Apple iPad on Digital Piracy | Apple iPad Best Price

It is interesting to know the possible impact of the Apple iPad on piracy, ebooks in particular. Reports have shown average increases of 78 percent in authorized ebook downloads over the week prior to the iPad launch. Then days after the commercial launch of the iPad, six of the top ten selling business-related paperbacks was reported to have shown a significant increase in unauthorized downloads on BitTorrent. This is according to BitTorrent news blog TorrentFreak. Does this trend and set of data suggest the beginning of an ebook piracy as in the early days of P2P tech?

Such a coup may be possible, but we think that it is still long way away. And it may not even happen anymore, as consumers become wiser. Just by looking at the pre- and post-iPad unauthorized downloads of the top ten selling books on Amazon.com, you will be disappointed of not finding any data at all. It is such a difficult task, as none of them were available on public BitTorrent trackers, other P2P services, and Usenet. Why is this so? Let us go further down the next logical step for TorrentFreak to do. And this is to track unauthorized downloads of the top ten business-related paperbacks from Amazon.com. Such type of book materials fit well with the nature or demographics of iPad buyers. And of these ten, only six could be found. Compare this with the music industry in the past and if this was the case with piracy of music and movies, the record companies and movie studios would be very happy indeed. The fact is it’s relatively easy to find the current top ten songs or movies on P2P networks. These observations speak to the significantly different dynamics involved in digital piracy of music, videos and books. The lack of availability of unauthorized ebooks is really due to the complexity and the time required in accomplishing the process involved in digitizing a printed book.

In their original and traditional retail form, music and movies start off as physical/tangible media like CDs for music and DVDs/Blu-ray for movies. Burning and converting them just need inserting a disc into a drive and using software to rip the content. It is a breeze and very little effort and time are required. The end-product will normally come out as a DivX/XviD file that is about 800 MB in size or as an MP3 that is less than 10 MB. Both of these will easily fit into a flash drive today, making it even easier to handle or share with friends.

On the other hand, while books in the EPUB format – which is the eBook standard in iPad – occupy a very small file size footprint and even smaller than an MP3 in most cases, digitizing or converting a printed book is much more complex and involves much more effort and time . Not only does the book pirates need to scan a book page by page, they also need to ensure that it’s formatted in a way that’s EPUB ready. If not, the end product could end up looking like a mishmash of words with a bunch of empty pages between text. There are devices available in the market to automate this scanning process, and cuts off time, but they are very expensive for the pirates to invest in.

You are free to disagree or comment here if you have another perspective or forecast. Thanks for reading.