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Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
To quote a certain police captain: "Just because you say it with conviction, doesn't make it so!" You don't know how many people pirate files, buy files, pirate only because they couldn't find a legit file, or buy legit because they couldn't find a pirate file. And "most are never read" is NOT the same as "none are ever read." You can't make an absolute statement out of suppositions and estimates.
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You can make assumptions based on available data though. Most of the better known pirate sites will tell you how often something has been downloaded, Amazon give you sales rankings, and some writers give hard sales figures that you can compare with their rankings to get a rough idea of how well other titles are selling.
That they aren't read is simple logic. I read a lot, but I would struggle to read more than about 60 books a year. So when someone downloads 5,000 books one day, 2,000 the next, and so on, it's obvious that less than 0.001% of them get read.
The people who look for unauthorised books by title, you could make an assumption based on the number of people who request specific titles on pirate sites (rather than just "everything by Steven King or every zombie book ever written). Those, if they get them, will have a higher likelihood of being read. But those are the sort of people who would have just bought a second hand paperback anyway, so it's no big loss.