Archive notice: This article was originally published on April 1, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
This gloomy forecast comes from Britain’s Society of Authors http://www.societyofauthors.org in the edition published today, Monday, of Times Online http://www.timesonline.co.uk. The association, which represents more than 8,500 professional British writers and authors, sees the book trade being pushed into a survival crisis similar to the one the music industry has been experiencing for some time. Revenue losses caused by online piracy in particular are said to be causing the sector serious difficulties. The common criticism is that a workable business model for the digital age is lacking. The Internet is flooded not only with illegal music but also with vast quantities of unlicensed digital copies of individual text excerpts and complete books.
“The Internet is a double-edged sword. It is good for increasing an author’s readership but disastrous when it comes to turning that into revenue,” explains well-known British writer Tracy Chevalier. The decisive factor at present is above all the lack of an acceptable business model for the digital sphere. The centuries-old approach has, in any case, had its day. “We are trying to plug the revenue hole that has emerged with laws and court cases, but we need to think more fundamentally and develop an entirely new kind of business model,” Chevalier says. Content can certainly be made available to users free of charge, but ways and means for authors to get paid must be created at the same time. “For a while, this will work well for readers because they have to pay less and less. In the longer term, however, this situation harms the content. People will simply stop writing,” Chevalier explains.
“The effects of increasing Internet piracy are also clearly noticeable in the German book trade. But the death of literature is not in sight,” states Gudrun Bolduan, managing director of the Publishers Committee at the German Publishers and Booksellers Association. The unlicensed appearance of book content on the Internet has increased enormously recently. The audiobook segment is particularly affected. “In 2006, we conducted screening over more than four months, which showed that around 24,000 legal audiobooks were available on the Internet at that time. Against that stood 110,000 illegal audiobook offerings,” Bolduan says.
In Bolduan’s view, the current legal situation is particularly open to criticism and is anything but ideal for the digital age. “Publishers currently have no way of tracking down online piracy,” Bolduan criticises. A workable business model is also still in short supply. “Through the ‘libreka!’ platform initiated by German publishers, which will soon contain more than 60,000 book titles, Germany will have good models that integrate the book trade and the reader into the purchase of e-books,” Bolduan is convinced.
