Quote:
Originally Posted by Quelle
In the case of a person downloading hundreds or even thousands of books, the act of creating a personal repository of books serves the same purpose for that person as going to the library or bookstore-an opportunity to browse, sample, and explore-not to exploit the creative energies of the author.
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While I agree with you in general that the downloading of books is not significantly impacting the revenues of authors, I don't agree that it is the equivalent of borrowing a book from a library.
In many countries, e.g. the UK, library loans are tracked and authors are compensated. Even in the US, library loans affect which books libraries decide to buy, so a book which is borrowed frequently may be purchased again by the same library (the first copy may wear out, or in the case of large libraries and very popular books, the library may decide to keep more than one copy in holdings), may be recommended to other libraries, or (most frequently) more books by that author may be purchased by the library. These are often "Library Editions" which have higher quality bindings and are more expensive, and generate more revenue for the author.
In contrast, no one (that I know of) is tracking torrents and making purchase decisions based on which books are downloaded most frequently. So the cases are not really equivalent.
Downloading books is also not the same as buying used books, as the number of copies of used books are limited, so the impact on the author's potential revenue is limited. However, I would like to see vendors of commercial ebooks use the used book market as a pricing model, because I think it would be a reasonable approach to factoring in the lack of resale value of ebooks.