BookBrunch

At the Magellan Media Partners Tools of Change session, Brian O’Leary told the attendees that he was looking to earn their trust, since he was hoping they would either join the research project he was conducting on the effects of piracy on the book publishing business, or measure it on their own.

O’Leary’s panel, "The Impact of Piracy and PRP on Book Sales", used a number of data charts and details on the study he’s conducting with the help of an NYU grad student. O’Leary began the study after discussions with editors at O’Reilly Media - which stages the TOC conferences - with the goal of finding out if there was a way to measure the impact of piracy on the industry.

The data set is small - the work is focused on the incidences of piracy on three P2P (or peer to peer) sites for a handful of titles from O’Reilly and Random House - and O’Leary said that the study was approached from a standpoint that IP mattered, there were incidences where piracy hurt sales and incidences where it helped sales, and the research was structured to identify which was which. (On the methodology, O’Leary noted that the grad student on the project had been searching the availability of 50 different titles everyday on the P2P sites. And noteworthy is the fact that O’Reilly provides all of its digital content DRM-free.)

Early results suggest that the P2P threat may be overstated for book publishing, as O’Leary noted, with a low incidence of it and significant lag between content becoming available and the illegal availability of it. The lag time between the availability of work and the pirated copy’s availability was, on average, 19 weeks.

Although O’Leary cautioned that it was hard to draw big picture conclusions from a study focused on a small data set, he said the indications suggested that piracy should be "viewed on a wider spectrum". Additionally, he said, the notion that only big books or small books were pirated might be off-base.

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