VietNamNet Bridge – Big technology firms and publishing houses,
which plan to join the ebook market, have been repeatedly urging state
management agencies to declare war with piracy.
When buying a Kindle or Nook
ebook reader from the shops in Hanoi, one would receive a “gift” – a CD disk
which contains thousands of ebooks.
Of course, the free ebooks are
pirate products. But 100 percent of buyers would accept the “gift”. In fact,
Vietnamese have got familiar with using intellectual property free of charge.
The widespread piracy has made
technology firms and publishing houses hesitant with their plan to conquer the
ebook market.
Sharing or infringement?
It’s obvious that piracy remains
the biggest problem for service providers.
“If we don’t publish ebooks, our
publications still would appear on a lot of websites and forms, from which
people can download the publications free of charge, even though with lower
quality than the printing versions. But if we publish ebooks, they would be
unlocked just 15 minutes after the publishing moments, at with the same high
quality,” said Nguyen Xuan Minh from Nha Nam Publication Company.
Ebooks have been shared on forums
and websites set up by groups of students, groups of people who like reading
books, or groups of people with the same carriers. The members of the forums
and website type the content of the books and then post on Internet for sharing
with friends.
E-thuvien.com provides hundreds
of ebooks. Vnthuquan, which was an online library, now provides ebook format –
epub – for readers to read books offline.
In the past, there existed a
service provider specializing in providing ebooks in English. Readers could
place orders, paid for services and waited for deliveries. The service provider
would hunt for the ordered books on Amazon or foreign book sale channels to
obtain the English original versions.
At that time, client was charge
50,000 dong for a literature publication and 10 percent of the sale prices for
learning manuals. However, the website collapsed just after three or four
months of operation.
The websites and forums
introduced themselves as the places where people can share their ideas and
exchange books. However, in fact, this is an infringement behavior.
An executive of Nha Nam said some
years ago, Nha Nam sent letters to some websites, requesting the administrators
to remove the ebooks published by Nha Nam from the websites. However, Nha Nam
never received reply from them.
It is estimated that nearly 30
percent of its printing books has been published as ebooks as well. However, in
fact, 70 percent of Nha Nam’s printing books are illegally posted on Internet
for sharing. That explains why the company’s turnover from ebooks remains very
modest.
With the appearance of ebook
readers and the popularity of social networks, it is now easier than ever to
spread pirate books. The box for sharing ebooks now exists on nearly all
forums.
Readers need to be aware of copyright
Alezza, Lac Viet or Anybook are
the most popular ebook publisher names. The number of official ebook publishers
in Vietnam remains modest, just because of the piracy problem.
However, even publishers
sometimes also “forget” to pay royalty because they are too busy to provide
services. A publishing house said Anybook still has not signed the copyright
contract with the house, but it has put books on sale already.
An ebook is sold at 2000-15,000
dong – the surprisingly low levels that analysts believe would not bring the
turnover high enough to cover the royalty.
Buu Dien
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