COS Blog- BEA in Review- CEOs Debate on E-books

[COS Productions]

Commentary by Sheila English

I didn’t get to make it to the CEO panel much to my regret, so like many
others I waited for PW to send out their daily review of what was going
on at BEA so I could find out what was said.

Of course e-books was a hot topic and the panel had a variety of
opinions. The panel included ABA CEO Oren Teicher, Workman Group
publisher Bob Miller, Authors Guild’s new president Scott Turow, ICM
executive v-p Esther Newberg, Ingram CEO Skip Prichard, Penguin CEO
David Shanks and FSG president Jonathan Galassi. That’s a lot of
publishing leadership!

I found it interesting that some felt piracy was a big issue with ebooks, and I agree it is,
but like someone on the panel pointed out, piracy happens when people
scan in the printed pages too. If someone wants to pirate a book to sell
it illegally they will. My own observation is that people can, if
motivated, re-type an entire book. Yes, that would be time consuming,
but let’s face it, if it is a top seller it is worth doing it, or so I
would think a criminal would consider it worth it. And criminals are not
worried about the quality of the final product. So piracy is going to
live with or without ebooks.

Still, let’s not make it easy for the bad guys. I’m all of looking into
the best way to make piracy difficult.

I love the quote in the PW magazine by Skip Prichard saying that ebooks
“did not cause piracy” which is 100% correct!