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A headline in a major Spanish newspaper: Piracy increases. The text says: A survey shows that 56.6% of those who downloaded a book
through the Internet did it without any payment... [In Spain] we are going backwards,
because while in countries like France the number of pirated eBooks decreases
year after year, here, however, it increased. Next door is
another story where publishers complain of their falling sales.
In this context, we should notice a couple of
widespread errors:
•
There
is confusion between a free downloaded eBbook
and a pirate eBook. Both things are quite different.
For instance, when I bought my eBook reader, it came with a library of about 1000
files. (Books and files cannot be considered equivalent, for each story by
Edgar Allan Poe, to give one example, was in a separate file). All these books
were legal, because all of them were works out of copyright. Later on I have
added many more: just now I have over 2000 volumes of classic books, downloaded
from free sites like the Project
Gutenberg, the University of Adelaide,
epub Books, the Cervantes virtual library, Dominio Público, Livres Pour Tous, Ebooksgratuits, etc. All the
books that can be downloaded from these sites are free, but all are legal.
However, publishers (and the media who echo them) tend to count any freely downloaded
book as a pirate book, because it does not provide them with any profit.
