Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
What realistically is the harm done to the obscure author? If his/her book stays hidden with other few thousand books and never gets read, no lost revenue. And who can realistically read 2000 books without spending years and years of reading (and that is if you read ALOT). So it is just a huge library. If that one obscure author has a real nice cover, or name, or something, it might stand out, get noticed (to that person looking through it), and will get read. And quite possible someone that looked for unknown authors and reads them that are inside thousands of other, possibly already more popular, then that author has a new fan. If you downloaded that huge library for the sole purpose of having different books available (again you cannot read em all anyway) then you might end up buying the, say, 10 books you really liked.
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I agree that there is probably not much harm done to the obscure author either.
I just don't think he will be helped much, even if one in 100,000 people do look at the 1,998 books that came with the books they actually wanted to pirate. Being pirated is just not really a viable way to escape obscurity. And I'm not sure many authors make that specific argument.
Instead, I think the more viable (and more common) argument is that: (1) obscurity is your biggest problem; (2) the best way of overcoming obscurity may be by doing things that make piracy easier (giving books away, selling them cheaply, not using DRM, distributing by torrent); and (3) the exposure you will get will benefit you more than taking significant steps to prevent piracy would.