Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
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.
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Of course it's relevant. The equivalent of a novel isn't a song. It's an
album. The comparison to a song only works if publishers sold chapters. People don't download books illegally to see if they like them. Once they've done the download, they've got the whole
book, so what would the advantage be of them buying it, even if they thought it was the best book ever written?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
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.
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With a freebie, it's different. The person offering it as a freebie
explicitly wants people to download it for free. Maybe those people will like it, and maybe they won't. But the point is that the writer and the people downloading the work have an agreement that the work is free. It's not a lost sale to the writer, because the item wasn't being put up for sale to begin with. Change that equation to one where the writer
doesn't agree, and the whole thing is different. Whether you read the first few pages and delete it, or you read the whole thing through, the fact of the matter is that it's still a lost sale, because it's only by obtaining for free what you would have had to pay for that you know whether you like it or not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
Are these downloads lost sales? I don't think so, and I think most people here would agree with me.
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If it's explicitly a freebie, then no, it's not a lost sale. If it's
not a freebie, then it's a lost sale by definition.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
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.
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Just because someone doesn't go looking for something doesn't mean they wouldn't have bought it if they found it for sale somewhere else. If you pilfer something for free, rather than buying it for the seller's price, that's a lost sale, no matter how you choose to parse it. If you steal a Ferrari, you can't turn around and say, "Well, it's not a lost sale, because I wouldn't have been able to buy it anyway." If you take something someone's selling without paying for it, it's a lost sale. Period.