Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
That is not true. That is like saying that not buying a book is stealing a livelihood. Since most of the downloading is done of thing that was not going to be bought in the first case you cannot equate one download with a lost sale.
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With respect, I have to disagree. In the case of the person simply not buying or otherwise reading a legal copy of the book, the person not doing the buying gains no benefit from the book so it is only fair that the author does not gain any profit from them. On the other hand, if someone reads a book, the author should have a chance to benefit, even if it is in a small way.
Authors gain their livelihood from the readers of a book, not the non-readers of said book. Lets, for the moment, go back 20 years before ebooks were common; Almost all books in the United States and Europe were read on copies that were legally purchased either by private individuals or public libraries. Even if many people read them from the library, more copies were sold since the library would need more copies for their patrons. Now lets get back to 2008; it is now possible for the number of readers of a book to bear no relationship to the number of legally sold copies of said book.
Now you make the argument that a download does not equate to a lost sale. In this you are almost certainly correct. A certain number of downloaders would never have purchased the product. If they could not have downloaded it for free, they would never have purchased it. That being said, some of the downloaders would in fact have purchased the book. If even one in ten would have purchased the book, if 100,000 downloaded the work, that is a loss of 10,000 sales. Thats potentially tens of thousands of dollars taken from the publisher and the author who collectively have done all the work of bringing the book to market.
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Bill