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How to Spot Bootleg/Pirated Artbooks
It used to be easy to spot a bootleg artbook. They never looked as good as the real thing. Often they had been poorly scanned resulting in images that were lined, speckled and generally messed up. Anyone who has delt with bad printers knows exaclty what they looked like. To top that off the printing itself was low quality. Often cheap printers with cheaper ink was used. As you can guess over the years conditions have improved.
Nowdays High Quality bootlegged artbooks are all over the place. The reason why is because it is now relatively cheap for them to reproduce these images and with today's technology the color reproduction can be VERY good. While these new high quality knock-offs can be hard to spot you may be able to tell just by comparing them to an official product. Some bootleg companies still have a little ways to go to catch up, therefore there work can look duller with slightly off colouration. They may hold other visual clues that they are not professionally done. For example, some official artbooks have textured covers that are not widely replicated yet. Studio Ghibli Artbooks will sometimes have these types of covers. So if you know the cover should be textured yet isn't then don't buy it.
It can not be stressed enough in this guide the importance of checking copyright information. Nothing prirated will normally hold the correct copyright info if you look for it and often it will have no copyright info at all. The best way to check is to do a little research. Find out what company actually releases the official product and see if the product you are looking into buying is released by the same one. If it has a different company name then likely it's not the real deal.