Will Books Be Napsterized?

The rise of e‑books opens up new hori­zons for read­ers, and also the pos­si­bil­i­ty that books will be “Nap­ster­ized,” as The New York Times explains. The Times arti­cle begins:

You can buy “The Lost Sym­bol,” by Dan Brown, as an e‑book for $9.99 at Amazon.com.

Or you can don a pirate’s cap and snatch a free copy from anoth­er online user at Rapid­Share, Megau­pload, Hot­file and oth­er file-stor­age sites.

Until now, few read­ers have pre­ferred e‑books to print­ed or audi­ble ver­sions, so the pub­lic avail­abil­i­ty of free-for-the-tak­ing copies did not much mat­ter. But e‑books won’t stay on the periph­ery of book pub­lish­ing much longer. E‑book hard­ware is on the verge of going main­stream…

With the new devices in hand, will book buy­ers avert their eyes from the free copies only a few clicks away that have been uploaded with­out the copy­right holder’s per­mis­sion? Mind­ful of what hap­pened to the music indus­try at a sim­i­lar tran­si­tion­al junc­ture, book pub­lish­ers are about to dis­cov­er whether their indus­try is dif­fer­ent enough to be spared a sim­i­lar­ly dis­mal fate. (Get the rest here.)

Need­less to say, pub­lish­ers are get­ting ner­vous. But some see the “Nap­ster­i­za­tion” of books being more hype than real. As author Seth Har­wood told me on Twit­ter (find our Twit­ter stream here), The “nyt arti­cle on ebook pira­cy is spin. If more peo­ple are read­ing, even stolen books, pub­lish­ers win. Too much fear of zero sum.” In the com­ments sec­tion below, Seth goes beyond 140 char­ac­ters and spells out why pub­lish­ers should take a deep breath. They might actu­al­ly have more to gain than lose, if they play their cards right. Give his thoughts a read, and keep in mind that he land­ed a Ran­dom House con­tract by giv­ing his books away as free audio pod­casts.