Why is music piracy so much more prevalent than book piracy?

[Sånıc Bÿm]

I was reading a post on a Queensryche fan forum, and after reading the following paragraph...

The internet has created a medium that allows people who feel entitled to obtain multimedia for free. We can't walk into a bookstore and walk out with a book or a grocery store with a gallon of milk, if we feel the price is unjustified for the product. The police would be called and we would be charged with theft. The same goes for walking out of Best Buy with a CD in our hands. We can choose to not purchase the item though.

...the poster's bookstore analogy had me thinking, "Why is music piracy so much more prevalent than book piracy?"

I came up with a few possible reasons why:

• It is easier to put a CD into a computer and then rip the music from the CD than it is to go through each and every page of a book, scanning each page or manually typing out the text (unless it is a very, very short book).
• The average music album is somewhere between 40 to 70 minutes in length, while it'll take at least half a day to read an average-sized novel, and it's easier to multitask while listening to music than it is while reading a book. This is pure speculation on my part, but I think these differences between music and books somehow make music more appealing to pirates than books.
• The book publishing industry is more aggressive in fighting piracy than the music industry.
• MP3's became popular and mainstream before ebooks did (as far as I know), giving music piracy a "head start" over book piracy.

When I talked about this with a friend, he said that people still preferred physical books.

Any other possible reasons?

[RJWalker]

Because no one reads anymore.

[MancerNecro]

Heeeeey I still read now...

But otherwise, I think it's because of the ease of getting the digital copy of the song vs getting the digital copy of a book.

Also, there's the availability of a library for free books so piracy is not required to acquire free reading of books.

[Klokinator]

Yeah, nobody reads, and even if they did, there's a library in like every city.Why would you want to pirate if you really need to read that copy of 50 Shades of Grey? (My personal BIBLE btw)

[Magical CC]

Because music industry is way bigger and more profitable than...you know...books and stuff, even with famous titles. The more you can earn from something, the more you will do to protect it, am I right?

[Knight]

A public library is already a free source of books and you can even get some free ebooks. Choosing a book to read is also more of a commitment as you usually read one over the time of a week, a month or several months, you don't just pirate a couple dozen books and expect to get through them.

[Skynstein]

I think it's because music is more popular. Also, e-book phenomenon is still fairly recent. But, if you look around, you'll find most books pirated, you just don't hear about it as often because music industry is huge so the piracy hurts it much more.

[MacLovin]

From what I've seen, it's because music is popular.

Also, idk if comics fall under standard books, but I hear it's also a strong one. It's just that the music industry makes alot of noise about piracy.

[MancerNecro]

I just thought of something else.

For comics (manga, mainly) and certain other types of books, the writer probably earns money from other sources than just the book as well. They could be earning from the movies produced and from the sales of merchandise related to the books as well such that the piracy of books might actually help them earn more money by attracting more readers and buyers to the movies and merchandise.

[Elieson]

Because no one reads anymore.

Yeah, nobody reads, and even if they did, there's a library in like every city.Why would you want to pirate if you really need to read that copy of 50 Shades of Grey? (My personal BIBLE btw)

I think it's because music is more popular. Also, e-book phenomenon is still fairly recent. But, if you look around, you'll find most books pirated, you just don't hear about it as often because music industry is huge so the piracy hurts it much more.

Nobody reads books anymore, when they can just find them online, go to Audible.com and get audio books, or just look up free information on relevant factual material instead. Scholastic textbooks are used for scholastic use, but I can't remember the last time I burrowed into my AP Statistics hardcover.

Also, I can't remember the last MTV Book Awards. Most of what you see in terms of the "Bestseller" Because having 125 "Best"sellers makes sense when Best generally refers to one? comes from people that we generally can't relate to referring to political scandals and the like, or books that only appeal to specific demographics (like 50Shades, Twilight, etc).

Plus, I can listen to music while I do other things. I can't exactly wash dishes and cook dinner and mow my lawn while reading the latest issue of Time magazine.

[EricaofRenais]

Books are relatively cheap compared to music, the last H.I.M. CD I bought was $15 while the last book I bought was $7, and ITunes sells songs for $1 and up so it cost a lot of money to buy music, so I can see people ripping off songs and not wanting to spend a lot of money on one song you really like vs. a book which has a good amount of entertainment for a lower price.

[Snowy_One]

You can pirate a dozen songs and finish them on your lunch-break.

You pirate one book and you may lose your entire weekend to reading it.

[Phoenix Wright]

i was disappointed that this was even a question, but you answered it yourself, op.

physical books can't be pirated, and i can't see too many people scanning physical books just so others can have it too.

other than that, music just happens to be more prevalent. i'll have you know that myself and almost everyone i know pirates textbooks, though. because fuck textbook publishers.

[Skynstein]

physical books can't be pirated, and i can't see too many people scanning physical books just so others can have it too.

They can but it's expensive so not worth.

[Snowy_One]

They can be pirated. It would take a lot of work, but considering people put up PDF's of games like Exalted all the time, it can be done.

It's just not something that most people would consider doing cause of how much time it would take to actually utilize the material.

[Phoenix Wright]

i guess my wording was unclear.

you can't pirate physical books. you have to steal them. but, you can scan them and pirate those digitally scanned copies instead. however, as has been stated quite a few times now, going through that sort of trouble isn't worth it.

[MancerNecro]

I find it really discriminatory to say that nobody reads books anymore when I state that I do still read books and I know a lot of friends who do read too. Call me a nerd or whatever bleh.

I agree with Phoenix's points though about it being hard to pirate books per se.

[Loki Laufeyson]

What? I find it easier to pirate e-books, holy crap. Especially pdfs and epubs.

What are you guys on about? I pirate books more than i do music.

[Elieson]

Clearly by the unfounded popularity of Iggy Azalea versus Nora Roberts, things like music will be pirated more than books

[Loki Laufeyson]

I dunno, i get the feeling theres a lot of undocumented book pirating going on...

Like perhaps music piracy just gets more attention?

How about that free U2 doe.

[MancerNecro]

Maybe. It depends on the definition of books. If i extends into ebooks then maybe the piracy of books could match the piracy of music. Then again, many ebooks are offerred for free anyway and there are sources of free books written by wannabe, new and non-professional authors (like me) on various sites like Wattpad.

[Blugga6]

Music is usually easier to get into for the average Joe.

"hey bro, listen to this song, it's called clockwork angels"

The bro pirates the eponymous Rush album within 24 hours.

"hey bro, i've been reading this book called the dream of the celt, it talks about human explotation and irish nationalism"

The bro has forgotten all about that conversation and Ireland long before the next day.

[BBM]

I pirate a lot of books. At one point I had over 400 books, but my hard drive crashed so I only have like a 100 atm. Firstly, nobody types a book page by page before they upload it... you get the e-book version (generally an epub or mobi) and upload that on some torrenting website. Even my university textbooks; I get most of those for free as pdfs. Secondly, as Florina said, music piracy just gets a lot more publicity because there are a lot more people who listen to music than there are people who read books, and there are also free ways to get books (libraries). That doesn't mean book piracy doesn't happen.

Edited September 14, 2014 by BBM

[Naughx]

The thing is the music industry wants to suck dry every dimes there is to make so they complain way more.

[Kirie]

It's very easy to pirate e-books. I had to sell or give away almost my entire collection of physical books when I moved to Amsterdam, but I didn't want to pay to re-buy the books again as digital, so I turned the the internet. I was surprised (no, not really) to discover that I was able to pirate almost all of them, with the exception of some books from lesser-known authors/publishers (and when I looked, none of those had e-book versions to purchase, either). These pirated versions aren't always the best, but there are programs like Calibre (which is awesome even for legal and legitimate purposes for anyone who uses an e-reader) that let you convert and tweak and clean-up files for ease of reading.

Really, the prevalence of downloading music over books is likely because music has been in an easily-sharable format for a longer period of time, and also because music is simply easier to consume. Even though I'm a voracious reader and I rarely listen to music, I still have more music downloaded than books, because music cycles through quickly on a playlist (and some of my downloads are over a decade old), whereas it'll take me anywhere from a day to a couple weeks to go through a book.