Book piracy on the internet will ultimately drive authors to stop writing unless radical methods are devised to compensate them for lost sales.

This is the bleak forecast of the Society of Authors, which represents more than 8,500 professional writers in the UK and believes that the havoc caused to the music business by illegal downloading is beginning to envelop the book trade.

Tracy Chevalier, the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring who also chairs the London-based organisation, said that her members were deeply concerned that the publishing industry was failing to adapt to the digital age.

The internet is awash with unlicensed free digital copies of individual chapters or in some cases entire books. Prominent victims of book piracy include Jamie Oliver and J. K. Rowling but the most vulnerable writers are less well-known poets, authors of short stories and writers of cookery books.

Some of the biggest names on the internet are effectively becoming digital publishers, not necessarily with the support of the book industry. Google is locked in legal disputes with authors and publishers over its plans to make available free electronic copies of every book over the next ten years. Amazon has found that its “Search Inside” function, which allows readers to see selected pages of books, has increased sales.

Ms Chevalier told The Times that the century-old model by which authors are paid – a mixture of cash advances and royalties – was finished. “It is a dam that’s cracking,” she said. “We are trying to plug the holes with legislation and litigation but we need to think radically. We have to evolve and create a very different pay system, possibly by making the content available free to all and finding a way to get paid separately.”

“It’s hitting hardest the writers who write books that you dip in and out of: poetry, cookbooks, travel guides, short stories – books where you don’t have to read the whole thing.

“Although people still buy [books by] Nigella and Jamie Oliver and Delia it is because of their celebrity. Cookbook authors are really struggling. I do it myself – if I want a recipe I go online and get it for free.

“For a while it will be great for readers because they will pay less and less but in the long run it’s going to ruin the information. People will stop writing. There’s a lot of ‘wait and see what the technology brings’ but the trouble is if you wait and see too long then it’s gone. That’s what happened to the music industry.”

In the 19th century and before, other models of paying writers existed, including lump-sum agreements and profit-sharing. She sees no reason why the book industry should not be equally innovative. She suggested four possible sources of income at an industry discussion on copyright law last week: the Government, business, rich patrons and the public. Government funding could take the form of an “academy” of salaried writers.

Simon Juden, chief executive of the Publishers’ Association, drew reassurance from the similar level of alarm ten years ago “when everybody thought that we were all going to read CD-Roms”.

Scott Pack, a former chief buyer for Waterstone’s who is now commercial director of The Friday Project, which publishes books developed from material started online, said: “At the moment if you asked ten publishers what the future of publishing is you would get ten different answers.”

Everybody agreed that the internet was a double-edged sword: good for growing an author’s audience but disastrous at turning that readership into revenue, he added. “Tracy Chevalier is right, it is worrying. At the moment, though, even the most pessimistic commentators still think that printed books will be popular for ages.”

Cover stories

— In 1701 The True-Born Englishman, a satirical poem by Daniel Defoe became a bestseller after an estimated 80,000 unauthorised copies were distributed. It did not make him rich but it did make him famous. In the preface to a later edition he wrote of his gratitude to the “pirates” who had sold it, the first known reference to intellectual property theft as piracy

— Stephen King made his story Riding the Bullet free to anyone with the right device in 2000

— In 2003 an e-mail purporting to offer a complete free copy of the latest Jamie Oliver cookbook flashed round the world. Oliver’s publishers said it was a hoax, compiled from previous Oliver cookbooks

— In July 2007 scanned pages from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows appeared on the net four days before its release. A Chinese translation appeared free online weeks before the official Chinese language version reached bookshops

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