Pirates infest the E-book waters.  One wonders why.

Pirated e-books make up as much as 20% of the e-book market, according to reports from a variety of sources.  Pirating books is as easy as downloading a program to convert files into the proper format, and it will look as if you got the pirated book from the proper source.

With the vast market e-readers sales have created recently, the book pirating business is booming.  It would have to, with sales of the Kindle Fire alone hitting over 1,000,000 sales a week in December.

But the problem seems to be that e-readers have minimal protection at best against pirating.  This has led publishers to ask Google to demote pirate websites in their search results so they don’t show as top results there.

Pressure is also being placed on ISPs to shut down these pirate websites.

This is happening as 6 publishers have made a deal to set their own prices for e-books which effectively makes it impossible to discount e-books without permission. Prices from these publisher’s books have skyrocketed, and negatively affected sales.

This type of deal does not exist for printed books. 

One wonders whether the pirating has anything to do with the combination of these publishers creating an air that makes it more tempting for people to try and get books cheaper, and the ease of pirating itself. 

One truly wonders whether these publishers are shooting themselves in the foot here, doing the deal and subsequent price increases before e-readers have proper content protection.

One really wonders.