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I pirate mostly tv shows. The ones that I can view online, I usually view online, unless they take too long to load. I used to also pirate music, but, honestly, with youtube I don't need to. I don't have a dedicated mp3 player, but I could use my phone. I still buy CDs on impulse, but not very often, and it's usually classical music. As I recall I started to pirate music because if I would listen to a CD too often, it would become scratched and stop working, and not because of the price.
With books it's different. I want to own books, and end up with a house filled with books, like my parents and my grandparents. I think that ebooks just wouldn't have the same feeling. And, of course it's also the shopping experience. Looking at a list of books online doesn't make me want to buy them, while in a book shop I buy on impulse.
The reason why I'm becoming interested in ebooks is because pbooks might become a thing of the past, since if the number of books that are printed decreases, their price will increase, which means that less would be bought, which means less will be printed etc.
And I can see that already. I've been living in the Netherlands for the past two years and I buy books in english, which are printed in the UK. Two years ago, PB books were between 7-10€, now they are 10-13€. A couple of weeks ago I bought a series of 3 books, the first one was printed in 2008 and I paid 9.95€, the next two were printed in 2010 and I paid 11.75€ each. If ebooks follow the same trend, that just means that they will also become more and more expensive.
Now don't get me wrong, I love the books, and I think that they are worth the price, but if there are not enough people that think the same way, it's not going to be worth it for the shops to bring the books in the first place, and I don't see here any ebooks being sold in brick stores yet. And if that happens, guess where I will get my books?
I see in this thread that many think that the solution is for the authors to self publish: the books will be cheaper and anybody in the world could get them. The problem that I see with this is that I don't think that they are going to get them translated to other languages. English isn't my first language, not even my first foreign language. I prefer to read books in english because I like to read in the original language.
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