Why Audiobooks Are Now a Major Piracy Target - Plagiarism Today

Book piracy has always been a thing. Even in the early 17th century, famous authors, such as Miguel de Cervantes, were dealing with unauthorized copies and sequels of their work being published.

As soon as books could be (relatively) easily copied, there were those who did so without permission from the author or publisher.

As with most forms of piracy, the internet made it much easier to pirate books. It was, and still is, trivial to share unauthorized PDFs, ePubs, and text files online. The file sizes are small, and you can easily store many books in a small amount of space.

One such dataset, Books3, was a major part of the dataset used to train most AI systems. It represented over 12 percent of "The Pile", a dataset used by most major AI companies.

Audiobooks have also been a major target for piracy. They are easily shared via MP3 or other compressed audio formats and, once again, have a relatively small file size that’s easy to store and share.

However, now there’s a new problem. YouTubers and streamers are creating their own audiobooks. What’s most interesting is that, while AI definitely is a major part of the problem, it’s not solely responsible. Humans are getting in on the action as well.

The reason for this is a confluence of factors that made books, and thus audiobooks, a tempting target for piracy, especially for those looking to make a quick profit.

Audiobook Piracy: Not Just for AI

According to an article by He Qigong at Sixth Tone, the TV drama The Protagonist has become a major success. Streamed over 1.18 billion times across its episodes, it has also brought significant attention to the original novel, written by Chen Yan.

But not all of that attention has been positive. Since the show’s release, local streamers have filled the hours of their broadcasts simply by reading the novel on stream. Though some streamers attempt to add some commentary or analysis as part of their reading, many just read the book itself.

To be clear, many of those streamers have had their accounts terminated. However, according to the article, this has been an ongoing issue in China. In April 2025, a novelist won 25,000 yuan ($3,700) in damages from a streamer who had read their novel on stream.

Fortunately, this does not appear to be as big of an issue outside of China, at least not yet. However, as one might expect, AI-generated audiobooks have become a growing problem, especially on YouTube. According to an article by Alexandra Alter at The New York Times, publishers have become increasingly frustrated with the lack of action from YouTube.

YouTube has a problem with low-quality AI-generated content broadly. It recently announced that it would be expanding its AI warnings and also its tool to prevent AI-generated likenesses of real people. However, when it comes to audiobooks, the company has been either unwilling or unable to take action.

Publishers are also in a difficult position. This is not a form of piracy that they are used to dealing with. They are, by and large, ill-equipped to deal with this kind of generative piracy.

So why is it becoming such an issue now? It’s the confluence of two factors.

Why Is It a Big Problem Now?

To understand why it’s a major deal now, we have to start in September 2017 with the launch of TikTok internationally. This marked a major shift in the way people consume video content. This created a gold rush for creating short-form vertical video content.

Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube would all release their own versions of the format, and it quickly became the most popular way to consume video content.

However, in November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, kicking off the current explosion of consumer AI. This became a bigger deal in December 2024, when OpenAI released the now-defunct Sora, its video generation tool. Now it was trivial to create short-form video content with nothing but a text prompt.

This created a flood of AI-generated content in the space. While it’s unclear how many viewers were turned off, it made short-form video content much less profitable. That’s because, typically, any revenue from ads would be split between all the creators who had the required number of views. More creators meant less revenue, even if views were rising.

To be clear, this doesn’t change how heavily YouTube (and other platforms) push short-form content. It just means that, while the content gets more views, the creators earn less money.

As such, long-form videos became much more desirable. According to an article by Alexander Lee at Digiday, long-form video content generates well over 10x more revenue than views on short-form content. This is because you aren’t sharing the revenue with other creators, and you can place more ads in long-form content.

So, many are either pivoting to or pivoting back to long-form content. But that is a problem. Creating long-form content that people want to view is...