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HIGH-TECH PIRATES FORGING ‘PERFECT’ COPIES OF TOP BOOKS

Pirate book publishers are flooding the market with counterfeit copies of bestsellers such as the Harry Potter titles which are virtually impossible to detect.

British publishers fear that four out of every ten books sold around the world are now pirate copies.

Sophisticated forgers are using digital technology to produce millions of counterfeit books in India, China and Iran. Their favourite targets are authors such as John le Carre, John Grisham and J.K. Rowling, whose popularity has helped the industry to boom.

As leading figures in the book trade gathered for the annual Frankfurt book fair yesterday, the talk was not of the latest blockbuster but of how much money authors and publishers were losing.

The industry is losing £4.5 billion of sales to pirates worldwide. In China alone, publishers lost an estimated £380 million in the past year.

The pirates do not just concentrate on the bestseller list but have a thriving industry in dictionaries, reference books and illustrated works on architecture and art.

The Publishers’ Association, which represents about 260 British companies, was leading the clamour in Frankfurt for an international crackdown.

Forgeries used to be blurred photocopies, but the new generation of pirates, who also operate in southern Africa, Latin America and South East Asia, are churning out sophisticated fakes.

Ian Taylor, international director of the Publishers’ Association, said: “You wouldn’t know they were pirated at all. They are scanned and digitised and damned near perfect.”

THE TIMES, Oct. 9, 2002