In June 1999, the music industry changed forever. The first version of Napster launched and became an Internet sensation seemingly overnight. Users began swapping songs online, many they owned legally elsewhere, others simply downloading new music for free. Many of those using Napster were college students where broadband connections were common at the time, and a large percentage of them never went back to buying music after they started downloading.

Though the music industry won its court battle with the first Napster, resulting in its eventual closure and then rebirth as a paid service, the larger war against file sharing loomed. Less centralized services such as Bittorrent and other file sharing networks began to quickly fill the void Napster left. As technology improved and broadband became more widely available, larger file sizes could be downloaded and, though the movie industry didn’t have their “Napster moment”, in a 2006 study the MPAA said that http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002426602, a number that has only grown since. Though the numbers themselves are shaky, it is clear that piracy is a growing problem for the film sector, especially as the DVD market “craters”.

However, as the music and movie industries have been thrown into chaos, the book industry has remained largely untouched. Though downloading books has always been trivial, something Project Gutenberg shows with public domain books, but that the market for E-books has been small. Without dedicated and popular E-book readers, there simply wasn’t much of an audience.

That, however, is changing and very rapidly. In just 28 days, Apple’s new iPad has sold 1,000,000 units, Amazon’s Kindle, largely seen as the iPad’s biggest competitor on the E-book front, sold some 3.3 million units in 2009 and has many more users on mobile phones where a Kindle app can be installed.

In short, E-book readers are going mainstream, if they aren’t there already, and Dan Brown’s latest book, “The Lost Symbol”, may be a sign of what’s to come. In addition to selling more digital copies than physical ones on Amazon, it was also downloaded illegally some 100,000 times from Bittorrent within 24 hours of launch.

E-book piracy is already entering the mainstream and it steps into an already tumultuous digital piracy environment, one that is going to require experts familiar with the shifting landscape to help protect it. (more…)