Quote:
Originally Posted by mr ploppy
Entertainment industry figures say that 10% of the population downloads unauthorised digital content. A survey on unauthorised downloader habits carried out by the Dutch governent a few weeks ago said that only 5% of downloaders were interested in ebooks.
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Piracy is not going to go away any time soon, clearly. When I was a kid, my father used to play home-made copies of commercial music on his reel-to-reel magnetic tape deck. When I was a teenager, I bought a radio-cassette player and used to record offshore pirate radio. Nowadays our kids copy digital media, plus download who knows what illegally. Yet, artists still record music, make films and so on. The music and movie industries have survived numerous technological changes, and whilst they might not be making the shed-loads of money they were used to, I expect they will survive for at least another generation. Meanwhile, book publishing - like the music and movie industries - is a business, and publishers wouldn't continue for long if they weren't making money, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over their crocodile tears.