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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Here's my unsolicited advice to authors and publishers. For an author's first book, don't worry about piracy. But to reduce piracy against a publisher's successful authors, hire a few white hat hackers to deliberately upload damaged copies. Sometimes they can repeat chapters. Sometimes, skip pages. Randomly change the names of secondary characters. Some things, like adding insults into the faked books, should be off limits. But generally let a small anti-piracy staff use their imaginations to make the pirate reader's experience one of risked frustration..
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They can't do this or the rights holder loses the right to sue. Essentially, their copyright becomes unenforceable because they are putting forth fake copies themselves. This came up back in the 90s involving a role playing game (wasn't D&D, but I can't remember which one).
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
What about music and movies? Ethical hacking to combat piracy won't work well with them because people listen to a song a great many times, and, generally, watch movies multiple times. So the relative cost of listening or watching once, to see if the download is genuine, is small. Flooding pirate sites with fakes should be uniquely effective with books because re-reading is so much less common than re-listening.
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I'm thinking, based on the studies published in recent years, that people who listen to a song a great many times or a movie are the ones most likely to PURCHASE that song or movie because they want the real deal. A CD quality song is far superior to an MP3. An HD or DVD movie is so much easier to rip 3 years down the road when you can no longer get that movie on the torrenting sites and/or want to share the movie with your parents. Things disappear because storage space isn't endless and people stop seeding. Same thing goes with books, IMHO. If you really enjoy a book, even if you got a pirated copy originally, you are more likely to buy that book just to have your personal copy. Heck, most people get it in paper form then. Hey, I have done the same with library books/audios for years - after enjoying the library one, went out and bought the commercial version.
As to the original author, interesting experiment, but it is just as likely that given the opportunity to read the first four chapters, she also attracted some new readers as well as got back some readers who were disappointed with the series earlier, so didn't bother to buy book 3. Audible found they substantially increased sales by giving those 3-4 minute snippets of books so people could decide if they liked the reader, the tone of the book, etc. I noticed you can get larger samples of many ebooks now - I'm sure this affects sales as well.