eBooks: “Publishers, your time is up”

According to Adrian Hon of online games company Six to Start, book piracy is about to arrive on a massive scale and publishers are facing disaster. Writing in today's London Daily Telegraph, Hon says that it is now becoming ridiculously easy to find and download pirated copies of the latest best-sellers. This is something I hadn't realised and I'm not particularly interested in pirate media because I happen to believe that writers need paying. There's no doubt, though, that the publishing world takes a big cut of the retail price and they are currently keeping the price of ebooks high in order not to jeopardise sales of good old fashioned dead-tree books. If Hon is correct, the floodgates are about to open and the publishers will no longer be able to charge massive prices for electronic downloads. If they don't heed the warning, I can imagine new, sleek e-publishers taking the market and wooing authors with bigger commissions at the same time as slashing the cost of books. We definitely live in interesting times.