By Edward Nawotka

In today’s feature story Sergey Anuriev, CEO of Litres.ru, notes that part of the reason his company keeps prices for e-books as low is they do is in order to give his company an opportunity to compete with pirates. He noted that when the company began, e-book prices were at at 15% of print costs, but have slowly escalated, with the eventual goal of pricing e-books at 75% to 100% of the print price.

The implication is that low prices are a gateway to wean customers away from “free” content — or pirated content — to “paid-for” books.

US-based publishers have aggressively used services like Attributor to combat piracy; in other, less wealthy markets where publishers don’t have access to these costly policing services, fear of piracy has left publishers reticent to adopt digital publishing.

Will Litres.ru’s strategy work? Is is particular to Russia or could it be implemented elsewhere in the world?

Let us know what you think in the comments.