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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
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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As I said, I don't think it's realistic to compare one book to another, necessarily. The only thing you can say for sure is that someone who downloads from a pirate site didn't buy that given book in that given format. (I'm willing to concede that they may have bought the book in EPUB format rather than MOBI, for example, but there's no way to know for sure.) It might be interesting to do a survey and discover which books don't overlap between formats. I would suspect that those would be at the
highest risk of being pirated, but someone could be pirating even
with access to the format they need, if they just don't want to pay the price asked.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
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.
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The bar is fairly high for books that are not digital to begin with. One way the publishers could decide to deal with piracy is a simple scorched earth policy, where they stop releasing digital books. There will certainly always be
some people willing to make digital copies of popular works, but the ebook market as we now know it (which, let's face it, isn't that old) would dry up eventually.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
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.
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As has been talked about here before, people who read are becoming fewer and farther between. That means that publishers are fighting for a portion of an ever smaller pie. If the ebook industry gets Napstered, professional authorship will die. Who'll be able to afford to write for a living when even their modest royalties are stolen?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
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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It shouldn't be too difficult to have a list of people that a reader designates as "book buddies". But that still leaves us with DRM. I just don't see any way of eliminating DRM entirely, because books aren't like music. With the exception of reference books (and maybe some others that I can't think of at 2AM
), people read a book, and they're done with it. It's not like a song or album you want to play over and over (although of course there are exceptions). That's why publishers want a time limit on lending. If you give someone all the time in the world to read a book, you just lost a sale. I expect the lending scheme to be improved to allow lending of a book more than once, but I wouldn't expect the time allotted for the lending to change a great deal.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Neither is insisting that every file downloaded is a lost sale.
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How is it
not? You can make a reasonable argument that a person who downloads one song wouldn't necessarily have bought the album, but you can't make that argument with an ebook, because they're not sold by chapter. Someone who downloads a book wants it for
all the content.
The most you'd be able to say in the pirate's favor is that
maybe the book never came out in a format their reader could use. But that's definitely not a slam dunk. And it's still a lost sale, because the buyer could've had the book in paper format.
That's the real risk here: that publishers will simply go back to paper because digital is too unmanageable. At least with paper, they'd know their margins, and they'd have less risk of piracy, plus the security of knowing that analog books can only be shared one at a time.