Will Kindle Piracy Kill Publishing?

Many argue that music piracy at file sharing sites like Napster played a huge part in the music industry’s fall from grace. Might piracy of e-books spell a similar doom for publishers and authors?

That’s the question being posed by David Carnoy at his blog, Fully Equipped at Cnet.

While the Kindle is an amazing success for its ability to deliver e-books to readers in the push of a button, pirates are offering the same easy access, but without the price tag.

Well, obviously, for big authors, this whole pirating thing presents a bigger problem–and a bigger loss. But that isn’t what dismayed me so much (sorry, but when you’re a little guy, you don’t care so much about how much the big guys are losing). Rather, what’s shocking, and what the publishers should be most concerned about, is the fact that a library of 2,500 books can be downloaded in a matter of hours. E-books are small files and 2,500 of them can be packed into a single download (Torrent) that’s only about 3.4GB. If you set the average price per book at a measly $2, the worth of said download would be $5,000. Bring it up to $4 a book and you’re at $10,000. (In fact, publishers charges much more for some of these books).

Read the whole piece at Cnet. Make sure to check out the comments for some lively debate surrounding the issue.

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