Quote:
Originally Posted by bhartman36
Digital files are a lot different, because they can be copied indefinitely and distributed much more widely. This differs from libraries in that a) libraries only lend out one book to one person at a time, and b) you make a deal to bring the book back after your designated time. You're absolutely right that with a paper book, you have the right of resale, and I think an e-book should be no different. But that still involves DRM to make sure that you don't retain a copy after you sell it.
E-books are also different in that, as I said, they're not sold piecemeal. If someone downloads an e-book, they're downloading the whole e-book, unless the supplier offers free samples. Thus, there's no such thing as a person downloading an e-book that wouldn't have had to either buy it outright in digital form or borrow it from a library as paper (and libraries, in case you're wondering, already pay premiums specifically designed to compensate publishers for the lost income).
E-books are in a rather precarious position right now. They don't want what happened to the music industry because of piracy to happen to them. Luckily, e-readers today are better designed than the MP3 players were in the Napster age. The distribution is more sophisticated. But the industry needs to settle on a format so that one format can be read across devices. If I had to guess today, I'd say that format would probably be AZW/Topaz, because Amazon seems to be dominating the market (at least, here in the U.S.).
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The fact that a novel is a unit, just like a song, has no bearing on whether every illegal/unsanctioned download is a lost sale or not. It's irrelevant to the question.
If you take a look at the "Deals, Freebies, and Resources" forum, you will find that a lot of people treat free downloads as being more like picking a book up off the shelf in a store than buying it. They download it on the chance they might like it, may or may not try a few pages, and only sometimes read it. Many of those people say they would not have bought the book had it not been free.
Are these downloads lost sales? I don't think so, and I think most people here would agree with me.
Why then would anyone think that pirate downloaders would behave any differently? They download books that catch their eye when they browse the eye-patch version of "Deals, Freebies and Resources." Sometimes they read them, sometimes they don't.
The only time I would call it a lost sale would be if the person deliberately goes looking for that particular book to download,
and they would have bought it if they could not have found it illegally.
Otherwise, they're just picking it up off the shelf on the chance they might like it.
I'm not justifying the behavior, but it's nowhere near accurate to say that every download is a lost sale.
You can't lose sales from someone who wasn't going to buy the product anyway.