Rhodri Marsden: Have books become the new target for internet piracy?

The knowledge that music, both commercially successful and woefully under-appreciated, is being shared online for free is something that even Luddites have got their heads around by now. But books? Would your first reaction, on hearing that there's a new Kathy Lette novel out, be to get online and try to grab all 200 pun-laden pages without paying? Well, I wouldn't, for various reasons. But this kind of behaviour is becoming more common. A recent study by the Swedish book publishers association discovered that 85 per cent of Swedish best-sellers are currently available on torrent site The Pirate Bay, and publishers and authors have reacted to this news with the same panic-stricken gasps that we've been accustomed to hearing from music business executives.

Of course, books don't lend themselves to being shared online in the same way that music does; people don't really like spending a few weeks perched on a knackered office chair staring at a Samsung monitor to wade through 'Finnegan's Wake', and printing the lot on to A4 would represent something of a financial and ecological disaster. But more importantly – and unlike CD albums – you can't easily convert books from your shelf into a sharable document. You'd have to be hard at work with a scanner for hours, waiting for it to laboriously chug over each page, before saving each image in an appropriate format and manageable size. The greatest risk of book piracy is, in fact, the point in the production process where a PDF of that final, print-ready document gets leaked online by a disgruntled and underpaid editorial assistant. But as e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle start to take off, books in electronic format will start to become standard.

Publishers will ensure that those documents are protected with digital rights management – but you can bet that hackers will try to crack it and allow books to be shared freely. Some authors, such as Paulo Coelho (below), however, aren't panicking. They believe that giving books away online has boosted sales. Now, we've heard this argument applied to music, and such claims are impossible to quantify. But we could all conduct a little test by doing Coelho's bidding, getting online and downloading a book of his for free ('The Alchemist' is supposed to be good) and then seeing if Santa delivers it for Christmas. It's our duty to the world of publishing.

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