Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
I think you just stumbled into a reason, I hadn't thought of before, why the Stiefvater experiment worked. Since common perception is of book piracy being a bit unusual, the mass uploading of damaged copies didn't cause quite as much outrage as it would have if music had been similarly messed with.
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But of course the experiment didn't work, as others have pointed out. According to her article:
1. Sales were usually evenly divided between print and ebook sales;
2. The second book in the Series, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, which she referred to as BLLB, sold twice the number of print books as ebooks;
3. An earc was released for BLLB.
3. The Publisher, for some strange reason, cut the print run for the next book to less than half of the print run for BLLB.
4. The print run for the final book sold out in 2 days. Sales were again evenly divided between print books and ebooks.
It is unclear whether her anti-piracy efforts had any effect at all. I suspect not making an earc available for the final ebook did help. As discussed in a number of posts, when something is not available through legitimate means but pirate versions are available, some fans will do just about anything to get the book. I doubt the fake ebook posting had any meaningful effect at all. A much smaller print run was sold out quickly, and ebook sales were back in sync, but not in volume, with print sales of less than half the previous book. This experiment seems to tell us nothing except perhaps that earcs are not good ideas.
On a more minor and perplexing note, it seems both the author and her brother were obsessed with pdf, a format that I and many others avoid like the plague for reading books. Many vendors no longer even offer this format. Do publishers offer earcs only as pdf's? Are there groups online who prefer this format for ebooks?