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J.S. Wolf said:
I know this has probably been said over and over, but do we have any sort of evidence that a download eBook from the darknet would have been purchased if it was not downloaded? (endquote)
Would you consider a free product from a different publisher and website at least analogous to pirated content?
Case: Mercedes Lackey. She publishes fantasy through at least three different publishers, and has a sizeable back list. Her first book is "The Arrows of the Queen". It had slow but stable residual royalties from DAW books. Then, on BAEN books, a completely DIFFERENT publisher and website, she allowed her collection "Werehunter" (which incidentally is mostly SF instead of Fantasy) to be included in the Baen Free library.
During this time she continued to publish new work, but no other content was included in the Free Library, although some of it was added after that first year.
One year after "Werehunter" was posted, royalties for "Arrows" TRIPLED, completely through backlist sales (no ebook available, the paperback was still in print but had not been re-released.) Other books in her back list had smaller increases. She said (online) that she thought this was evidence that people were seeing her work for the first time, and then looking for "what else she had written", and trying the first book.
This appears to me to be exactly analogous to a pirated work generating sales.
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