Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
This is evidence for pirates preferring the EPUB format. Or maybe evidence for pirates not preferring Kindles. The side-loading is mostly for pirated material" theory is still sketchy at best.
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I'm into figures.
Let's play statistics:
My "test group" of about 10 guys easily has 150.000 eBooks amongst them.
How many does the "honest" reader have?
200 on average?
This would need 750 (!!) honest sideloaders to make up for the same number of books.
Of course my test group will have lots of doubles, but so do the honest sideloaders. Probably even more so. The more people, the more likely to find Harry Potter and other high runners.
So, if we take the number of books as the base of comparison, the hoarders/pirates probably outweigh the honest sidelaoders.
Instead, we could use number of users as base of comparison.
Definitely a more favorable (towards honesty) picture.
I know lots of people, who wouldn't even sideload, not to mention strip from DRM. They buy on the reader, not even on the PC and that's it.
Is this the majority of users?
I still dare say: If someone sideloads (tens of) thousands of eBooks, it's most likely (at least partially) pirated content. Yes, there's HarryT with his collection of 6.000+ legally obtained books. Yes, there's the occasional Gutenberg project collector.
But are there dozens of them for each pirate, to outweigh their tens of thousands of pirated books?
I dare say as well: Pirates most likely sideload. Would someone load (tens of) thousands of books over the cloud, directly on the reader? Or will most of them batch-download on the PC and then sideload?
So, in this case, question would be about ratio between pirates and honest sideloaders.
I hope, pirates are an insignificant minority. Certainly not the 90%+ I see in my "test group". But probably not that small either. And bigger amongst sideloaders, than in other groups...
That's what I would have liked to quantify. But since the regulations in MR wouldn't allow statements about illegal activities, most pirates wouldn't openly admit it and MR of course should have a better quota than the general public, it only can be a positive picture...