Jan 15th update:   At the request of a few authors, we’ve disabled the links to the infringing copies in the Example section.

Book publishers frequently ask us how much online piracy is impacting their revenue.  Today, with the release of the first study to quantify book piracy in the U.S., we’re pleased to announce new capabilities to help book publishers answer this critical question.

Key findings of the research are listed below, and the full study can be downloaded here (.pdf).

We plan to update and add more depth to these findings regularly as we expand our anti-piracy services.  If you publish books or journals and wish to see how FairShare Guardian can protect your titles, please contact us.

Key Findings

• Significant amounts of pirated book downloads are taking place online, representing potential losses of $2.75-3 billion, representing roughly 10% of the total United States book sales
• Across the 913 books included in the study, nearly 10,000 pirated copies of every title in the study was available for free download.
• The  Business and Investing, Professional & Technical and Science genres have the largest potential lost sales per title.

Source: Attributor January, 2010

Source: Attributor January, 2010

Examples

Listed below are examples of pirated titles and a link to just one of the 25 sites included in the study (Copies downloaded figures are as of 01/14/10).

• Arts and Photography
  • Architect’s Drawings by Kendra Schank Smith, 10,010 copies downloaded

• Biographies & Memoirs
  • Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama, 2,850 copies downloaded

• Business & Investing
  • Freakonomics by Steven Levitt, 1,132 copies downloaded

• Culinary and Hospitality
  • Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, 659 copies downloaded

• Fiction
  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, 1,732 copies downloaded
  • Bed of Roses by Nora Roberts, 1,156 copies downloaded
  • Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, 8,177 copies downloaded

• Science
  • Advanced Calculus by Wilfred Kaplan, 3,526 copies downloaded
  • Molecular Biology of the Cell by Bruce Alberts, 3,584 copies downloaded

Methodology

• FairShare Guardian™ service monitored piracy for 913 popular books in categories representative of the industry across the the top 25 one-click hosting sites starting in October 2009 for a period of 90 days.  Download .pdf copy to view list of sites.

• FairShare Guardian captured the number of successful downloads completed for each of the 913 titles as reported on four file hosting sites that make the download data available (4shared.com, scribd.com, wattpad.com and docstoc.com).  Across these four sites, a total of 3.2 million downloads occurred.

• Across the top 25 one-click hosting sites, a total download figure of over 9 million copies was projected using the 36.4% share of one-click hosting sites that the four above-mentioned sites represent. Download .pdf copy  to view share figures.

• The retail value of these 9 million copies was calculated to reach $380 million. Each book’s retail price and category/genre information was collected from Amazon.com.

• The 913 titles in this study represent works from publishers totaling 13.5% of the U.S. book publishing market. Projecting this $380 million value to the entire industry results in total potential piracy figure of $2.8 billion.

• This study does not to answer the question, “How many of these pirated books would have been purchased legally if piracy was not an option?” Previous piracy studies assume a one-to-one substitution, meaning all pirated material would have been purchased and thus the market value of pirated books is equal to the actual loss, though Attributor feels this is an overly optimistic assumption. This issue will be addressed in a future research phase.

We enter the new decade with an ongoing sense of enthusiasm about our publishing customers and the potential for their industry. We consider it great validation and acknowledgment of our work at Attributor, including the Fair Syndication Consortium’s progress towards an ad-supported syndication platform, that Outsell, a leading research and advisory firm focused on the publishing and information industries, recently named Attributor to its ’30 to Watch’ list in their report, “Information Industry Outlook 2010: A New Dawn, New Day, New Decade.”The report highlights companies who they believe will have an important impact on the publishing- and information-provider community.

We couldn’t agree more with Outsell’s perspective about a new year and new opportunities, as stated in their report: “Those who fly and grow are those who prepared for a new dawn, a new day and new decade. Those who have not kept up will continue to face pressures and a proverbial sunset – more challenge, and in some cases demise.”

As Outsell explains, success in the new decade will depend on creating and fostering positive, successful and engaging experiences. We look forward to working with our customers to foster this perspective and build on the successes of 2009.