Battling Book Piracy: Strategies to Protect Authors and Publishers in the Digital Age

One of the biggest concerns of the entire publishing industry is definitely going to be piracy because it costs the industry billions of dollars every year.

These losses are in the form of the unauthorised reproduction of books and other publishing materials, the copy of the published materials and the sharing of these published materials.

Simply put piracy means that the authors and the publishers who have put their hard work and their investments into something do not get back the returns that they deserve.

This has become even more easy in an age where copying something is much easier because you are not dealing with a physical copy.

That is why publishing companies are also coming up with different strategies in order to protect themselves and their esteemed authors against the attacks of piracy.

We are going to look at some of these strategies and we will also look at the impact of piracy on the publishing industry and why it is such a bad thing not only for the industry but for everyone associated with the industry including the readers.

So, let us start by looking at the impact of piracy on the publishing industry.

The Impact of Piracy on the Publishing Industry

Loss of Revenue

The first and most significant impact that we need to talk about when we speak on piracy is simply the fact that it results in a lot of loss for the publisher and the author.

This is not a temporary problem but it can have a profound impact on the entire industry.

This is simply because if authors and publishers stop making money and lose money through piracy then they will simply lose the motivation to publish new works as well.

Piracy takes place in this digital age with the help of the reproduction of eBooks and the availability of these books on piracy websites.

This makes the distribution of these books unregulated and the publisher and the author do not get a single cent of revenue because of this.

Quality Compromise

Piracy not only affects the authors and the publishers because it has a very negative effect on the readers as well.

This is because the people who create unauthorised copies of books do not care about the quality of the books and they also do not care about other things such as other elements that maintain the quality of physical and digital books.

They simply copy it and produce a very simple and badly copied version of the book and they distribute it all over the place.

This is very bad for the reputation of the author but it makes the reading experience very bad for the readers.

Sometimes the readers might encounter bad translations and other times they might encounter copies of the book that are not even properly replicated with entire sections missing and no one to hold accountable.

Erosion of Copyright

Copyright laws are there for a reason and it is to help people protect everything they create and own and it is applicable not just to books but any kind of artistic work.

This inspires people and keeps them motivated to create new things because copyright laws give people the assurance and confidence that their work will be protected no matter what.

However, when unauthorised copies of ebooks and audiobooks are distributed all over the market, it sends a very bad signal to other creative people that their works might also get circulated like this over the internet.

This demotivates creative people from doing something new and it is not only bad for the economic side of things but it is also bad from the cultural side of things for an entire society.

If people do not get what they deserve then they will simply stop making those things.

Market Disruption

Lastly, these kinds of practices have very bad implications for the market and cause major market disruptions.

We need to understand that when it comes to the market a lot of industries depend on each other.

This is also true when it comes to the publishing industry because a lot of other professionals and a lot of other industries are directly or indirectly related to the publishing industry.

That is why if something happens to the publishing industry then these other industries are also affected which means the impact is not just on a single author or a publishing company but gradually the entire industry.

That is why when piracy affects someone it not only changes society as we have seen but it also causes major problems with the entire market dynamics.

Key Strategies to Combat Piracy

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

The first and most important thing publishing companies can do is implement advanced Digital Rights Management (DRM) encryption in all digital publishing such as audiobooks and ebooks.

This kind of thing is already utilised by some of the largest platforms on the planet such as Amazon and Apple in order to make sure the content simply cannot be shared from any kind of device.

These Digital Rights Management (DRM) also make it possible for restricted access as well as the tracking of the source of any kind of unauthorised copying.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is so effective that you can also find it being utilised on every streaming platform when it comes to their content which simply cannot be downloaded or even screen recorded.

This is one of the most effective ways to do it and while it might be difficult to implement it on your platform but if you are publishing your content on a popular platform then it is implemented by default and you should always choose a platform that supports Digital Rights Management (DRM).

While it is not completely impossible to bypass the Digital Rights Management (DRM) licence of encryption but it makes it considerably more difficult to do so.

Competitive Pricing

If we want to stop piracy then we need to understand the reason why piracy is done in the first place and everything has to have a demand and then it will have a supply.

The demand for piracy happens because people do not want to pay a lot of money for something and that creates a demand for supplying that thing cheaper.

That is very if you look at the piracy market then you are only going to find things that are expensive if purchased legally, available to be pirated. We are talking about things like expensive software and games which are some things most commonly pirated.

That is why one of the easiest ways to ensure that your publishings will not get pirated is to have very competitive and aggressive pricing for them.

Since you can already ensure that the quality of the original material whether it is an eBook or audiobook will be of the best quality, you now can also ensure the prices are going to be the best and the cheapest so that it simply does not make any sense to pirate them.

If you do something like that then people will just lose the incentive of making unauthorised copies of that material.

However, you must also ensure that you do not lose money in the equation.

Active Anti-Piracy Campaign

There are a lot of anti-piracy steps you can take in order to ensure that piracy decreases in general in the industry as a whole.

In order to do that the first thing, you can do this to campaign and request the government to create more strict legal enforcement for countering piracy.

This can be in the form of better laws with much stricter punishments for committing piracy and it can also be creating easier laws that make it possible to prosecute someone for illegal copy and distribution of literature.

Apart from doing that, you can also hire some of the best law professionals in the industry so that you can run a very active takedown campaign in order to prosecute the people who copy your material.

This has to be something well-funded and done around the clock so that you can get hold of all the individuals and bring them under the law.

In order to do that you also need to work with the best Internet service providers (ISPs) in order to identify these individuals and you also need preferable Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to the websites that share your material for free.

If you are able to do all of that together and if you are able to bring the government on board in order to support you then you are not only going to improve the situation of your author and readers but the entire industry and not just the publishing industry.

Educating Readers

Piracy is something that would be impossible to do if readers do not actively participate in it and that is why your best chance of stopping piracy is to actually encourage the readers and speak to them logically and emotionally about what kind of harm it does for the author and the publisher.

In order to do this, you can create content with the help of the author and promote that anti-piracy content on their social media platforms.

Additionally, you can also utilise a technique that game developers have been doing for a long time which is to simply put in a paragraph at the beginning of the book and thank the readers for not pirating the material and buying it legally and thanking them for the help it is doing to the author.

Of course, this is going to be also present in the pirated copy but it will just make the readers feel bad who did not actually pay for the ebook or audiobook and it will encourage them to not do it again.

Speaking with emotion and logic to readers is one of the best ways to stop piracy and it will bring an amazing shift in the entire industry.

Collaboration Within the Industry

Stopping piracy is very difficult and nearly impossible for a single person or even a single publishing company no matter how big it is.

Strength is always in numbers and that is why if you are able to settle the differences with all your competitors and come together and work against piracy then it can have a much better effect in bringing change.

When the entire industry comes together change is also very easy to come by.

This kind of industry collaboration is needed in order for the standardisation of encryption techniques such as DRM and it is only possible when everyone in the industry comes together to apply something like this.

When you are willing to create standards in the industry and grow stronger and have a better and stronger lobby for copyright protection then you need to settle your differences and come together.

Watermarking Solutions

Apart from creating DRM solutions, there is also something else you can do that might be a little bit more technical but will help in the identification of the source of piracy.

You can create invisible watermarks embedded in eBooks and PDFs that will make it possible to trace the source of the leak.

You can have different watermarks for all the different lots of releases or you can even different the different watermarks based on the locations of the release.

This will tell you exactly where the piracy is originating from so that you can take steps to prevent that in the future.

While this is a complicated process but it has a great effectiveness rate that is much better than others.

We hope this blog helps you understand how to combat piracy in the digital world when it comes to literature and publishing.

If you are someone who is tired of piracy and would like the most experienced publishers to publish your manuscripts, we are here for you.

We are Orange Publishers and we have extensive experience in digital publishing whether it is audiobooks or ebooks and we have some of the finest experience in DRM implementation.

We will help you publish your works digitally in the most secure way possible.

Along with that we also have one of the finest reputations for bringing the reliability of traditional publishing with the convenience of self-publishing under a single roof.

We welcome you to visit our website and check out everything we do and we would love to publish your masterpieces both physically and digitally.