ANA President urges FG, State Governments to tackle book piracy

Books

The President of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Dagga Tolar, has urged the Federal and State Governments to urgently address the issue of book piracy in the country.

The ANA president said that piracy had become the bane of Nigerian writers, adding that it was taking its toll on them.

``If you come to Ajegunle, for instance, there are thriving printing presses that are busy pirating people’s works, and we need to take urgent action to stem the situation.

``They pirate these books in hundreds of thousands,” he said.

Tolar said that piracy needed to be tackled with appropriate action, noting that most of the books that pupils read in schools today were pirated materials with numerous missing links.

According to him, the prints in most pirated copies are usually blurred.

``These individuals need to know that it is people’s intellectual property that they are killing, and that they are depriving authors of their livelihood,” he said.

Tolar noted that piracy was thriving because some people were only striving to survive, ``so they do all sorts of things, many of which are to the detriment of others.

``They cause authors of such works to suffer,” adding: ``the pirates sell the books at the cheapest prices ever.”

The ANA president noted that if the unit cost of a pirated book was N100, for instance, and the pirate printed a million copies, one could can imagine what he was stealing from the owner of the copyright.

``A publisher contends with taxes, royalties and other production costs, but when he eventually fixes his unit price, it may look outrageous to those who do not have a good idea of his production profile,’’ Tolar said.

He said that writers, publishers and even the pirates ought to be registered and get organised, so that ``we should be able to know ourselves.”

``Every publishing company, for instance, should be able to sponsor one writer so that if they are churning out copies of books, writers of such books can as well get some benefits for their works,” he said.

Tolar regretted that the police arrested the pirates, only to release them to continue with their illicit business.

However, the ANA president noted that book piracy could only be stopped when the government began to jail them.

``We need to do a re-think and re-organise the society for things to take a better shape.

``Art is priceless, but it is only when it is adequately protected that it can help to give the society an identity and also impact on job creation,” he said.