MobileRead Forums - View Single Post

ficbot · 07-31-2010, 10:15 PM

I know of no reliable, empirical way to measure. Speaking anecdotally---

1) Most 'pirated' ebooks I have seen were so poorly formatted that it was worth it to me to go and get the 'real' one if I could.

2) My sister and I traded Fictionwise book lists and had about 500 titles between us. Of that lot, there were maybe a dozen books of mutual interest. We just had very different tastes. So the fact that she was *willing* to give me the books did not really matter as I did not want to read most of them

3) Similarly, I wanted to share some public domain stuff with my dad for his new Kobo so I downloaded my entire Calibre library off Dropbox for him. Once he had deleted all the vampire, Star Trek and sci-fi novels, pretty much all that was left was the public domain stuff anyway

So, if people want to read something, my experience has been that they will buy it, read it and be done. Most casual readers do not want to spend massive amounts of time searching iffy websites for badly formatted books when for ten bucks they could get a proper one with much less trouble.

Of course, if you bring in artificial restrictions such as geo-blocking, that's a different story

And of course, there will be the 'download an ISO image of 6 billion ebooks' people who do it just for the sake of it (although as others have pointed out, most of these books never even get read and probably were not 'lost sales' in the sense of 'would the person have bought it otherwise'). I am speaking of the average general reader like my parents who read maybe a dozen books a year and are new to the ebook game. If she wants the book, she's more than willing to buy it. She wants minimum fuss and hassle. She will not spend hours trolling the darknets. She will probably not venture beyond more than one website. Just make it available, let her buy it, and it's all good as far as she is concerned

She *has* asked me to get her some books, and I have obliged. But every title she has asked for has been massively popular (Tom Clancy, Nora Roberts) and our public library has those in ebook. So she can get them for free without resorting to things like torrent sites.

07-31-2010, 10:15 PM	#14
ficbot Wizard Posts: 2,409 Karma: 4132096 Join Date: Sep 2008 Device: Kindle Paperwhite/iOS Kindle App	I know of no reliable, empirical way to measure. Speaking anecdotally--- 1) Most 'pirated' ebooks I have seen were so poorly formatted that it was worth it to me to go and get the 'real' one if I could. 2) My sister and I traded Fictionwise book lists and had about 500 titles between us. Of that lot, there were maybe a dozen books of mutual interest. We just had very different tastes. So the fact that she was willing to give me the books did not really matter as I did not want to read most of them 3) Similarly, I wanted to share some public domain stuff with my dad for his new Kobo so I downloaded my entire Calibre library off Dropbox for him. Once he had deleted all the vampire, Star Trek and sci-fi novels, pretty much all that was left was the public domain stuff anyway So, if people want to read something, my experience has been that they will buy it, read it and be done. Most casual readers do not want to spend massive amounts of time searching iffy websites for badly formatted books when for ten bucks they could get a proper one with much less trouble. Of course, if you bring in artificial restrictions such as geo-blocking, that's a different story And of course, there will be the 'download an ISO image of 6 billion ebooks' people who do it just for the sake of it (although as others have pointed out, most of these books never even get read and probably were not 'lost sales' in the sense of 'would the person have bought it otherwise'). I am speaking of the average general reader like my parents who read maybe a dozen books a year and are new to the ebook game. If she wants the book, she's more than willing to buy it. She wants minimum fuss and hassle. She will not spend hours trolling the darknets. She will probably not venture beyond more than one website. Just make it available, let her buy it, and it's all good as far as she is concerned She has asked me to get her some books, and I have obliged. But every title she has asked for has been massively popular (Tom Clancy, Nora Roberts) and our public library has those in ebook. So she can get them for free without resorting to things like torrent sites.