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Originally Posted by CommonReader
I don't know about the US but in Germany the industry seems to have failed completely to establish the sense of copyright infringement = stealing in the population at large. It rather seems to be something like a parking violation. You don't announce to the public that you are parking illegally but it doesn't particularly affect your social standing if people know that you are doing so. People who would never accept to be given a DVD that was stolen from a shop won't mind to be given the movie on that DVD as a data file. Given that you can put a lifetime's worth of reading on a single SD card I don't see how the industry has any realistic chance to get this under control.
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You can also fit a lifetime's reading into a second hand book shop, but that never stopped people from buying new books. It hasn't always been, but for a long time now book publishing has been about making short term profits in the first few months of publication. After that, unless it's stilll selling well it's dropped so that they can concentrate on the next big thing.
Publishers have more to fear from writers thinking they aren't necessary to bring a book to market than they have from piracy. Playing on a writer's natural fear of piracy, exagerating its detrimental effect, and then offering a service to stamp it out, would be a good additional service for a publisher to provide to writers. The promise of all those extra millions of sales would make them think it was definitely worth giving the publisher 70% or more of their income for uploading the ebook to Amazon, etc. (I know they do other things as well.)