Quote:
Originally Posted by KevinH
Pirates never have and never will pay for their ebooks/music/software and therefore can not be counted as lost sales at all.
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Not strictly true. The only independent research that has ever been carried out concluded that people who download unauthorised content actually spend more money on legitimate content than people who don't download. This suggests to me that most of the people downloading are actually just sampling or treating the internet like a giant global library and "borrowing" books that they don't value highly enough to buy.
Of course that won't be all of them, there will be a relatively high percentage of them that never buy anything, but most of those are just collecting files for the sake of collecting them. There is absolutely no way of making money from those people, except maybe through advertising revenue placed within your work, so there is no point worrying about them. Very little of what they download will ever be read anyway.
But to cut off all the samplers and borrowers out of spite just because they are getting something for free? That's just plain silly. Those people have the potential to become your best customers, but if you cut them off they will just download someone else's work instead. How do you benefit from that?
Writers (and other content producers) are already benefitting significantly from the lack of any second hand market for digital files. The unauthorised ebook market is nowhere near as large as the second hand book market, and never will be. Price ebooks at the level of a second hand paperback (after a reasonable period of time at full price if you must), and piracy will diminish to the point where it may as well not exist.