Quote:
Originally Posted by Anke Wehner
In this blog entry on book piracy, an author points out that booksellers expect about 5% of the print books in their shop to be stolen.
Theft of physical objects and illegal downloads are obviously (well, to me obviously) not really comparable, but I thought it was funny.
That blog entry is pretty interesting and pragmatic, and the writer concludes that piracy has probably a neutral effect. |
Or a slighty positive one. That's actually pretty close to my thoughts on piracy. The file collectors were never going to buy it anyway so there's no point fretting over them. If they don't download your book they will download someone else's instead. Most of them will never read the books they download either.
But even if you want to cut their supply off out of spite you can't do that without also affecting the samplers, who will almost certainly read your book and might even go on to turn into fans directly responsible for extra income.
The best way to think of it is like all those books people are "stealing" from you by buying them second hand on Ebay. You don't get any money from them for that book, but you might for your next, or they might benefit you in other ways. Or they might not. The only certainty is that if they didn't "steal" it none of that could happen because they "stole" someone else's book instead and they are getting the benefits of that "theft" instead of you.
I know which I would rather have.