[rixte]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Another article about this, this time by The Guardian: 'We're told to be grateful we even have readers': pirated ebooks threaten the future of book series

Even though I quibbled with the author's methods, I can see that piracy can be one of the factors impacting future books in a series. On the other hand, author Jeremy Robinson also mentioned that he will stop writing series, and piracy wasn't the problem.

The comments on that first one were full of "this is why there should only be physical books, no more ebooks" solutions

I still think the Maggie S. argument is 100% flawed and doesn't prove what she thinks it proves.

What is most frustrating about these articles is that very thing - I want to see proof and most of the actual statistics and proof lean toward the piracy doesn't have a significant impact. And then we get authors like this one "Lam said that she had a trilogy cancelled through her first publisher three weeks after book two came out. “That’s an instance where if even a couple hundred had pirated instead of buying, it had repercussions. Long-term, that publisher went bankrupt and I re-sold it to my new publisher, but it was still a challenge at the time. Not everyone gets a second chance.”"

... and it's like, ok, but where's the proof that your book was even PIRATED? Isn't it more likely that nobody read it, pirated or not?

(That's backed up by the fact that I went to goodreads and looked at the trilogy she had under her name, the first book had 2312 ratings and the second had only 825 ratings. That's not piracy - that's only 1/3 of the people reading the second book as the first. And they were published in 2013 and 2014, so it's not a matter of not enough time for the reviews to catch up.)

Which, again, may not be the fault of the book itself ... they all look like they got good reviews ... but of the marketing by the publishing firm or the timing on release where it got swallowed up by something else that came out at the same time or whatever (I'd certainly never heard of the book before and it looks like one I'd be interested in). There's just nothing in there that makes me believe that a book that was ignored/forgotten in the legit publishing world was secretly a hit in the underground piracy world and 'but for the piracy of the pirates' would have gone on to commercial success. It just doesn't work like that.