Lithuanian publishers warn illegal ebook supply may exceed 15,000 titles

Lithuanian publishing representatives have warned that the illegal distribution of ebooks remains a major but under-discussed problem, with popular titles sometimes appearing on piracy platforms within hours of publication.

The latest available study, commissioned by Lithuania’s Ministry of Culture in 2024, found that 60% of people who consumed written digital content — ebooks, audiobooks, and online magazines — said they used only legal sources. Another 14% used both legal and pirated content, 5% relied mainly or exclusively on pirated material, and 20% could not say how they accessed such content.

Jurga Sakalauskaitė, head of the Pegasas bookstore chain in Lithuania, said research published by the European Union Intellectual Property Office placed Lithuania among the EU countries with the highest intensity of online piracy.

According to Sakalauskaitė, some Lithuanian internet users visit piracy websites more than 20 times per month — twice the EU average.

“They go to steal content as if going to work — every day,” she told LRT.lt.

Sakalauskaitė Sakalauskaitė said EUIPO’s econometric analysis, which examined the relationship between piracy rates and economic, demographic, and legal-market factors, indicated that income inequality, youth unemployment, and insufficient access to legal content were among the factors associated with piracy. She cited Finland as an example, where internet users make an average of four visits to piracy websites per month and long-established content-subscription services have occupied space that piracy platforms retain elsewhere.

She also pointed to the role of established Russian-language piracy networks in the Baltic region. Legal Russian-language digital-content services in countries such as Latvia and Estonia remain limited and fragmented, while illegal websites, file repositories, and Telegram channels have accumulated extensive archives and large audiences since the 1990s, Sakalauskaitė said.

The exact scale of ebook piracy in Lithuania remains difficult to determine because no institution systematically collects such data, said Laura Tekorė, executive director of the Lithuanian Publishers Association. Once a book is released digitally, its further distribution becomes difficult to control, she added.

Calculations by Vilnius University researchers Arūnas Gudinavičius and Vincas Grigas showed that between 6,000 and 7,000 Lithuanian-language ebooks were legally available at the end of 2020, while one piracy website alone offered about 5,000 titles.

Later data from the same researchers suggested that the total number of Lithuanian ebooks available illegally could exceed 15,000.

“In other words, the illegal supply at that time almost equalled the legal one,” Sakalauskaitė said.

Books from various genres appear on illegal platforms, but the more popular and widely discussed a title is, the faster it tends to be uploaded. Rankings compiled by the U.S. ebook platform Good e-Reader, cited by LRT.lt, show that recent bestsellers and popular self-help books consistently dominate the flow of pirated titles.

Unauthorized EPUB and PDF files are distributed through specialised piracy websites, file-hosting services, and closed Facebook and Telegram groups. New files may appear within days or even hours of a book’s publication. When one group is removed following a complaint, another often appears under a different name, Tekorė said.

Publishing representatives also said public attitudes toward book piracy were changing more slowly than attitudes toward illegally distributed films and music. Tekorė stressed that a book represents the copyrighted work of authors, illustrators, translators, editors, and other publishing professionals. She also warned that copying entire textbooks and workbooks in schools could teach children from an early age that copyright did not apply to books.

As reported earlier, visits to piracy websites across all media industries increased by 26.6% between April 2022 and March 2023, while publishing piracy grew by 189% over five years, according to data from the piracy-monitoring company MUSO. The study also found that ebook piracy became the second-largest digital piracy sector after film piracy in 2020.

Main image: Hidden Gems Books