Quote:
Originally Posted by Sil_liS
I think that the point is not whether the book gets pirated or not, but if it still sells after it is pirated.
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That is the chicken and the egg. And it is not even that simple. There is a part of the pirates that will never have any part in paying. There is also people that do pay for pbooks and/or ebooks that will never even consider pirating a book. As a book grows in sales/pupularity both of those subsets will increase in number, maybe not percentage wise. Hard to judge how much actually gets pirated at any given time and how much of lost sales would not have been lost if there was no pirate version. And how much of pirating does lead to sales - and you cannot claim that pirating NEVER creates a sale.
If everybody that buys books would also pirate books then the equation would be a lot simpler to solve. Then you could analyze if pirating (w/o having anything to sell yet) would lead to more or less sales later on when it does become available for sale. But that is not the case, and IMHO will never be the case.