Quote:
Originally Posted by alecE
It's obviously very difficult/impossible to come to any accurate figure for the claimed lost sales due to ebook piracy.
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It'd be difficult to be definitive, but not impossible to put together some useful statistics.
1) Start with a list of 20 books of comparable print sales, in groups. Maybe 5 bestsellers, 10 midlist, 5 backlist available only as mmpb.
2) Note which have legit ebooks available. (Ideally, you want about half yes, half no.)
3) Go looking on torrents & file-exchange services for these books. This is the hard part... most mainstream businesses have no idea how to find the sites that Google doesn't turn up, and no patience for building the relationships it takes to get access to the more hidden places. But even public-search torrents & upload sites would be useful.
4) Track downloads/torrent seeding activity for 6 months. Compare to book sales.
5) Compare to comparable print books that have no easily-findable ebook version.
It wouldn't be definitive, and getting really useful statistics would probably take studying a hundred or so titles and some real consideration of what numbers to compare.
The problem with that method is that it's likely to discover that pirate ebooks have either no effect on sales, or a small positive effect on sales. And publishers don't want to deal with free downloads as word-of-mouth advertising; they want to insist "Reading for free! That's stealing!" ... and very carefully never compare torrent downloading to buying books at a rummage sale for $4/bagful.