02-12-2009, 08:57 PM | #1 | |
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Hard data on ebook piracy versus sales
Saw this on Boing Boing today... thought it was interesting...
small excerpt: Quote:
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02-13-2009, 02:51 AM | #2 |
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I am afraid not even my engineering degree helps me understand that data set!
Free ebooks are great. Ask Baen, they entice(for good reason) people into buying ongoing series by offering a pretty good selection of free ebooks online. Couple that with extremely competitive pricing (US$6 per book) and it is a winner all round Their sales model works for me and I would be sure others as well! |
02-16-2009, 04:54 AM | #3 |
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Edit.
Last edited by dadioflex; 12-16-2010 at 04:11 AM. |
02-16-2009, 06:35 AM | #4 |
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Um, yes, but when most people read on e-ink devices the volume will be up and the price lower, right? Of cause, it will probably be years, and years and years before MOST people read on e-ink devices.
Clara |
02-16-2009, 10:06 AM | #5 |
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Since they make money on the ebook side now, I'm not sure what would make their approach less successful when more people are reading digitally.
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02-16-2009, 11:11 AM | #6 |
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I haven't listened to the audio, but the slides talk about availability of pirated copies in terms of seeds and leechers, which implies that they're only looking at Bittorrent, which may not be a very good measure of availability. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but my impression is that most e-book piracy revolves around Usenet and IRC, plus there is (was?) the massive publicly-accessible FTP server run by someone in the Usenet e-book piracy community. OTOH, piracy via those mechanisms is obviously much harder to measure.
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02-16-2009, 11:20 AM | #7 |
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who would want a pirated book, aren't most of them scanned images like with home scanners and such. Quality must be crappy
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02-16-2009, 11:24 AM | #8 | |
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I think ebooks are relatively safe from piracy.
the problem is that downloading a pack of 700 MB,can easily get you 700 books,compared to only 1 movie. Quote:
There's just no way of telling. |
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02-16-2009, 11:29 AM | #9 | |
Karmaniac
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Quote:
Their layout is very bad; and seldom you'll find good books online. I have to say I do not own illegal ebooks; and all the ebooks I own I have purchased a pbook of;or are under Public Domain. I'm a bit dissapointed in the ebook sector on bittorrent. It makes more sense to format your own books from scratch then download them. Perhaps some users upload books you can download from mobileread (Public Domain books),but I haven't seen any yet. Statistics like this are good into scanning the market to see if it's a good thing to manufacture devices that support open formats like txt,pdf,html, chm, etc... |
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02-16-2009, 12:46 PM | #10 |
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what?
Last edited by Blackguard; 02-22-2010 at 08:51 PM. |
04-24-2009, 10:44 AM | #11 |
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Actually, given that some of the people doing it will be vastly more experienced at this sort of thing than current publishers lots will be better.
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04-24-2009, 11:04 AM | #12 | |
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Quote:
Every package contains covers, wikipedia extracts and a preview of next installments. And, of course, a link to the bookstore who sells the printed version of it. They're better formatted than the average BoB book, multiformat, DRM free and available. OTOH the "legit" offer consists of about 0 titles...... Can you figure what Italian e-book reader owners read? Wrong! We just read PG books (liberliber.it has got italian books). And those works stay in torrents un-downloaded! |
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04-24-2009, 11:06 AM | #13 | |
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Quote:
So you're accounted for 1.000 theft even if you intended to do just one. |
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04-24-2009, 12:02 PM | #14 | |
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Quote:
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04-24-2009, 12:51 PM | #15 |
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It's good that these things are started to be studied with real data. However, it's way too soon to be drawing many conclusions.
1. As pointed out, they only measured a very small portion of public torrent traffic. They did not measure Demonoid and other sources. 2. They compared sales of certain ebooks after they were offered for free and after appearing on P2P. 3. They have a pretty small sample set: 16 titles, only 8 on P2P. 4. They showed that for the average ebook, sales increased modestly after it was offered for free, and after it was available on bittorrent, and the change in sales did not correlate with how popular a book was prior to being available for free. We're talking average increases of 6.5%. But the range varied on the P2P titles from 18.2% up to 33.1% down. 5. With such a small statistical sample from only one specific genre, it's hard to draw any broad conclusions. It does seem that offering certain titles for free as a promotion for a limited time does help sales in the short term, but the long-term effect of piracy on sales (which such free promotions might facilitate since they provide a package of easily redistributable files without DRM) on those and other books remains unknown. 6. They provide the same cautions as I have when studying this issue: correlation is not cuasation, larger samples may uncover a trend that's not yet visible, and what works today with ebooks may not be true tomorrow due to so many other changing variables. |
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