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Originally Posted by bhartman36
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?
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.
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.
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.
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I think the problem here is that you and I have a fundamentally different understanding of a lost sale.
By my definition, a lost sale only exists when there would otherwise have been a sale to lose. So, since not all illegal down-loaders would have bought the book, not all illegal downloads are lost sales.
Human nature is human nature. When people are presented with a large amount of "free" stuff, they generally follow the same pattern of behavior whether the product is legally available or not. If something is available for "free," people are more likely to take it than if it has a price.
Every instance of theft is not automatically a lost sale and neither is every illegal download. Some are, some aren't. We're never going to know the exact breakdown, but arguing that all illegal downloads are lost sales is as foolish as arguing that none are.
Piracy impacts every industry's bottom line - but multiplying the number of downloads by the sale price isn't the way to calculate that impact. This is the real world where things are more complicated than that.