PESHAWAR, Oct 5: The business of pirated books has become an albatross around the necks of foreign publishers, because the local booksellers prefer selling pirated version of foreign-printed books for more profit.

“We pay taxes on the import and sale of all sorts of books, whereas the sellers of pirated stuff do not pay any tax to the government. It is the responsibility of the government to put brakes on the illegal trade of books,” said Mian Waqar Naeem, Peshawar-based sales and marketing manager of the Oxford University Press.

He said his organization was incurring losses to the tune of Rs35 million annually, because of the increasing business of pirated books. He said they paid million of rupees in royalty to the writers of different books against the sellers of the pirated books, who neither paid royalty to the authors nor taxes to the government.

A book-seller informed Dawn that the demand for local editions of all the books was increasing due to the huge prices of the imported books.