Book publishers appear to be going through the same process that the movie and film industry went through. It is suffering from a bad case of pirates.

Dan Brown's blockbuster novel "The Lost Symbol" hit stores in September, and the book sold more digital copies for the Kindle e-reader in its first few days than hardback editions. All good stuff but within 24 hours after its release, pirated digital copies of the novel were found on file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent and more than 100,000 copies were downloaded.

Pundits are predicting that the piracy is going to get worse and that the flashy DRM systems on the Kindle are not stopping anyone. Figures show that sales of digital books is increasing but at the same time so is piracy. The situation mirrors exactly the same situation that the music and film industry battled with for so long. Expensive text books are one of the hardest markets to be hit. Cash strapped students will use pirated ebooks rather than waste their limited cash on hugely
expensive tomes or wait 20 years for the copy to be available at the university library.

Publishers are trying to minimise the problem by delaying releases of e-books for several weeks after physical copies go on sale. Simon & Schuster recently did just that with Stephen King's novel, "Under the Dome." The problem with this approach is that the pirates simply create their own books by scanning them in.
But there are signs that publishers are realising that book market has to learn from the entertainment industy's experience. Instead of trying to prop up existing models, it has to come up with methods of selling books in such a way that the pirated copies are not worth having.

One region that the publishers are looking at is making the technology better to encourage people to download more books. All good stuff. But there is one fly in the ointment of book sales and that is the distributor. Currently the cost of each book is the 60 per cent which is paid to get a hard copy in the shops. Amazon and e-distributors have just added that cost on to what would be a book that costs little to make. Pirating will disappear over night if publishers released the ebooks from their own servers at a cost which ignored the distributors.

The only problem is that the publishing industry does not want to kill off traditional sales by removing distributors.