E-Book Piracy Costs Publishers $315 Million in Lost Sales

New Digimarc and Nielsen Study Unveiled at London Book Fair

LONDON, March 14, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Digimarc Corporation (NASDAQ: DMRC) recently commissioned a Nielsen consumer survey on e-book piracy and the company will present their findings on March 15 at The London Book Fair. Digimarc commissioned the survey to better understand the nature of e-book piracy, how it impacts revenue, and what publishers can do to prevent it. The session, titled "Inside the Mind of a Book Pirate," takes place at 1:45 p.m. (UK Time) in the Tech Theatre.

E-book piracy currently costs U.S. publishers $315 million each year in lost sales, and the Nielsen survey revealed that people who illegally download e-books are largely ordinary consumers, students and working professionals who access e-books from a wide range of digital sources, including online auction sites and via email from friends. The study highlighted the fact that 70% of illegal downloaders have either graduated from college or have a graduate degree. The most common age-range of an e-book pirate is between 30- and 44-years-old with a yearly household income between $60,000 and $99,000.

"When it comes to book piracy, you can't prevent what you can't predict. This is the challenge for publishers as they grapple with preventing illegal piracy," said Devon Weston, director, market development, Digimarc Guardian. "Our new Nielsen data makes it clear these pirates don't fit a typical criminal profile. They access digital content from a vast universe of web pages, social platforms and file sharing portals. Our aim is to break down the problem for publishers and help them develop an effective prevention strategy."

Digimarc's Guardian content protection service offers publishers an end-to-end digital piracy solution that discovers and verifies pirated content, de-lists the content on search engines and then reports actions-taken within a convenient customer portal. The solution helps enterprise-level rights holders, such as publishers, demonstrate their commitment to authors by providing detailed visibility into individual-work level piracy and protection, and by allowing the content creators to self-report suspected violations.

The Digimarc Guardian team will be attending The London Book Fair, March 14-16 at Booth #3B100.  To download a copy of the study, please visit www.digimarc.com/resources/ebook-piracy-study.

Find out more about Guardian content protection solutions by visiting:  https://www.digimarc.com/application/copyright.

About Digimarc
Digimarc Corporation (NASDAQ: DMRC), based in Beaverton, Oregon, is the inventor of Digimarc Discover® software and the imperceptible Digimarc Barcode for automatically identifying and interacting with virtually any media. Digimarc Discover software enables industrial scanners, smartphones, tablets and other computer interfaces to reliably, efficiently and economically identify traditional barcoded items, along with many other media objects. Digimarc Barcodes are imperceptible to people and do all that visible barcodes do, but perform better. These remarkable capabilities have allowed Digimarc and its business partners to supply a wide range of patented consumer engagement, media management and security solutions across multiple consumer and government industry sectors. Digimarc owns an extensive intellectual property portfolio, with patents in digital watermarking, content identification and management, media object discovery, and intuitive computing more generally. For more information and the latest news, please visit www.digimarc.com and follow on Twitter at @Digimarc.

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