At Last, a Common Sense, Non-Paranoid Consideration of eBook Piracy, and Its Future

Keir Thomas, PCWorld Business Center:

... One of the reasons the MP3 piracy scene was possible was that, along with the capability to shrink music to a 4MB file, it was built around a standard file format, MP3, which was supported by every media player. DivX brought the same standardization to movie piracy. In both cases, an entire ecosystem arose, based around the common file format.

EPUB is supposed to be the e-book standard file format, but by refusing to adopt it for the Kindle, Amazon is taking one step towards stopping a piracy ecosystem developing for e-books. Conversion to a compatible format is, of course, entirely possible, but Amazon may be hoping that the difficulty and hassle of doing so will put many off.

The other strategic difference when e-book readers are compared to media players is that e-book readers usually have built-in bookstore browsers. This was the failing that initially allowed MP3 piracy to gain a hold. In the late 90s, people had MP3 players and software but no legitimate source of MP3s, other than ripping them from CDs. It took Apple and the development of iTunes to bring some order to the chaos, to the extent that now most people are happy paying for music, and piracy is limited to a hard core of people who never had any intention of paying anyway.

While there are still many questions over e-book pricing, statistics released from the likes of Amazon indicate that people are happy making use of e-book stores straight from their devices. While piracy will always be an issue for any organization offering creative content online, all the signs are that those behind e-book readers have thought things through so that they're able to avoid e-book piracy being a necessity, and also less of a temptation. ...