Quote:
Originally Posted by bhartman36
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.
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No, because it was only downloaded *because* it was free. If it wasn't free it wouldn't have been downloaded.
There are lots of books on Amazon that might interest me, but I'll never know, because I don't want to pay $10 for them. If one drops to $2, I might buy it to see if I like it. That sale at $2 is
not a lost sale at $10, because I wouldn't buy it at $10.
(This has nothing to do with whether it is legally/illegally available for free, or the morality of obtaining it, just that the desire of someone to have something for no cost does not translate to the desire of that person to have it for non-zero cost)