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January 2nd, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda - Up to 20% of eBooks are sourced from illegal sites
- Publishers in talks with government to find ways of combating trade
By
Sean Poulter
Last updated at 10:00 PM on 1st January 2012
They have been one of the retail sensations of the Christmas season.
Sales of eReaders, the handheld devices on to which electronic books can be downloaded, rocketed through December.
It is good news for makers such as Amazon, which produces the best- selling Kindle and collects 30 per cent of the price of downloaded books.
ePiracy: One of the illegal downloads being made available for the Amazon Kindle (left) is 77 Shadow Street by Dean Koontz. It can be obtained for free from pirate sites, while those who pre-order it from Amazon will have to pay nearly £12
But there are fears that their profits could be hit by a wave of pirate eBooks available to download for free.
Just as pirates and websites including Napster undermined the music industry by putting music on the web for free, so the same is now happening with eBooks.
Creating pirate copies of published books is simple and can be done using a computer and a scanner in a relatively short period of time.
The pirates have developed software which people can download to their home computers to convert these pages into images that can be read on a Kindle or similar device.
Hitting back: Publishers have asked Google to demote pirate websites to make sure they do not appear at the top of web searches for free eBooks
One pirate website boasts: ‘With a Kindle there is pretty much no protection against pirated books. There are programs which can simply convert any piece of text into the proper format and it will show on your Kindle as if you had bought it!’
It is estimated that up to 20 per cent of eBook downloads are from pirate sites.
The Publishers Association issued 115,000 legal threats to websites to stop them offering free pirated books in 2011, a rise of 130 per cent on 2010.
FACE RECOGNITION COULD MAKE PASSWORDS HISTORY
Passwords could become a thing of the past as firms such as Apple develop face-recognition software to let users access their smartphones, tablets and laptops.
The technology scans the face that is looking at the screen, picking out key features such as the distance between the eyes, the size of the nose or the shape of the lips, then comparing them to a stored image, the Apple Insider blog says.
Hi-tech firms are racing to rescue users from the need to remember a growing store of passwords to access their technology.
Some gadget manufacturers already include fingerprint pads and recognition to help improve security.
However, both Apple and Google are understood to be working on smartphones that go a step further and combine fingerprints with image recognition.
Publishers are in talks with the Government and Google to find ways to combat the trade, which breaches their copyright.
They have asked Google to demote pirate websites to ensure they do not appear at the top of web searches for consumers looking to find free eBooks. Pressure is also being put on internet service providers to shut down pirate websites.
One of the best-known eBook pirate websites offers a selection of best-sellers that should not yet even be available to the public.
One example is 77 Shadow Street, the new novel by Dean Koontz. Amazon customers will have to pay £11.96 to pre-order it – but an eBook and audiobook version are already available for free from the pirate site.
The rise of the pirate eBook websites coincides with concern among consumers about the high price of legal book downloads.
Five big publishers, together with Apple, are under investigation by the European Commission for allegedly colluding to push up the price of eBooks by as much as 50 per cent.
Many eBooks are available for as little as 99p, however a bestseller can cost more than £10.
In some cases, Amazon and Apple are charging more for an eBook download than the real book.
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The author should have noted that VAT is not charged on real books but is charged on ebooks. Even so, with prices so high for something that costs close to nothing to distribute, it’s inevitable they’ll get pirated.
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The plentiful and free bounties of the internet will never cease to provide for us all; truly..
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“In some cases, Amazon and Apple are charging more for an eBook download than the real book.”
And they are upset that ebooks are pirated.
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Why the big surprise at this. People do not value a STREAM OF DATA with no inherent or resale value, unlike a real book, record, tape or CD. I remember the same bleating about “Home taping is Killing Music”. It didn’t as the tapes were inferior and without an entire pressing plant you couldn’t copy a vinyl LP. And then along came easily copiable digital CD, DVD MP3 etc. It is the same thing with eBooks. Perhaps if the eBooks weren’t so EXPENSIVE, rivalling the real paper item in price for a stream of nothing, then piracy would be less of an issue. But I fear that “lessons were NOT learned” previously and history is about to repeat. I have NO SYMPATHY with a stupid, greedy, litigious and corrupt industry that has only itself to blame. I won’t buy an expensive reader and be limited by battery life and DRM, I will buy or borrow real non-battery-powered paper books.
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It’s just supply and demand, basic economics. If you overprice something, you will end up either lose sales through second-hand items, or a black market.
Saying the the music industry was undermined by piracy, is just propaganda and very much untrue — they are still making billions in profits. There, in most cases, those who download something would never have paid for it anyway, so there’s no loss of sales. If anything, it showcases a new product and they make extra money on tours and other merchandise. The music industry has never lost a penny to piracy. I’d imagine it’s exactly the same with books.
12 pounds for a book that has no physical substance, cannot be lent to someone, cannot be resold second hand, nor given to charity, is not a reasonable price. There will be a an optimal price where people are willing to pay — but that is not it.
The music industry finally learned this. It seems the publishing industry was not paying attention.
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Sell them at a more reasonable price. Check out most of these books and music twice the price of other countries.
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Hardly surprising when we see the price of E books escalating for no apparent reason other than the publishers want to milk it for all they can!
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The key is in the final paragraph. Price. Let me explain how it works (compliments to the music industry), industry charges ridiculous amount for product as it can be controlled, industry loses control but continues to milk the decent and honest for as long as they can, demand for cheaper product encourages piracy, industry tries to stop piracy, fails, price comes down to fair level, industry still makes money.
The publishers are the same as the music companies. They obviously know that an ebook can only really be read on one device, it cannot be read for free at a library or sold on once you have finished with it and yet it costs more than the paperback despite not having any of the production costs. It’s disgraceful and whilst I would never condone it I find no sympathy for the greedy publishers.
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Since there is NO excuse for an e book to cost more than a paperback, the publishers are in the wrong here. It will of course do to the publishing industry what the same greed did for the music industry.
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