Quote:
Originally Posted by jbcohen
Have you found that as the price of an ebook goes up there are more ebook pirating and conversely as the price of an ebook goes down the attempts to pirate the book goes down?
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As has already been indicated, I don't think anyone has found anything resembling actual useful numbers. The thing with piracy is that it's a lot easier to see what's available than to see what's actually being downloaded. Depending on the site, you can gauge popularity by the numbers that indicate how many are giving a "torrent assist", but that's still not much of an indication. Sometimes people don't reseed (which is happening more often now that the heat is turned up - people are learning how to turn off that option) and others only reseed to support certain items or uploaders.
Even if a site has download stats listed, that's still only one site out of many, and sites ebb and flow in usage (especially if it's a well-known site that's under scrutiny from law enforcement).
And that's just for torrent sites - I'd wager that for ebooks, newsgroups get more traffic, and as those are mostly by paid subscription, you can't just drop by and see if they even list file stats.
It would be nice if we could point to the numbers and say with any certainty that intelligent pricing reduces piracy, but the only people that have those numbers probably won't be volunteering that info any time soon.