They may have been a commercial flop, but ebooks are still a target for pirates, writes Angus Kidman

Published in The Australian, September 13 2001

Promoters of electronic books have long recognised that there is some way to go before Bridget Jones' Diary becomes Bridget Jones' Virtual Diary. Despite fervent promotion, sales of electronic books have lagged well behind print books, even in online stores. For example, Internet book retailer Amazon.com maintains a top 100 list of its best-selling print titles which is refreshed every hour, but doesn't bother going beyond a top 25 list for its electronic book department and only updates it once a day.

Yet even before ebooks (as they're usually known) have managed to take hold in the market, they face an unexpected threat: piracy. Just as the music industry has been threatened by the rise of MP3, a format which allows near-CD quality copies to be exchanged at no cost other than an Internet connection, publishers must increasingly face the challenge of pirate electronic copies of their top-selling works hitting the Web.

The problem seems to be growing rapidly. A recent study by Envisional, a British Internet monitoring service, found that more than 7,000 books could easily be obtained online. Predictably, best-selling authors such as Stephen King and Tom Clancy topped the list of pirated authors, although cult authors such as Irvine Welsh and fantasy favourites such as J.R.R. Tolkien also made the top 10.

In many cases, multiple different "editions" of individual works are available. J.K. Rowling, for instance, has only published four titles in the Harry Potter series, yet more than 700 different pirate copies were located by Envisional.

There's a certain irony in Stephen King's appearance at the top of the list. King has been one of the most visible experimenters with the ebook format, although neither of his tryouts have worked particularly well. King's first attempt was a novella, Riding The Bullet, which was released in March 2000 in association with his publisher.

The book was so popular initially that numerous readers had trouble downloading a copy. Many who did succeed complained of bugs in the software designed to access the novel, rendering the text unreadable. Despite that, the book remains on Amazon's top 10 list of ebook sellers more than two years later.

Most pirated authors online 1. Stephen King 2. J. K. Rowling 3. Terry Pratchett 4. Tom Clancy 5. Douglas Adams 6. J. R. R. Tolkien 7. John Grisham 8. Iain M. Banks 9. Irvine Welsh 10. Douglas Coupland Source: Envisional

In July last year, King took a different tack, launching a serial novel called The Plant that was promoted via his personal Web site. King published the work, based on a story he had begun in the 1980s, chapter by chapter, and declared that he would only continue it each month if fans continued to pay for new instalments. The experiment got off to a good start; more than 116,000 people coughed up $US1 to download the first two chapters. However, the project never got past Chapter 5. In November, King proclaimed that he was bored with the project, and wanted to work on other titles. He added that most Net users had the "attention span of grasshoppers", while dedicated booklovers didn't consider the electronic format to be a "real book". While The Plant itself remains unfinished (King has said the project may resume in the future), pirate copies of the published sections are still widely available online.

Ebook software developers (a field dominated by Microsoft and Adobe) have devoted a large amount of effort to creating ebook formats that can't easily be copied or exchanged in this way, but few have proved impervious. Adobe has recently attracted much unfavourable publicity for its efforts to prosecute a Russian programmer, Dmitry Sklyarov.

Sklyarov told attendees at a security conference in the US how his employer, Elcomsoft, had cracked Adobe's secure ebook format, making it possible to freely exchange text stored by the system. He was subsequently charged and remanded in jail under US copyright laws for his role in developing the software, but the outcry was so great that Adobe itself called for his release. The case goes to trial in November.

Most pirated books avoid these commercial formats anyway, instead using word processing programs. While creating a pirate copy of a book can be a slow process, the technology is readily available. All the aspiring pirate needs is a basic scanner (which can be picked up for less than $200). Images of each page are scanned in, converted to text using a character recognition program, and saved in whatever format the pirate requires. The means for exchanging books vary. Some are offered as downloads from Web sites, while others are traded using software packages such as Gnutella which are better known as a conduit for pirate movies and music. Fans who aren't fussy about formatting can even exchange books as plain text files via email -- a method that is almost impossible to detect. Indeed, a 150,000 word novel could easily fit on a single floppy disk in basic text format.

The only real restriction on the online theft of ebooks may be the fact that, for the time being, relatively few people are prepared to spend hours in front of a computer screen simply to catch up with their favourite authors. Even ardent supporters of electronic books, such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, don't expect them to make any real commercial until 2004. "A book is small, lightweight, high-resolution, and inexpensive compared to the cost of a computer," Gates has pointed out. If ebooks ever catch up, though, the pirates will be ready with a virtual library full of texts.