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Call it a form of "organized crime, and muse that perhaps it faces a crossroads similar to the one it faced in Gutenberg's day 500yrs ago. E-books are one of the last remaining frontiers for file-sharers to really trade and consume, but with technology like Amazon's Kindle making them a more palatable reading experience than staring at a 20" monitor for hours on end this is slowly changing. As a result, the German book industry is see the writing on the wall and is trying to fight the threat head on. "We are in tough against illegal downloading, against theft on the Internet, to proceed" and "the courts with thousands of procedures employed," said (GOOGLE TRANSLATION) the chief executive of the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers, Alexander Skipis, at the opening of the Leipzig Book Fair on Thursday. "The policy is forcing us to take this step." File-sharers tend to trivialize this "organized crime." This new policy means they have already readied thousands of lawsuits targeting those illegally sharing e-books, enough to sufficiently employ the German courts "for years." Leipzig also says he supports a graduated response mechanism for ISPs, a la "three-strikes," for file-sharers that illegal share copyrighted books. He also says the book industry has suffered greatly from file-sharing, though the amount is unclear. "We can not yet say how much damage this causes. For us, we are now in the millions," he said. "Our industry feels that small and medium-sized scientific publishers would disappear from the market. If a publisher dies, so does our culture. It has a social relevance which, unfortunately, no policy is in place to protect." Leipzig also observes that his industry is facing a sort of publishing crossroads similar to that of Gutenberg's and his movable type press. "Maybe our industry is facing a break, just as Gutenberg did over 500 years ago," he said. I'll admit the e-book industry is certainly facing a critical time in its history, but just as those who made books by hand were forced to adapt to the realities of Gutenberg's press, so will the book industry have to adapt to the realities of a digital age.
