Quote:
Originally Posted by QuantumIguana
If a book bootlegged and sold, that is lost sales, because that is money that is going to the bootlegger instead of to the author. But a downloaded book doesn't equal a lost sale, you can't assume that the person who downloaded the book would have purchased it, or even that that they read it. Sure, some people would have purchased the book if they couldn't download it, but the actual impact on sales is very hard to calculate. You can't simply multiply the number of downloads times the sale price.
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I agree that bootlegged books cost sales. However, I think a bootlegged sale may in many cases be a potential sale but at a lower price. There would be some purchases from the bootlegger where the buyer was going to buy in any event and just took advantage of the availability at a lower price, and some where the buyer was not prepared to pay one cent more. All that is clear in this case is that there is a market for the book at the lower price.
The situation becomes more complex when bootleggers use a subscription type model. It becomes almost impossible to guess what each subscriber may have purchased except for the bootlegger. I would suggest, however, that it would certainly not be a case that the subscriber would have paid full retail price for every book they downloaded.