[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

People go to pirate sites because its easy and it doesn't cost them anything. Make it hard to get to the pirate sites (IOW, ENFORCE the law) and people will pay for things they want to enjoy.

Do you have evidence for this?

75% of readers, before ebooks, never contributed to the authors' revenue stream. What makes you think that "get rid of pirate ebooks" will turn those people into ebook customers instead of RSS feed readers? What makes you think they'll buy ebooks from those authors instead of downloading freebies from someone else?

If "free" is what's important to them, no amount of anti-piracy measures will affect them. If they were looking for a particular book, or books by a particular author, and free is not an option--they'll still compare price & convenience against other forms of entertainment.

If you make it easy to pirate or casually share, people will do that a lot.

Which is why Baen went bankrupt about 8 years ago. Oh, wait ...

Let's also squelch the dumbest argument, trotted out repeatedly in these discussions-that if anti-piracy measures don't work perfectly to stop ALL piracy, they shouldn't be attempted at all. Let's try that argument on for size with other crimes.

Laws against murder haven't stopped all murders, so let's do away with homicide laws
Locks don't stop all burglaries, so let's dispense with locks
Anti-fraud laws haven't stopped all fraud, so let's stop enforcing anti-fraud laws.

Anti-piracy measures are a fine thing even if they're not 100% effective. DRM is not. DRM is like a lock on my home that the builder gets to keep. The builder doesn't have the right to attempt to prevent burglary of my home.

The issue isn't that "publishers shouldn't try to stop piracy." The issue is that publishers are ignoring *many* ways to gain customers in favor of "anti-piracy" measures.

We're kinda baffled, because there's no "# of pirates prevented" line on authors' royalty statements. And publishers haven't shown any ability to convert former pirates into paying customers, instead of either someone else's leeches, or someone else's paying customers.

If they were farmers, they'd be building elaborate scarecrows and electrified fences and developing toxic bug sprays to stop predators from eating their crops... and not bothering to water the plants.

They're trying VERY VERY HARD to prevent unauthorized readers, and not putting much effort at all into gaining new customers. They're not willing to proofread their releases; they won't release complete sets of backlist series; they won't allow worldwide sales; they require sometimes-complex software hassles to read the books; they don't price books where customer expectations are.

And they're welcome to keep doing all that... I'll keep buying from Smashwords. (Where the books are often not proofread, but at least I'm not paying $10 for something riddled with OCR errors and 4 em epub margins. For $2, I'm much more tolerant of lack of editing, as long as it doesn't throw me out of the book.)

If the mainstream "big six" publishers want to survive, they'll need to figure out to get customers, not how to "stop pirates." They don't make money stopping pirates.