Napster for Novels?: Not even pirates like e-books.

• Author: Godwin, Mike
• Position: Culture & Reviews

Is THE AMERICAN book publishing industry headed for its own Napster crisis? To judge from a recent report from Envisional Ltd., a British digital rights management company, Napster-like online trading of bestsellers may be accelerating even as the industry's own efforts to get a digital product out the door are slowing to a crawl. Paradoxically, publishers' fear of a Napster scenario--thousands of users trading copyrighted works over the Internet without a dime going to authors or publishers--may bring that very scenario about.

The original Napster crisis was instructive: While music companies dithered about how best to distribute their intellectual property to consumers over the Internet, an entrepreneurial programmer named Shawn Fanning created a networked system for trading music online. The resulting product and service, Napster, exploded onto the national scene, with millions of users trading thousands of compressed digital music files in the MP3 format. The music companies were forced to respond, and they did so quickly--not by getting their own product to market, but by suing Napster and similar upstart companies into the ground. As it stands today, Napster is moribund (though Audiogalaxy and other rivals are still flourishing); the music companies say they plan to roll out digital distribution systems soon, but consumers are still waiting to see a new paradigm that they like.

Similarly, in recent years American publishers have been quick to embrace the concept of "e-books"--digital editions of books that can be read on computers, handheld devices, or special e-book readers--but slow to find or exploit a market for the product. Not least of publishers' concerns has been the perceived need for software makers to prevent would-be pirates from making endless and perfect copies of the original.

But while publishers have been handwringing over the prospect that their e-books will be pirated, Internet-based book pirates have sidestepped e-books altogether, choosing instead to scan the text of traditional paper editions and make the results available on the Internet, often through Napster-like file-sharing services. In an exhaustive August survey, Envisional Ltd. claimed that as many as 7,300 paper editions of popular books have been scanned and made available on the Internet through distributed file-sharing services such as Gnutella. Among the most commonly traded books are titles from bestselling authors such as Stephen King, Tom Clancy...