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Two Decades of E-Book Publishing in a Small Language Market: Publishers Lag Behind Pirates

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Abstract

The study analyzes legal and illegal access to e-books in Lithuanian language as one of the small language publishing markets in order to better understand the digital transformation of books in Lithuania. The range of legally and illegally publicly available online e-books in Lithuanian language was identified and analyzed in few aspects, revealing the range of choice of legally and illegally available e-books in Lithuanian. The results showed that at the end of 2020, there were about 6 thousand in legal access and over 15 thousand in illegal access unique titles of e-books in Lithuanian language. Analysis of the data showed that only 10–25% of legal e-books have become illegally accessible. The rest is “published” by users of illegal websites themselves, mostly by scanning and OCRing printed books. Four main channels for accessing legal e-books have been identified: online bookstores, libraries, subscription service platforms, and academic online bookstores. Choice to read legal books on the screen in Lithuanian language is small, and illegal access channels offer several times larger choice of e-books. The decision of some large Lithuanian publishers not to publish (or publish only symbolically) e-books does not prevent them from appearing in illegal access, and readers who are becoming more and more accustomed to reading on the screen are likely to encourage the demand and emergence of illegal supply.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Master’s students of Media and Digital Publishing Studies at the Faculty of Communication of Vilnius University: Mindaugas Bareikis, Brigita Beinarytė, Soneta Blankaitė, Donata Gavėnaitė, Ema Grigaitytė, Simona Šernauskienė and Aleksandra Tomaševskaja, for their great work in collecting data from various access channels. We also thank the Lithuanian Culture Council for funding this study.

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  1. Faculty of Communication, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania

    Arūnas Gudinavičius & Vincas Grigas

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  1. Arūnas Gudinavičius
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  2. Vincas Grigas
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Correspondence to Arūnas Gudinavičius or Vincas Grigas.

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Gudinavičius, A., Grigas, V. Two Decades of E-Book Publishing in a Small Language Market: Publishers Lag Behind Pirates. Pub Res Q 38, 490–502 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-022-09894-1

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