Tens of thousands of university students are using illegal sites to download sections of text from books, costing the publishing industry billions of pounds, according to new research.
Perlego – which runs an online library of academic, professional and non-fiction eBooks – said that for 2023, the largest figure for illegal downloads was in January with more than 530,000 piracy searches in the UK.The company said it is working with more than 250 universities in Britain and the US and other educational facilities in more than 190 others countries and hopes to make necessary publications more accessible to universities and their students.