Sales of eReaders, the handheld devices on to which electronic books can be downloaded, rocketed through December.
It is good news for makers such as Amazon, which produces the best- selling Kindle and collects 30 per cent of the price of downloaded books.
But there are fears that their profits could be hit by a wave of pirate eBooks available to download for free.
Just as pirates and websites including Napster undermined the music industry by putting music on the web for free, so the same is now happening with eBooks.
Creating pirate copies of published books is simple and can be done using a computer and a scanner in a relatively short period of time.
The pirates have developed software which people can download to their home computers to convert these pages into images that can be read on a Kindle or similar device.
One pirate website boasts: 'With a Kindle there is pretty much no protection against pirated books. There are programs which can simply convert any piece of text into the proper format and it will show on your Kindle as if you had bought it!'
It is estimated that up to 20 per cent of eBook downloads are from pirate sites.
The Publishers Association issued 115,000 legal threats to websites to stop them offering free pirated books in 2011, a rise of 130 per cent on 2010.
Publishers are in talks with the Government and Google to find ways to combat the trade, which breaches their copyright.
They have asked Google to demote pirate websites to ensure they do not appear at the top of web searches for consumers looking to find free eBooks. Pressure is also being put on internet service providers to shut down pirate websites........
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2081072/Online-pirates-threaten-Kindle-profits-thousands-turn-sites-download-free-eBooks.html?ITO=1490
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