The New York Times
    June 3, 2004

    In the Virtual Stacks, Pirated Books Find Eager Thumbs

By SANDEEP JUNNARKAR

    EARLY in his undergraduate years at Indiana University, Joseph
Ruesewald said, he had trouble finding the required titles for a couple of
his classes at the local bookstores. When he tried ordering the books
online, he learned it would take too long for delivery. Having come of age
in the era of Napster, Kazaa and other file-sharing networks infamous as
bazaars for pirated music, he knew exactly how to obtain the books - if
not in his hands, at least for his computer's hard drive.

    Over the semesters, downloading books free and reading them on his
monitor became routine, he said. He learned to adjust the screen color to
off-white to help reduce eyestrain and depleted his university printing
allotment by running off hundreds of pages at a time.

    "It became an alternative to going out and looking for the books in
stores," said Mr. Ruesewald, 21, who graduated from the university's
school of informatics last month.

    He emphasized that he had sought alternatives to downloading books
without permission by turning to publishers that allow readers to view a
book's pages one at a time. And he confesses to a sense of guilt over
playing the role of a "leech.'' But "as a student, I was pretty broke and
couldn't really afford $100 textbooks,'' Mr. Ruesewald said. "I had to
turn to the Web for help."

    He is clearly not alone. While the music industry's effort to quash
the trading of pirated songs over the Internet has attracted far more
headlines, the unauthorized sharing of digitized books is proliferating in
news groups, over peer-to-peer networks and in chat rooms.

    The activity is all the more striking because making a book available
online is as cumbersome as ripping a CD is effortless. Each page must be
scanned, run through optical character-recognition software and proofread
before the complete work is uploaded to a network or transferred directly
to a recipient.

    Yet a quick survey conducted with peer-to-peer file-sharing software
revealed the digital availability of dozens of titles currently on the New
York Times best-seller list, including "The Da Vinci Code," "The South
Beach Diet" and, of course, hundreds of copies of any Harry Potter title.
Even the official audio-book versions read by the authors or celebrities
are easy to come by. Computer and technical books that can cost as much as
$100 in print are also a mainstay.

    Other recesses of the Internet are also rich in illegally traded
literature. A visit to a group called "#Bookz" on the Internet Relay Chat
network revealed a multitude of titles being offered or sought every
second.

    News groups like alt.books also draw a steady flow of visitors, like
Steven Audette of Verona, a town in central New York known for its casino
rather than its literary establishments. Mr. Audette said he had
downloaded about 2,000 titles, including some duplicates in varying
formats.

    "I download philosophy, religious, technical, engineering, science,
sci-fi, horror, musical theory and almost anything but tawdry romance
novels," said Mr. Audette, a 39-year-old father of two with a background
in management and logistics.

    Mr. Audette said he had never felt pangs of conscience when
downloading books although he sometimes buys a copy if he finds a book to
be of great interest. "Perhaps the cost factor has numbed the sense of
guilt," he said. "I bought my first books when they were priced for 95
cents a paperback and less than $10 for a hardcover."

    For classics he visits Project Gutenberg, a vast legal repository of
mostly older works for which no copyright is in effect; he uses news
groups to download current publications still protected by copyright.
"These groups offer opportunity to read books not always available," he
said. "I have yet to find a library or bookstore so well stocked."

    Mr. Audette estimates that about 70 percent of the works he downloads
are still under copyright. He said he has uploaded only a few books.

    Envisional, a company based in Britain that tracks Internet piracy,
estimates that 25,000 to 30,000 pirated titles are available on the Web.
The vast majority are English-language titles, although pirated German,
Spanish and French books are also plentiful.

    An estimate of how many people are actually downloading the books is
harder to come by, however, said David Price, a researcher at Envisional.

    Mr. Price said that although researchers are able to track the number
of people using file-sharing applications, it is difficult to tell exactly
what they are downloading. And the problem with news groups and Internet
Relay Chat channels, he said, is that once users have established initial
public contact, they tend to carry out their transactions privately.

    "Most studies show that music piracy is by far the most popular,
followed by film and movie piracy," Mr. Price said. "Book piracy is
certainly not at those levels, but it is popular enough for publishers to
be concerned about it."

    Indeed, publishing houses are taking notice. "We monitor the World
Wide Web very closely and take this issue very seriously because we take
any violation of our authors' copyrights very seriously," said Stuart
Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House. "We have sent a number of
take-down notices to such sites and have received immediate compliance."

    The Association of American Publishers, the book industry's main trade
association, has also pressed I.R.C. administrators to block channels
focused on book trading. The association succeeded in shuttering a popular
channel known as #bookwarez last year but concedes that the group may well
have reconstituted itself on a different I.R.C. server or under a new
name.

    "We have detected more of the piracy activity in the peer-to-peer
networks, which to us is the most threatening because I.R.C. rooms are a
little difficult to use," said Edward McCoyd, the director of digital
policy for the publishers' association. "You have to be a little
technically savvy in most cases to trade in those rooms, whereas
peer-to-peer is so intuitive and people have already been introduced to
the technology through music sharing."

    Some members of the association have felt the sting of the illegal
activity. "A few publishers have seen the sales of some books falling off
from sales in previous years, based on how much trading was going on," Mr.
McCoyd said. Nonetheless, electronic book piracy appears to have little
impact on the industry's bottom line, according to publishers.

    Federal law enforcement officials have far higher priorities today but
had begun to take notice of the piracy phenomenon before terrorism became
a top concern in September 2001. The arrest of an encryption expert
earlier that year for promoting a program that could crack the security
protection for Adobe's eBooks format led to the prosecution of his
employer, the Russian software company ElcomSoft, on charges of violating
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But a United States District Court
jury in San Jose acquitted the company of the charges in 2002, raising
concern that future prosecutions might also be unsuccessful.

    Mr. McCoyd said the publishers' association was unaware of any new
federal investigations involving book piracy on the Internet.

    Yet the limits of the technology available for reading digitized books
may be working in the industry's favor. Sitting in front of a big computer
screen is not like curling up with a book on the sofa, and hand-held
devices tend to strain the eyes after 10 minutes or so of steady reading.

    "The same reasons that legal E-books have been slow to catch on are
the same reasons that illegal downloading of book files is nothing more
than a concern rather than a critical stage for us," Mr. Applebaum said.

    Still, technologists believe that gadgets will eventually emerge to
make the reading experience similar to that of cracking open a book.

    "And as technology gets better and devices on which you can read books
get more and more popular, people will look for ways to obtain books
freely," Mr. Price of Envisional said.


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