In the virtual stacks, pirated books find readers
Despite the cumbersome process necessary to digitize a book, the unauthorized sharing of literary works is proliferating.
When he tried ordering the books online, he learned it would take too long for delivery. Having come of age in the era of Napster, Kazaa and other file-sharing networks infamous as bazaars for pirated music, he knew exactly how to obtain the books--if not in his hands, at least for his computer's hard drive.
Over the semesters, downloading books free and reading them on his monitor became routine, he said. He learned to adjust the screen color to off-white to help reduce eye strain and depleted his university printing allotment by running off hundreds of pages at a time.
"It became an alternative to going out and looking for the books in stores," said Ruesewald, 21, who graduated from the university's school of informatics last month.
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He emphasized that he had sought alternatives to downloading books without permission by turning to publishers that allow readers to view a book's pages one at a time. And he confesses to a sense of guilt over playing the role of a "leech." But "as a student, I was pretty broke and couldn't really afford $100 textbooks," Ruesewald said. "I had to turn to the Web for help."
He is clearly not alone. While the music industry's effort to quash the trading of pirated songs over the Internet has attracted far more headlines, the unauthorized sharing of digitized books is proliferating in newsgroups, over peer-to-peer networks and in chat rooms.
The activity is all the more striking because making a book available online is as cumbersome as ripping a CD is effortless. Each page must be scanned, run through optical character-recognition software and proofread before the complete work is uploaded to a network or transferred directly to a recipient.
Yet a quick survey conducted with peer-to-peer file-sharing software revealed the digital availability of dozens of titles currently on The New York Times best-seller list, including "The Da Vinci Code," "The South Beach Diet" and, of course, hundreds of copies of any Harry Potter title. Even the official audio-book versions read by the authors or celebrities are easy to come by. Computer and technical books that can cost as much as $100 in print are also a mainstay.
Other recesses of the Internet are also rich in illegally traded literature. A visit to a group called "#Bookz" on the Internet Relay Chat network revealed a multitude of titles being offered or sought every second.
News groups like alt.books also draw a steady flow of visitors, like Steven Audette of Verona, a town in central New York known for its casino, rather than its literary establishments. Audette said he had downloaded about 2,000 titles, including some duplicates in varying formats.
"I download philosophy, religious, technical, engineering, science, sci-fi, horror, musical theory and almost anything but tawdry romance novels," said Audette, a 39-year-old father of two with a background in management and logistics.
Audette said he had never felt pangs of conscience when downloading books, although he sometimes buys a copy if he finds a book to be of great interest. "Perhaps the cost factor has numbed the sense of guilt," he said. "I bought my first books when they were priced for 95 cents a paperback and less than $10 for a hardcover."
For classics he visits Project Gutenberg, a vast legal repository of mostly older works for which no copyright is in effect; he uses newsgroups to download current publications still protected by copyright.
"These groups offer opportunity to read books not always available," he said. "I have yet to find a library or bookstore so well stocked."
Audette estimates that about 70 percent of the works he downloads are still under copyright. He said he has uploaded only a few books.
Envisional, a company based in Britain that tracks Internet piracy, estimates that 25,000 to 30,000 pirated titles are available on the Web. The vast majority are English-language titles, although pirated German, Spanish and French books are also plentiful.
An estimate of how many people are actually downloading the books is harder to come by, however, said David Price, a researcher at Envisional.
Price said that although researchers are able to track the number of people using file-sharing applications, it is difficult to tell exactly what they are downloading. And the problem with newsgroups and Internet Relay Chat channels, he said, is that once users have established initial public contact, they tend to carry out their transactions privately.
"Most studies show that music piracy is by far the most popular, followed by film and movie piracy," Price said. "Book piracy is certainly not at those levels, but it is popular enough for publishers to be concerned about it."
Indeed, publishing houses are taking notice. "We monitor the World Wide Web very closely and take this issue very seriously, because we take any violation of our authors' copyrights very seriously," said Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House. "We have sent a number of take-down notices to such sites and have received immediate compliance."
The Association of American Publishers, the book industry's main trade association, has also pressed IRC administrators to block channels focused on book trading. The association succeeded in shuttering a popular channel known as "#bookwarez" last year but concedes that the group may well have reconstituted itself on a different IRC server or under a new name.
"We have detected more of the piracy activity in the peer-to-peer networks, which to us is the most threatening because IRC rooms are a little difficult to use," said Edward McCoyd, the director of digital policy for the publishers' association. "You have to be a little technically savvy in most cases to trade in those rooms, whereas peer-to-peer is so intuitive and people have already been introduced to the technology through music sharing."
Some members of the association have felt the sting of the illegal activity. "A few publishers have seen the sales of some books falling off from sales in previous years, based on how much trading was going on," McCoyd said. Nonetheless, electronic book piracy appears to have little effect on the industry's bottom line, according to publishers.
Federal law enforcement officials have far higher priorities today but had begun to take notice of the piracy phenomenon before terrorism became a top concern in September 2001. The arrest of an encryption expert earlier that year for promoting a program that could crack the security protection for Adobe's eBooks format led to the prosecution of his employer, the Russian software company ElcomSoft, on charges of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But a United States District Court jury in San Jose acquitted the company of the charges in 2002, raising concern that future prosecutions might also be unsuccessful.
McCoyd said the publishers' association was unaware of any new federal investigations involving book piracy on the Internet. Yet the limits of the technology available for reading digitized books may be working in the industry's favor. Sitting in front of a big computer screen is not like curling up with a book on the sofa, and handheld devices tend to strain the eyes after 10 minutes or so of steady reading.
"The same reasons that legal e-books have been slow to catch on are the same reasons that illegal downloading of book files is nothing more than a concern rather than a critical stage for us," Applebaum said.
Still, technologists believe that gadgets will eventually emerge to make the reading experience similar to that of cracking open a book.
"And as technology gets better and devices on which you can read books get more and more popular, people will look for ways to obtain books freely," Envisional's Price said.
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