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Originally Posted by bhartman36
Even in the small circles I roll in, I've heard of two authors (one a family member) who've been blindsided by having their books appear on multiple pirate websites.
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Do they have any evidence that those books cut into their sales numbers? Have they compared sales of books that they found pirated vs those they didn't, and found the ones that weren't pirated were selling better?
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Publishers and authors will feel better about releasing DRM-free material when piracy subsides,
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It's not going to happen. Just not. Files are *never* going to be harder to copy than they are right now. Never going to be harder to share. Everyone who wants to make a living producing digitizable creative content (whether or not they release a legit digital version) is going to need to figure out how to deal with unauthorized copies.
The top "pirates" of digital music are *also* the top buyers of it. The number of people buying used paperbacks and scanning them to release them as ebooks is very, very tiny ... most unauthorized ebooks are cracked commercial versions--which means *someone* bought that file.
If authors & publishers really want to cut down on piracy, they need to figure out a way for that buyer to legitimately share the book with several friends, instead of saying that "sharing with 5 random friends is the same, legally, as sharing with 500 strangers."
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I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think immediately removing all DRM and calling piracy a boogeyman is it.
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Neither is insisting that every file downloaded is a lost sale.