[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by tompe

I think that nearly all that is downloaded are collections. In volume at least it totally dominates.

You may well be right. I haven't tried to analyze it.

You objected to the claim that downloaders does not notice that they have a book. And if you are not reading the books why would you know which books you have if you have downloaded thousands of books? I saw one collection with more than 16000 books. Why do you think that people that have downloaded that collection know every book they have on their computer?

I don't, but I repeat, "So what?" The question is whether such downloads take actual sales away from an author. If a person isn't even aware he downloaded a book, it hardly counts as a lost sale. A sale is lost if the downloader reads reads the downloaded book instead of actually buying a copy. That's hardly the case in a downloaded collection where the downloader isn't even aware of what all the books are.

You claimed it was just a distribution method. Claims that are wrong need to be corrected. How it matters is another question that I did not take up. But of course it matters since if you describe something wrongly you cannot analyse and build theories of how things works and will work in the future.

It is just a distribution method. The fact that a sub-culture with associated attitudes and practices has grown up around it is a separate, though relevant, issue. Not everyone is a part of that culture or shares those attitudes, even if they do use P2P software.

For instance, I use Bit Torrent for the purpose it was designed for: to minimize the load on servers when files are distributed by distributing the upload and download activities as well. It's just the thing for various open source projects. I don't use it to download ebooks. I have more than I have time to read now, and while I'm a pack rat and collector, I collect things I specifically want to read, and don't grab things just to have them. I know what's in my collection.
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Dennis