Many people worry about the tremendous capacity of e-book exchange platforms to replicate books. After all, it's easy to imagine each e-book sold being distributed to thousands of people. The challenge facing publishers is how to protect their authors' work. (Chuang Kung-ju)

Taiwanese e-book stores may be popping up everywhere online, but all still suffer from a lack of titles that is keeping buyers away. Why have so few e-book titles been released? Basically, because few writers have been willing to license the digital rights to their work.

Once e-books are posted online, it takes only a click of the mouse to pass on copies to others. With authors very naturally concerned that their work will be pirated, publishers have found it difficult to license the digital rights. But the music industry's experience clearly shows that efforts to control piracy are futile, and serve only to distance artists and their labels from consumers.

So how can we protect intellectual property rights? And how can publishers persuade authors to license their work?

Readers browsing the eBookTaiwan and Hami bookstores all wonder why there are so few bestsellers and works by big-name authors. They are especially disappointed to find that foreign titles at the top of the bestseller lists-books like The Secret, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and The Lost Symbol-are completely absent.

About 40,000 titles are published in Taiwan each year, with most mainstream bestsellers coming from the 5,000 or so translations of foreign titles released annually. Though Taiwanese publishers have been actively negotiating digital rights with foreign publishers, the Chinese-language e-book market remains immature, lacking a reliable business model and clear-cut "rules of the game." Consequently, foreign publishers have been very cautious about licensing the digital rights to Chinese-language editions.