As publishers struggle with ‘whack-a-mole’ websites, experts, authors and even Guardian readers who illegally download books, assess the damage
Abena, who is 18, recently read Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, and thought it was wonderful. She does feel a bit bad about downloading it illegally, she says, but her mother is a single parent who can’t afford to feed her voracious love of books. She has also enjoyed the entire Percy Jackson series without paying its author, Rick Riordan, a penny. She’s not a thief, though, she says: “I wouldn’t take food or clothes without paying the people who made them, because they’re physical things. I believe real life and the internet differ.”
Abena (not her real name) is one of millions of people who use book-piracy websites to illegally download work by authors they love. The UK government’s Intellectual Property Office estimates that 17% of ebooks are consumed illegally. Generally, pirates tend to be from better-off socioeconomic groups, and aged between 30 and 60. Many use social media to ask for tips when their regular piracy website is shut down; when I contacted some, those who responded always justified it by claiming they were too poor to buy books – then tell me they read them on their e-readers, smartphones or computer screens - or that their areas lacked libraries, or they found it hard to locate books in the countries where they lived. Some felt embarrassed. Others blamed greedy authors for trying to stop them.
One reader said he’d pirated around 100,000 books in a few hours: 'I doubt I’ll get through even a fifth of them'
Series authors are vulnerable: when book one does well, but book two is heavily pirated, book three could end up dead in the water
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