Mihir's Impressions - Book piracy eating away publisher’s pie
Book piracy has been rampant over the last 20 years that the inter-American Publishers Group estimates that globally about 50 billion book pages are illegally reprinted every year. Asian and Latin American countries have been the main culprit and book piracy in these developing countries have reached alarming dimensions.
29 Sep 2012 | By Mihir Joshi
Mihir's Impressions - Book piracy eating away publisher’s pie
A Hindi film, Shor has an amusing side-story about pirated books. But real-life is not a joke.
Technological advancement has facilitated the burgeoning book piracy. To reprint a book illegally, all that a culprit needs is two copies of the original, a scanner, a computer with optical recognition programme and a small rotary press. With these common facilities, multiple pirated copies of a book can be produced within couple of days. With the help of these technologies not only is the text copied but also the design, the cover, the colour and the bar code, making it difficult to tell a pirated copy from a genuine one.
Reprography — the method of obtaining photocopies — is common in educational institutions all over the country. This is the main reason for the inability of the publishers to sell books in adequate numbers. In India according to 2011 figures, about 15,000 publishers publish about 70,000 books annually in 22 languages. According to the Federation of Booksellers and Publishers Association of India (FBPAI), book piracy poses a major threat to the 7000-crore publishing industry in the country and results in a loss of 400 crores to publishers in India.
The most pirated books are college ‘course material’ books. Books on specialised subjects, such as engineering and medicine, are very expensive and consequently extensively photocopied in colleges. The teachers themselves organise photocopying of books.
Delhi University recently banned photocopies of books that are recommended reading after three publishers, including Oxford University Press (OUP) and Cambridge University Press (CUP), filed a suit. The publishers claimed a shop in the university handed out photocopies of their books as course material.
In response the students have lashed out at the publishers and refuse to by their books until the books are discounted. A statement was released states “strict warning should be given to these criminal presses that they cannot get away with this sort of bullying and stifling of democratic student culture!”
The major reasons of rampant book piracy are the high cost of books in our country and the poor economic background of most students. Containing book piracy should necessarily be a multi-pronged strategy. Publishers should receive subsidies from the government, especially for the publishers who publish educational books. Creation of a rental library like the one started by Amazon in the United States (http://www.printweek.in/News/
Book piracy is so wide-spread in India that at every traffic signal you will be confronted by a prated book vendor. Weeding out book piracy will take collaborated efforts from the government and publishers.
For starts, it will require Indian print firms not to support nefarious book production. Will our printers bite the bullet?
Mihir Joshi, besides being a PrintWeek India scribe, is a central defender and supporter of AC Milan. In his weekly column he immortalises the power of print with the same passion with which he gets excited about the world's greatest game.
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