criminal complaint, not against Boox.to, but against both Der Tagesspiegel and Zeit.de who had republished the article. Their claim: by naming the site the publications had assisted copyright infringement.

“With the direct and multiple naming of the Internet address the reader is immediately aware of the illicit supply of the website. With regard to objective journalistic reporting there was no need for direct nomination,” the publishers write in their complaint.

“The publication of the Website and its Internet address immediately enabled a broad mass of readers to become aware of the site. The reader is also indirectly encouraged to take advantage of the offer, taking advantage of the illegal site that has been highlighted by the play of the interview.”

Speaking with TorrentFreak, the admin of Boox.to says he was “enthusiastic” when he learned of the criminal complaint, but the best was yet to come.

“Soon people found out that the online magazine of the German Book Publishers Association had itself published the complete URL of the site. Well, then there was just laughter and tears,” Spiegelbest told us.

“So the criminal complaint was publicly dumped during the first few hours. The criminal complaint itself was made as a matter of principle without any prospect of success in a German court room.”

Although the publishers were quick to take action against the news sites, they’re apparently struggling to do much about the site itself. The secret, Spiegelbest told TorrentFreak, is in the way the site is setup.

“What is really new in Germany for the ebooks is that we cannot be abused practically,” he explains. “We have a hidden server (Tor) with our content. The public address is our proxy. So this proxy can be abused but we have a second proxy running to replace it. So of course you can abuse our proxy but an international court order will cost a lot more than replacing the proxy. That’s why there is little effort to take our site down. It’s a matter of finances.”

And now it appears that Germany just isn’t big enough for Boox.

“We are planning to open our site for ebooks in all languages. This is our vision for the future. For the weeks ahead we have to cope with an escalation in the number of new registrations. But in 2014 an international site (for all languages) may well be our project,” Spiegelbest concludes.

It’s notable that the criminal complaint also named the site in question so that the authorities could properly investigate the matter. Maybe the publishers should have instead performed a creative mime, with the police asking “Is it a TV show? Is it a movie? Is it a book?”

Reporting is not a game of charades and it is definitely not, as the publishers tried to suggest, an act of copyright infringement to refer to a pirate site by name. Streisand Effect in 3….2….1

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

In recent years ‘watermarking’ has been expanded into the digital domain. All kinds of digital media can be quietly marked in order to identify the origins of the content, which has proven particularly useful with the ‘dots’ to be found in Hollywood movies. By tracking these marks within pirate copies of movies, studios are able to identify which theater they were ‘cammed’ in.

Digital watermarks can also provide much more person-specific information. Vendors of digital data, such as MP3 retailers, sometimes put watermarks into the media they sell in order to identify the original purchaser. The idea is that if people believe they can be identified as a ‘leaker’, then they are more likely to keep their content close to their chests.

Of course, despite the presence of watermarks, content still manages to leak online. However, the digital watermarks in consumer purchases rarely directly identify the original purchaser of the content, meaning that anti-piracy companies have to go through other processes to get their man. A cozy arrangement in the Netherlands tackles this problem with ease.

The new digital distribution deal for eBook merchants will see them ‘watermark’ unique codes into the digital eBooks they sell which will identify a specific transaction number. These transaction numbers will be linked directly to a specific customer account.

So far the process isn’t much out of the ordinary, but the new deal will also bridge the missing link between random-looking transaction numbers in a digital file on the Internet and a real person’s identity.

The agreement will see vendors connected to the eBoekhuis platform share previously-private customer data directly with copyright holders and anti-piracy group BREIN. This means that should digital books turn up on BitTorrent networks or Usenet for example, with a minimum of fuss BREIN will be able to match the embedded watermarks with the customer who bought them.

According to the document seen by EReaders.nl, eBook vendors will be required to store customer transaction data and make it available to BREIN and rightsholders for a minimum of two years.

The problematic sharing of customer information with a third-party (who could potentially sue them) will be solved by informing customers at the point of sale that their details may be shared with outsiders if their account is linked to abuse.

Whether customers will read the terms and conditions is open to debate, but if brought specifically and clearly to their attention it’s likely that many would think twice before parting with cash.

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

To deal with this threat the French Publishers Association (SNE) announced several countermeasures this week. One of their key initiatives is ProtectionLivres.com, a new anti-piracy portal that will allow publishers to search for infringing content and send infringement notices to take unauthorized copies offline.

“SNE members will soon be able to use a French version of a service developed by English publishers. This portal provides access to a search engine through which publishers can find illegal content and send takedown requests,” they wrote in a press release.

The association explains that the new service will be especially useful to smaller publishing houses who don’t already have systems in place to protect their content. The French version is a copy of CopyrightInfringementPortal.com and will be launched on the ProtectionLivres.com domain in the weeks to come.

At least, that was the plan.

Unfortunately for the publishers, news of the new anti-piracy portal didn’t go unnoticed by the popular eBook release group “Team AlexandriZ.” These book pirates quickly found out that the domain mentioned in the press release wasn’t registered yet. So, Team AlexandriZ decided to buy it instead, redirecting it to the Defective By Design anti-DRM site.

Team AlexandriZ, who were sued by SNE and six book publishers last year, told TorrentFreak that they wanted to reverse the original message the domain was intended for.

“Protectionlivres.com was supposed to be a site where publishers can report pirated content, but it’s now a portal to fight against DRM. Because DRM is one of the causes of piracy, not its effect,” Team AlexandriZ says.

Thus far the plan has been quite successful. French press picked up the stunt, directing the attention for the anti-piracy initiative to the unfortunate mistake. The French Publishers Association quickly realized that they had no other option than to register a new domain name to host their portal.

The publishers group quickly issued a new press release (original here) replacing the ProtectionLivres.com domain with the new PortailProtectionLivres.com. There is no mention of the incident on their website but the (1) in the title of the press release says enough.

The above shows that similar to their natural adversaries, anti-piracy campaigns are like a hydra. They simply grow a new head and reappear under a new name. But not without having a laugh first.

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

Oliveira, the author of several books, was transported to the Plaza de Armas in Lima, Peru, in the back of a truck Thursday. Once in place she did what the gentleman of the **AA’s have dreamt about so often but have never had the courage to do.

She jumped out, stood in front of the government palace, and peeled back a long dark coat revealing a lacy black “dental floss” (blame Google translate for that term) struggling to cover a tiny portion of her lower body.

Words daubed across her chest and back in red ink, presumably to draw attention away from her black pull-up stockings, shouted a firm ‘NO TO PIRACY’.

“I’m doing this for my book so it is not pirated anymore anywhere in the world,” Oliveira explained, attracting the attention of the police.

“A country is made with culture, with books. When people pirate books culture is in danger. [Peru] is the first country where I see this,” she added.

Oliveira spoke about her earlier books including “100 Secrets of a Lady in Waiting” and “If He Cheats On You, It’s Your Problem”, a book filled with tips targeted at women whose partners screw around.

And Oliveira apparently isn’t writing from a position of ignorance either – in fact it appears she’s creating her own market. She admitted that the books had been written from her personal experience working as garota de compañía (a girl of company) in which she had sex with 5,000 men, proving that you can indeed charge for stuff normally available for free.

Eventually though all good things had to come to an end. Oliveira put her clothes back on, got in the truck and drove away, probably wondering how rich she’d be if each of her night-time conquests had purchased just one copy of the book for their wives instead of pirating it.

And for those cynics thinking that this was just some sort of sexually motivated anti-piracy publicity stunt to sell more books, wash your dirty minds.

The fact that Oliveira is appearing today at the Chamber of Commerce in Lima with a presentation titled “Seduce Clients” has absolutely no connection to what happened Thursday.

Moving pics or it didn’t happen? OK, go on then..

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

A) Sign up with a major publisher,which may include signing over a substantial percentage of royalties, and possible debt-financing?

B) Or release digital copies online and become a viral sensation?

The answer is B, at least it is if your book is called “Go the Fuck to Sleep”

The book, written by Adam Mansbach, and published by a little known publisher, has sold over 100,000 copies, pushing it to the number 1 spot. It’s so popular, that the publication date has been moved from October to mid-June.

Want more? How about the fact that film rights have already been sold to Fox2000. Or that publishers in the UK, Australia, South Africa, India and even China are also putting the book out simultaneously with the US release?

Some credit the sales to a pirate PDF of the book. The PDF went viral, with the pages spread via twitter and Facebook as well as other ‘new media’. The book began as a Facebook post between friends 11 months ago, so it’s only fitting it goes full circle.

Not everyone’s looking on the positive side, though. Business Insider insists it only works for ‘a picture book, not a novel, so the value of the physical object is higher than for a book which is just text.’ and that people will ‘buy the book, not for themselves, but for a friend. Again, this isn’t applicable for most books.’

Or, put another way, this book is something people not only want to own, but want others to own, and that it’s obscurity, not piracy that’s the real problem. What a surprise it’s sold so well then. Sounds like a novel way of dealing with piracy though – make stuff people want to buy, it might just catch on….

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

This year the book industry may see the definite breakthrough for eBooks, and again an Apple device is expected to play a facilitating role. Having watched the changes in the music industry where piracy is often portrayed as a huge threat, some book publishers already fear the worst.

The million dollar question is whether or not these fears are justified. How big of a threat is eBook piracy for the book industry? Is there a noticeable iPad effect? We have some interesting numbers to share.

To determine if Apple’s iPad has had en affect on eBook piracy we looked at the number of downloaded titles before and after its introduction. We decided to focus our research on the 10 best selling eBooks on Amazon which seemed to be a good starting point. The problem, however, is that none of these books are available on public BitTorrent, nor could we find them on file-hosting services or Usenet.

This in itself is quite an interesting observation, and clearly a signal that eBook piracy is not (yet) as widespread as that of music and movies. In order to come up with some comparison material we decided to change our sample to the 10 best selling paperback books in the business category, which should also fit well with the demographics of iPad buyers.

From this list 6 of the 10 books were available on BitTorrent. Although we have to note that BitTorrent may not be the only source of eBook piracy, it should give us a good indication of the iPad effect, if there is any. To do so, we tracked the download numbers from Saturday till Thursday, a week before the iPad launch and the days after.

By comparing the data from these two samples we found that the number of unauthorized eBook downloads on BitTorrent grew by 78% on average, a significant increase. It is worth noting that all of the six eBooks had more downloads after the iPad launch than before.

David Allen’s productivity guide ‘Getting Things Done’ was by far the most downloaded eBook with an average of 435 downloads a day, up from 277 before the introduction of the iPad. However, this 57% increase is relatively small compared to some of the other titles we tracked.

‘Freakonomics’, another classic in the business section, saw a 104% increase in downloads, going from 187 to 381. ‘How We Decide’ saw an even bigger surge in downloads – 140% – as downloads went from 56 to 134.

The three remaining books from the list that we tracked on BitTorrent are ‘The Tipping Point’, ‘How Women Decide’ and ‘The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People’. These three titles all saw an increase in downloads, 21%, 47% and 71% respectively, with absolute download numbers after the iPad launch of 192, 52 and 82.

Interesting data, but what can we conclude from the statistics?

First of all, there seems to be a significant iPad effect if we assume that the increase in downloads is in part related to the iPad introduction. On the other hand it is clear that the absolute download numbers are relatively small compared to those of music and films, where popular releases can have more than a million downloads in one week.

This low piracy figure can in part be explained by the fact that the number of people with an iPad or other eBook reader is still relatively low. Another key factor is that most books are simply not available in a pirated version, so buying a book through an online store is far more convenient and faster than trying to find an unauthorized copy.

The convenience factor and the overall user experience are going to be the key advantages for the book industry. When the iPod was launched there were no digital download stores, making file-sharing networks the only option to get music easily.

As a final note we have to stress that piracy does not equal lost sales. In the academic publications that looked into the link between piracy and (music) sales, there is still no consensus on this topic. For now, the book industry is best off putting all their efforts into making a great product for consumers and we’re sure that the iPad can be of assistance there.

In the months to come we will keep en eye on how eBook piracy evolves.

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

Perhaps of more interest is the technique used by the publishers’ organization to gather their data. In the report they write that they had to code a specialized tool to scrape the Pirate Bay database for book titles, since there were no ready-made tools available.

Peter Sunde is now arguing that they were breaking the law by scraping the site multiple times without permission. “The Pirate Bay actually owns the copyright to its own database of torrents,” Sunde writes on his blog. Sunde further refers to the Pirate Bay’s Usage Policy, which the book publishers organization has violated.

In true MPAA style, Sunde is determined to fight for his intellectual property. “I called them up and asked them to present more information about the technical things, so we can send them an invoice if they don’t want to be dragged into court,” Sunde told TorrentFreak in a comment.

Meanwhile, the true reason behind the real book publishers’ study remains vague. As we’ve pointed out many times before, piracy can actually boost book sales. One of the prime examples is best-selling author Paulo Coelho, who said he sold thousands of extra copies because he pirated his own books. Coelho’s success later inspired the publisher and Leander Kahney – the author of the two books – to do the same, with several others following this example. Particularly for book authors, piracy seems to be a useful promotional tool, rather than a threat. For now, that is.

We can’t foresee what will happen if someone launches a Kindle ready pirate site. More on this later, for sure.

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