Success and Growth of eBook Industry Leads Company to Expand Monetization Services to Copyright Infringements in Publishing
Rightscorp (OTCQB: RIHT), the leading provider of monetization services for artists and holders of copyrighted Intellectual Property (IP), announced today that it plans to expand its copyright monetization services into the consumer book publishing market. Rightscorp will soon represent authors and publishing companies by monitoring and monetizing of their digital assets against copyright infringement and illegal downloading.
"We recently announced a deal to represent Mark Sisson, author of the bestselling book The Primal Blueprint. This marks our entrance into the multi-billion dollar book publishing industry, an area where we feel we can add value to our clients and our investors," said Christopher Sabec, CEO of Rightscorp. "eBooks and eReaders have become very popular since the release of the Kindle in late 2007, but just like any medium, the creation of digital format opens them up to digital theft and copyright infringement. With a $3 billion market and growing, the digital book market is an ideal place to add protection and secure revenues. We are now expanding our focus to include monetization and protection of online books and are already in discussions with other authors and industry trade organizations about how we can help them."
The Association of American Publishers reported that revenues including both online and physical book sales were $15 billion in 2012. The Los Angeles Times placed print sales at $12 billion in 2012 and also $12 billion in 2011. Regardless of the eBook's growth over the last few years, the industry for physical books remains very strong.
Sales of eBooks reached $3 billion at the end of 2012, up from $68 million in 2008 according to a recent article posted on Yahoo! Finance. The article also cited that Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon, said that "Kindle owners buy more books now than they did before they owned the eReader". A PaidContent article cited that PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) estimates "consumer eBooks will drive $8.2 billion in sales by 2017, surpassing projected print book sales, which it thinks will shrink by more than half during that period."
Rightscorp currently represents more than 1,000,000 copyrights with more than 40,000 copyrights in its system. Rightscorp has already received settlements from subscribers of more than 50 ISPs and closed over 60,000 cases of copyright infringement to date.
