The piracy of ebooks and audiobooks is one of the most debated issues in publishing. Whether people are discussing ways to combat piracy, or whether it's even an issue worth our concern, the fact of the matter is that there are people stealing books.

In this month's podcast, we attempt to get inside the mind of a pirate to figure out what anti-piracy strategies are most effective. We also offer other (legal!) ways of getting free books and talk with Canadian publisher ECW about how the industry is (or isn't) fighting back against book theft.

(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)

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The full videos of the Tech Forum presentations mentioned in the podcast are linked below:

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Transcript

Zalina: Hello. Welcome to the BookNet Canada podcast. I'm Zalina Alvi, the marketing manager at BookNet.

Kira: And I'm Kira Harkonen, the marketing associate at BookNet.

Zalina: And this month, we are talking about a very sexy topic. We're talking about book piracy.

Kira: So, the piracy of eBooks and audiobooks is one of the most debated issues in publishing. Whether people are discussing ways to combat piracy, or whether it's even an issue worth their concern, the fact of the matter is that there are people out there and they are stealing books. Many pirates may not even be aware that they are committing a crime. Listening to an audio book on YouTube may seem innocent enough, because YouTube is not a free download site. But audiobooks typically cost between $20 to $40, and when the views or listens add up, that's a huge loss for publishers. For example, the audiobook version of Stephen King's "Salem's Lot," which retails for $30 on Amazon, has 115,000 views on YouTube. Assuming every single person would have paid full price for this book, that's a loss of nearly $3.5 million.

Obviously, the biggest argument in favour of piracy is that those people never would have bought the book in the first place, so it's not really a loss. Furthermore, now that there are 115,000, people who've listened to the book, they can now help promote it via word of mouth to people who will buy the book. Whether this is true or not, the issue of piracy still remains a growing concern.

Zalina: For sure. It's an issue with a lot of different angles. So, how big is the problem? So, because we are BookNet, we looked at the data. Actually, at our tech forum conference just this last March, Noah Genner, who's our CEO, did a presentation called "The State of the Publishing Nation," that offered a lot of stats based on our surveying of book consumers in Canada. So, according to his presentation, he found that 25% of eBooks and 20% of audiobooks are acquired from "free sites." So, yes, this can include legal options like Project Gutenberg, but obviously there are gonna be other things in there, like YouTube, listening to audiobooks on there, or various torrent sites. And that's not a insignificant portion of the pie, is it?

Kira: No. That's a huge chunk of all the eBooks in the world if you're looking at 25%. And in the UK, according to the online copyright infringement tracker survey, 17% of books read online have been pirated, which is the equivalent of 4 million books. In the United States, Digimarc has reported that publishers are losing more than $300 million per year as a result of piracy. So, the long-standing argument that not every pirated book equals a lost sale because those people were never gonna buy the book to begin with has been disputed. Fantasy author Tom Pollock raises a fair point in saying that, "It's very much a static analysis of a dynamic problem, because if you normalize the practice of pirating books, you erode incentive for people to pay for them. So eventually, people who would have bought them stopped doing so."

Zalina: Yeah, that's an interesting way of putting it. There's another study from MUSO, it's the London-based organization that tracks piracy on a global scale. And they say that online piracy is up 1.6% across the world, with piracy sites receiving over 300 billion hits in 2017. And more than half, 53%, of all visits going to streaming sites, making it the most popular piracy tool. And, most visits to piracy websites come from, you guessed it, the United States. It was 27.9 billion visits.

Kira: I think, like, after that, it was Russia and India, which, India has a huge population, like, bigger than the United States. So the fact that they didn't have more piracy hits than United States is saying something.

Zalina: Well, that's true. I was gonna ask how it breaks down to, you know, per person, because population, obviously, it makes a big difference. But that's very interesting. So, let's talk a little bit about who's actually pirating these books. So, you mentioned Digimarc already, but, so, they sponsored a study by Nielsen, called "Inside the Mind of a Book Pirate," that was actually very interesting. If you can go look for it, it has a lot of really good stats, but it's also very short. So, very nice. So, they talked a lot about the different elements of book piracy, including a profile of what the typical downloader is.

So, they say that illegal downloaders are typically aged 18 to 34, they're educated and they're wealthy. Stephen Lotinga from the Publishers Association clarifies that eBook pirates "tend to be from better-off socio-economic groups. It's not the people who can't afford books. It's not teenagers in their bedrooms," which is definitely contrary to what the typical perception is, of someone, you know, at home in their mom's basement, pirating a bunch of things.

Kira: That's, like, what a lot of people say. They say, "You can't stop people from pirating books because it's the people..." like, people can't access them, but if they can actually afford them, and they're pirating them anyway, those are the people we're trying to stop, not people who are in the middle of nowhere and have no access to a bookstore or internet. Like, it's things like that.

Zalina: Yeah, it's interesting. So, the study also talks about why they do it. According to the same Digimarc survey, the Nielsen study, 58% say it's convenient or easy. Fifty-one percent say it's because it's free and cheap. Free or cheap. Thirty-eight percent say it's because it's not available elsewhere. Thirty-three percent just say it's a preference, and 17% say they shouldn't have to pay for content. It's very interesting.

Kira: Yeah. So, 17% of people who think that you shouldn't have to pay for books, who can't be persuaded to change their mind. But the other people, we can look at how to work with them, how we can change their minds, how we can make the content that you pay for easier to access than the content that's free on the internet. So, accessibility and availability in other industries has made piracy the more difficult option. So, I know way more people with a Netflix account, and, like, I'm sure these people still pirate movies occasionally, but because Netflix is super easy to access, and it's only $8 a month, and you can watch however many movies you want, however long, you can watch Netflix all day, every day and still pay $8.

Zalina: And it's not limited content there's enough.

Kira: Yeah. It's not limited. You can...

Zalina: Get all the major blockbusters, all the new TV shows. More or less. [crosstalk 00:06:22] get new episodes. But...

Kira: But the same thing doesn't really apply to books. I know, like, an Audible subscription is $15 a month. But realistically, people don't read books as quickly, so $15 a month adds up, and you eventually have to read at least, or you'd listen to at least, like, 10 books a year or more to make it, like, a financially viable option. Otherwise, it might make more sense to just go out and buy the audio book or listen to it online.

Zalina: And, I mean, a lot of other options. I mean, you get a monthly credit with your subscription. That's one book. And that's not exactly the...if you're gonna listen to three or four audiobooks in a month, that's gonna add up.

Kira: And then, if you're getting a credit for one month, and then you have to buy more books on top of that, it's kind of like, you're just being forced to pay $15 every month to buy a book, when you could look up a book whenever you want on YouTube, for example.

Zalina: Yeah, so there's a ways to go to making sure that it's as convenient, easy, cheap, accessible, as a lot of other entertainment mediums. So, I wonder how much people who are pirating books think about how it is affecting the rest of the industry. I wonder if it's like, if you're thinking about downloading a movie, it's so easy to see, like, big Hollywood stars and giant film companies not really feel too bad about the effect of you download...you, this one person downloading this movie. What do you think about how book piracy affects...like, who it affects and how it affects them?

Kira: So, I feel like it primarily affects the author. Like, they're the first and foremost person who are not gonna get the sale from the book, that, like, the average professional author makes less than minimum wage. So, like, lots of people work another job just to have enough money to write. So, if an author's book also doesn't sell enough copies, the book two of the series might be cancelled by the publisher, and they don't get compensated. I know Samantha Shannon, the author of "The Bone" series, she said that "The thing that's really exhausting about piracy is that authors are not often allowed to be upset by the theft of their work. If we ask people not to do it, no matter how courteously, we're told that we should have more compassion or be grateful that we even have readers. Outside the creative industry, people broadly dislike theft. Within the creative industry, it becomes a grey area where people aren't so sure."

Zalina: Well, yeah, I mean, that's the content marketing argument, right? It's the same reason why if you want people to read, or buy your product, or read your book, like, you could put some free content out there to attract those readers. And it does seem like that's the number one argument for why people shouldn't be terribly concerned about combatting piracy, at least in the book industry,

Kira: I know Maggie Stiefvater, I think that's how you pronounce her last name, she, for one of her books, which she was worried that the second book in the series, or her series, was gonna be cancelled, she released the first five chapters, just illegally, free, online, and then people read it, and they're, I think after the first five chapters, she put, like, a little message about piracy and how it was bad. And, like, people were like, "Oh, where can I find the actual book?" And then a bunch of other people went out to buy the actual book, and then her series was able to continue, only because of she released it for free.

Zalina: I mean, that's pretty good outside-the-box thinking, but, I mean, it requires so much on the part of the author to be so proactive about finding methods to get around this, be creative like that.

Kira: Or even being, like, aware of how much your book is being pirated is, like, takes a lot of work. You have to, like, go on Google and type in your name and go through all of the links and see which ones are actually, like, legitimate, free download copies, and which ones are just phishing scams.

Zalina: So, where are people getting all of these free books? So, a quick Google search brings up multiple forums with links to sites where audiobooks and eBooks can be downloaded for free. YouTube is the main one, right?

Kira: Definitely for audiobooks. You can just type in "free full audiobook," or "full audio book" on YouTube, and you get tons of results. And they all have thousands and thousands of views, because YouTube has no, like, piracy system and check for books. They do for music, where, like, they match it, and then they'll send a notice to the copyright holder that someone has posted your book, but they can't do that for books, because...

Zalina: Well, there's a way, if you... You can complain, right, about a specific video. You can say, "This is my property," submit a form, and, like, see if they take it down. But is that's...I don't know, is that a drop in the bucket? Like, is it just gonna end up back on YouTube the next day?

Kira: Yeah, you just have to...there's nothing to stop that person from posting the video on YouTube over and over again, and views will just keep adding up. I know, there's one specific author who took a look at his books. I don't remember his name. Ryan Holiday? He looked at his books on YouTube and put a notice, and then it was back up the next day, like, on a different user's profile.

Zalina: I mean, it's kind of nice that so many people wanna listen to it, I suppose.

Kira: Yeah. Suppose that's the argument that the pirates are trying to make.

Zalina: But there are, like, if the book industry, or I should say, the audiobook industry, looked more to how music copyright is protected, do you think there are opportunities for ways for it to be handled more, you know, streamlined, without the authors having to, like, submit a form each time?

Kira: Definitely. But I don't think that, like, a lot of people are thinking about that. It's most, like, the huge concern is for people stealing songs from the internet, because I feel like audiobooks aren't...there's not a lot of focus on them for piracy.

Zalina: Yeah, which might change, I suppose, because it is a growing portion right now. It's still very much in the minority of how people consume books in Canada. But everyone is paying attention to it, and it does seem to be growing, so maybe when it's a larger portion of the pie, it'll be more of a priority for protecting the copyright in that medium.

Kira: Definitely. I mean, eBooks, on the other hand, they're definitely more frequently circulated on the internet, because it's so easy to just strip the DRM from eBooks. You just type it into Google, and there's, like, hundreds and hundreds of articles, and, like, different plugins you can get for how to do it. And it's, like, a three-step process.

Zalina: Well, people. People will find a way.

Kira: People will find a way.

Zalina: Just like nature.

Kira: And I think, like, the biggest issue is within the education sector, like textbooks. Students can't afford to buy textbooks all the time, so they're very frequently pirated electronically.

Zalina: Yeah, I know. That's such a shame. I appreciate all the ingenuity, though, I have to say. So, with, I mean, thousands, I don't know, possibly millions of people out there constantly working, figuring out ways to hack the system, figuring how to strip DRM, put audio books up on YouTube, what can anyone really do to prevent piracy?

Kira: There's a few different options out there. There's blockchain and then DRM, digital rights management, are the two big things that people are talking about right now. But then there's a lot of people talking about just putting a digital watermark on books, which is what they did for Harry Potter. But that was hacked within a month. But I think, with Harry Potter, like, because it was digital, or because it was so widely available, and you could download it for any platform, because of the lack of DRM, people were less likely to pirate it. The CEO, Charlie Redmayne, he did say that because it was more widely available, but they had more, like, reports of the piracy from other people just being like, "Hey, you should shut this down." But also, it wasn't a huge issue for them, just because everyone could, they could find it where they wanted to find it, on Pottermore and Pottermore was fun. People wanted to play the games.

Zalina: Yeah, true. So, it's a matter of thinking about your business models, and how they can more or less keep up with how people want to consume content.

Kira: Making your content more widely available and easy to access is the main way I think that people can combat piracy. I know "Game of Thrones" is the most widely pirated show on television, in the world, but mostly by people who live outside of the U.S., because they can't access it. The number one reason for this is because it's only available on HBO, or HBO Go, I think is what their streaming service is called. And it's an expensive channel and platform that...and not necessarily everyone who subscribes to HBO wants to watch, like, "Big Little Lies" or "True Detective." They just wanna watch "Game of Thrones." They're not gonna pay for the channel just to watch one show.

So I think if it was available on something that had more options, and it was more easily accessible, then people would be more likely to pay for the content, but because it's not, then you're gonna get pirates. But I know, despite all of this, the series director, David Petrarca, has said that, "Illegal downloads have absolutely no effect on the success of the series. In fact, it creates buzz encouraging others to pay for access to the show, and it's now one of the most popular TV shows on the planet."

Zalina: Well, we know where he falls on the debate. That's an interesting note, point you made about how, because it's downloaded mostly outside of the United States, because it's not really available there yet, right? To the point, you know, business models having to evolve, I wonder if we need to acknowledge that content isn't just a United States first, and then Israel two months later, Japan a few months after that. I mean, people are consuming content and sharing it on a global scale immediately, all the time. So that definitely should be something content creators should be thinking about, or distributors, really.

Kira: Yeah. I think the number one thing that encourages piracy is if you say it's released in the United States first, and only in the United States, people in the U.S. are gonna be talking about it on social media, and then everyone is gonna wanna know what they're talking about. So someone's gonna share it, and then it's gonna get passed around the world before it goes out there legally.

Zalina: That's stuff, I mean, that's a whole rights issue, which is not an easy thing to change, or to think about differently. Another thing that, I don't know, is on the side of combatting piracy in some way, I mean, the government is trying to do stuff, a little bit, here, there.

Kira: A little bit.

Zalina: Yeah. You know, trying to shut down piracy websites, make it harder for people to actually get to torrent sites and download content. But at the same time, you see all this pushback from the public about keeping the net neutral, about not controlling things, being worried about it being a slippery slope if the government starts shutting down certain sites. So, it's definitely tough. It might just be technology having to come to the rescue here.

Kira: And a lot of the time, technology also, like, makes mistakes. Because I know with Pottermore, specifically, and the watermark system that they have, I think it's BookStream, it started sending out takedown notices to Wikipedia for, like, J. K. Rowling's Wikipedia page, because it just thought it was infringing on copyright when it was not. And there's been, like, a lot of instances where these bots, I guess, are sending out, like, unwarranted takedown notices, especially for Wikipedia pages, for, like, the publishers' own authors, and all of that. So, it's not perfect.

Zalina: No. I mean, automation has a way to go, probably, in that area, sounds like. Another area, I mean, everyone knows about DRM, right? It's definitely...like, if you talk about book piracy, it's hard not to talk about DRM. So, but most people don't actually know exactly how it works. So, we actually have a little clip from Dave Cramer, from Hachette, who spoke at our ebookcraft conference a couple years ago, about what exactly it is, how it works, and also, actually, how it's problematic. So, let's see what he has to say about it.

Dave: So, one way to keep people from copying digital books is to use technological protection measures, the machinery of cryptography, to keep a book secret from the wrong sort of users. This is DRM, digital rights management. So, what is DRM? Our friends at Defective by Design define DRM as the practice of imposing technological restrictions that control what users can do with digital media. The key word here is control. Let's prevent you from sharing the book or easily copying it. Essentially, DRM is trying to use technology to make digital books act like a physical book.

So, how does it work? If I wanna buy or borrow a book, I log into the library server, I pick an EPUB, and then I also pick a passphrase. So, each book has a content key. That's the key we use to encrypt things, a symmetric key that encrypts or decrypts the book content. The EPUB is encrypted by a little command line tool that uses that key, and then this user passphrase is hashed to form a user key, which is then used to encrypt that content key, to keep that secret from everyone who doesn't know the passphrase. And then you put that encrypted key into a license document, which you can include in the EPUB. So, lots of little pieces to make sure that everything is secret enough.

So, DRM is fundamentally problematic. We don't even know if it helps with our stated goal of reducing piracy. Both BISG and the American Association of Publishers have been approached about doing a study on that, and they have both declined to get involved. DRM can restrict fair use, and it can get in the way of accessibility. We know it always gets cracked. A major goal of businesses is to avoid what Bill Rosenblatt calls a one-click crack, something so easy that even a publishing executive could do it. But another goal for DRM is to be strong enough that it unleashes the force of the law on those who try to crack the DRM or try to create that one-click hack, or even try to check if the DRM is actually secure. But still, wouldn't it be nice if you could buy an eBook from Kobo with DRM and then import it into your Kindle? Assuming the Kindle supported the damn CSS, of course.

Zalina: So, that's DRM. Everyone's fairly familiar with DRM. And if you weren't before, you are now. So, you already mentioned blockchain as well. So, obviously, you've heard about it, you've probably seen a few videos explaining what it is. But essentially, it's an emerging technology that may have some interesting applications for the control and distribution of intellectual property on the internet. So, if you work in book publishing, especially in distribution, you should probably be paying attention by this point. We have a couple experts on the topic, who spoke at our last Tech Forum conference exactly about this subject, Simon-Pierre Marion from Scenarex, and Stephen Sawyer from Access Copyright, spoke about how blockchain could be used in book publishing, as well as the potential challenges for ensuring authorship in using it.

Simon-Pierre: Basically, what it will bring, it will increase the security of eBooks, by providing to the eBook owner a universal access right to their eBooks. It's also going to bring additional traceability functionalities, as we've seen in the previous presentation. When you have access to a blockchain, you can have access to all sort of traceability, visibility over your eBooks, so authors and publishers will be able to see basically what happened to their books. The additional functionality that, of our solution, which is the key here, is the sharing possibility of an eBook. So, an owner of an eBook, using a blockchain solution, will be able to either resell his book, or he could lend it to someone he knows. Of course, this needs to be done with the authorization of the author or the publisher.

Stephen: The other thing is, when you're uploading a work, you can define the amount of additions of, or copies of that work, which is something that, of course, can't be done in today's internet of copy and paste. So, because of the smart contract application, you can actually define, like, I only want there to be, like, a hundred, you know, a thousand, a million copies of the work. So you can create scarcity in your asset, and therefore value, as opposed to our current internet of, like, I have a PDF, I email it to you, you have it and I have it, you email it again, and now everybody has it. This is very different in the blockchain space, where there's a finite asset that gets moved around.

But what we sort of realized in doing this project was, there's some fundamental problems when, you know, for this uploading a book is, do we actually know who this creator is? And is it actually their work that they're uploading? So you need to sort of authenticate the authors and the users. You know, are these the actual people? Is this actually Margaret Atwood who's the one who's uploading her work? Because if you're doing peer-to-peer payments, you know, the right author better be at the other end. Otherwise, the system kind of doesn't work, right? And the right publisher better be at the right end of it, in the same thing.

So that was something that we noticed is a problem. And there are a lot of people in the blockchain space that are looking at fixing that, at creating identity systems that work. But then, the other issue is, is it their work that they're uploading? So, is it actually "The Handmaid's Tale" that Margaret Atwood is putting on? Or is it something else that doesn't really belong to her? And we see these as big problems, because we live in our YouTube age where, you know, people are uploading stuff that doesn't belong to them, and even sometimes monetizing it.

Kira: Blockchain is super interesting. I know Amazon is already, like, looking into blockchain for different things. Amazon's looking into everything, I think.

Zalina: Well, as soon as Amazon says they're gonna look into something...

Kira: You should definitely look more into it.

Zalina: ...It’s serious.

Kira: Not everyone like agrees with DRM. Not everyone thinks that it's the way of the future, because it's too restrictive. It doesn't allow, like, everyone to access your books in, like, an accessible way, and those people are more likely to pirate them. So, another alternative to blockchain or DRM is just using a digital watermark. These watermarks can imprint personal information onto books purchased, to make readers less likely to share these copies illegally. Whether that's, like, actual personal information, or just, like, a specific code that's linked to one person, it can help make it easier to track pirated books back to their source.

Zalina: I have a question?

Kira: Yes.

Zalina: Do people know that something is watermarked? Like, how does the average reader know?

Kira: I was looking into it, and apparently, it's really hard to find the watermark in, like, a copy, but I don't think people know unless, like, they look up information about how you manage the books.

Zalina: I'm wondering about it as a deterrent. Because they would have to know that it was watermarked to be concerned about sharing it, I would imagine.

Kira: True. But I think if they didn't know, and they shared it, and they got...it was easily tracked back to them, maybe that'd be enough of a deterrent.

Zalina: So, more of the punishment side.

Kira: Yeah. I think so. But I know it's, like, someone hacked into the Harry Potter watermark for like a month. But they said that it was really hard to locate in the file. So, it could be put anywhere, and you just have to go through it basically, like, line by line, through the code to find it, but it's there. So, Pottermore uses BookStream, but there's other options like Digimarc, which funded or did the study that we mentioned earlier. And I know that the CEO, Charlie Redmayne, said of going DRM-free and using the digital watermark instead, he said that, "It did help make the book more accessible to people, so that they were less likely to pirate it."

And ECW Press also decided to go DRM-free, for a similar reason. And we decided to speak to Jessica Albert, who's the digital production manager and art director there. They did it for the same reasons, where they wanted to establish that relationship with the consumer.

Kira: So what percentage of ECW's titles are available in eBook format?

Jessica: So, 100% of our new titles, of course, that we have eBook rates for are available in eBook. And as for our backlist, I think it would probably be about 70% of old stuff that came out before.

Kira: And audiobooks... I took a look at the audiobooks that you have, it didn't seemed like every title is available, but a few are?

Jessica: Yeah. We don't have every title available. But per season, we probably end up having, between producing the audio books ourselves and selling rights for other companies to produce audio books, we probably have about 20% to 30%, on a good season, available in audio, sometimes more.

Kira: And do you primarily sell from the ECW website? Or is it from secondary retailers like Amazon, Kobo, or Apple?

Jessica: Yeah. Definitely our main sales channels are through the major retailers. So, for audiobooks, it's Audible, and for eBooks, it's Kobo, Amazon, and Apple.

Kira: And you said there, like, through the website, though, it's DRM-free?

Jessica: Through our own website, our eBooks and audiobooks are both available DRM-free. And at online vendors, if we have the option, we select No DRM intentionally, just like that for the vendors.

Kira: And is there a specific reason for that? I know J. K. Rowling, and like the former CEO of Pottermore, they said that they wanted Harry Potter to be available to all readers anywhere on a platform that people want to use at a price people want to pay. So, the decision to go DRM-free was primarily to establish direct-to-consumer relationships, but they also use BookStream, which puts digital watermarks on their books, so that they can be checked online. For ECW, was it more out of necessity or like, because of lack of options, or is it primarily to establish that relationship?

Jessica: I think the primary... Yeah. I think definitely the primary reason is that we wanna provide access for our customers, and we want them to be able to read the books on whatever platform they wanna read it on. We want them to be able to read it at home, read it on their device, read it on their phone, whatever. So it's definitely ease of access is our main concern. But the rest of it, that, there are other concerns, including just having the resources to deal with DRM, and not being able to...the other main reason would be not being able to sell the books through as many channels as we have...as we do sell them now.

So, we wouldn't be able to sell them on our website directly to the customer. And we don't have the resources to, you know, apply DRM on our end, and that kind of thing. And a lot of the smaller vendors that we supply our books to wouldn't be able... They don't apply the DRM for you. It's only the larger vendors that tend to do that. So we want to be able to sell on every single vendor, independent vendor, smaller vendors, as well as directly to customers, if that's what they want.

Kira: Right. And how do you combat piracy, if at all? Would you say it's negatively affecting sales in any way? Or is it just a sort of, like, a background issue?

Jessica: Yeah, I think it's definitely for us more of a background issue. Because we're a smaller publishing house, our books don't end up being pirated as often, because they're smaller books, or because we have fewer books. But we do follow up on every sort of tip that we get, if someone flags for us that they see one of our books available somewhere that seems like it's for free, and send us an email about it, if an author sends an email, or someone out in the world sends us an email, we follow up on every single one. But they're very few and far between for us. We don't have a lot of those problems, and even the ones that we do end up following up on, I would say, probably 80% to 90% of them actually aren't available for free. It's like a clickbait type of thing, where they're trying to get you...like a phishing scheme, trying to get people's email addresses and stuff, but the book isn't actually...you don't end up ever getting the book.

And a lot of the ones that we do see are also pirated from the print version anyway, so it's a scanned PDF, as opposed to someone cracking the eBook and then putting that for sale. So, we find, just, we've never seen a reason to apply DRM or that kind of thing, because it doesn't actually combat any of the piracy we do see, which is a negligible amount anyway.

Kira: And would you treat eBook versus audiobook piracy differently?

Jessica: I think that we would definitely, probably go after an audiobook pirating situation a little bit more, with a little bit more effort. But we haven't seen that a lot so far anyway. Just because, like, it's a large amount of file. And it would be easier, I think, to tackle than someone sending around one small eBook file, getting that audiobook offline. And that's a, like, intellectual property of the author and the narrator as well, so I think we might try and go after that a little bit more, only because it's something we haven't seen yet, and we might just want to figure out how to combat that, if it ever did come up.

Kira: Thanks so much to Jessica Albert for that interview. We also reached out to Digimarc, who published the report about book piracy that we mentioned earlier. And Devon Weston, the director of market development, send us a brief statement how publishers of all sizes can determine whether or not they need to put an anti-piracy solution in place, and if so, how to develop an appropriate strategy.

Devon: In order to effectively combat piracy, it's critical that publishers develop an institute and anti-piracy strategy specific for their organization. Strategies vary greatly publisher to publisher, and the cornerstone of every successful strategy we've seen is education. Develop knowledge of the piracy ecosystem, as it affects books, your books, and ask questions.

Ask your peers at other houses what services and approaches they've used, what has been successful, what has failed? Get your most important stakeholders involved — authors. Find out their perspective on piracy. Author care and retention is one of the biggest drivers for publishers to develop effective anti-piracy strategies. And get data where you can. Sales data can be a good place to start to understand both the impact of piracy, and point you to a good place to begin building your strategy.

Typically, your bestsellers are the most pirated. Analyse your organization's approach to book releases, and availability in your markets and channels. Lack of access, or delayed access, can actually drive piracy. And ask internal stakeholders to participate. Does your staff already spend time looking for pirated materials? If yes, how much? Are their takedown notices successful? Does your organization care about piracy, and should it?

Piracy hits publishers at the bottom line, and it is worth fighting. Any strategy is going to require investment, so try to determine what level of investment is right for you. Perhaps it's a staff member spending part of their time searching and sending takedowns. Or perhaps it's engaging with an anti-piracy vendor to do this work for you. There are a number of anti-piracy vendors, like Digimarc, that offer services to book publishers, with one of the main differences being that over 95% of Digimarc's anti-piracy customers are book publishers. We've built our entire service around the unique needs of publishers and authors, and the book piracy ecosystem.

And if you do engage with anti-piracy vendors, there are a few key questions to ask. How many book publishers do you work with? And make sure to ask for industry referrals. Is your anti-piracy service core to your business strategy, or a small part of your overall focus? Do you have a product roadmap we can review? Are you a member of Google's trusted copyright removal program, which facilitates large-scale removal of pirate links from search engine result pages? Does your organization send takedowns on all pirate copies found? Or do they only delist the links from search engines?

What level of authentication do you perform to assure accuracy before you take enforcement actions? What portion of the links enforced are reviewed by humans first? Do you have a channel into which concerned authors and staff can send suspected piracy? If yes, how are those reports handled?

Once you have developed a strategy, maintaining it is critical. Is the organization ready to commit to combating book piracy now, and years into the future? Who at your organization will be responsible for driving awareness, education, and overseeing the success of your program? Will you hire a full-time staff member to oversee, or will it fall to a particular department or person to assure your strategy is effective, and evolves with the changing ecosystem?

Zalina: If we were to be speaking to readers, or possibly pirates, what are some alternatives to pirating those...but, like, what are...what can we sell people? Other ways to get free books, that is not torrenting?

Kira: Like, there's tons of options for free content on the internet. LibriVox is really cool. It allows, like, anyone in the entire world to record themselves reading a book, and then they can post that audio file online for other people to download for free.

Zalina: Just ones in the public domain, though, right?

Kira: Yeah, ones in the public domain. And the same thing with Project Gutenberg. It uses books in the public domain and puts the eBook file online for free. They have over 57,000 free books. And then, in 2019, January 1st, is the first time in 20 years when a bunch of new books will join the public domain, so that's really exciting. There'll be books by Jane Austen, D. H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Mikhail Bulgakov, Aldous Huxley, just tons of cool new books. And I think Bambi.

Zalina: Excellent. Exciting. Probably not Harry Potter yet.

Kira: Probably not. Not for another hundred years or so. There's also Kindle Unlimited and Scribd. They have different subscriptions. This isn't free, but they do have unlimited eBook options, so once you pay, like, a price per month, like Netflix, then you get an unlimited amount. But they have, like, certain stipulations in place, like, I'm sure... I think Scribd has, if you read too much, they'll put, like, they'll slow you down a little by making a few little roadblocks. But...

Zalina: Yeah, there's been a little trial and error in the area of unlimited eBook subscriptions, but it sounds like some of these companies are getting to a place where they've got a lockdown on how it's gonna work.

Kira: There's also 24symbols. They don't have a huge selection of bestsellers, but they have other titles, and it's only $9 a month. Playster is $15 a month, which is actually quite expensive. It's basically, you'd have to read, like, a good 20 books a year for that to be viable, and, like, a lot of people only read an average of four books per year, so subscription models aren't always the best option. But that's why we have libraries. And libraries are free.

Zalina: Yes. Go libraries.

Kira: So go get a library card, so you can also read eBooks from the library, using Overdrive.

Zalina: Yeah. I mean, a lot of people don't, at least people I talk to, don't seem to be up to date on all the things that the library offers. They're constantly surprised by all of the stuff that you can get, and, like, up-to-date, popular stuff. So, that would be my main suggestion.

Kira: I feel like a lot of people only went to the library when they were younger, and they stopped once they're older, and they don't realize how far library technology has come.

Zalina: Yeah. You can stream movies, guys. If you're interested in picking up on some of the links, articles, studies that we mentioned throughout the podcast episode, check the episode notes for some of those, so you can do some further reading. And, yeah. Don't pirate books, guys.

Kira: Get a library card.

Zalina: Thanks for listening.

Podcast: Batten down the hatches – How we're combatting book piracy

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