Quote:
Originally Posted by mr ploppy
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.
|
The anecdotal pirate who downloads thousands of books and reads none (the hoarding pirate) is
not the typical pirate... therein lies the fallacy. The typical pirate downloads what titles they want to read, or if they download a bulk of titles, it is to get the few titles they actually want to read. These are the same people who will buy a title if it is not readily available on pirate sites, but is available conveniently or reasonably priced from legit sites.
The hoarding pirate is still indirectly connected to one-off downloaders, in that the hoarding pirate often makes their collection of downloads available to others who seek a book ("You're looking for
Worldfarm One? I've got that one... here you go, no need to buy it."). These file distributions are often person-to-person, so they won't show up on anyone's server records.
And finally, any loss is a loss. Trying to reason it down to a low percentage doesn't alter the fact that an author is losing a sale, and that is significant even if it's just one.