Quote:
Originally Posted by hildea
That's my main reason. I want authors to keep writing and publishing. If pirating takes too much of their profit, they might not be able or willing to publish more books.
Also, if their income is good enough, more of them might be able to quit their day job and write full time, and that may lead to more good books to read for me.
|
That is (too a large extent) what happened to the Atari and Commodore ecosystems. They were squeezed out of the market by two types of piracy:
One the one hand, owners of the systems were waaayyy too proficient "sharing" software.
On the other, too many people crunched the numbers and figured it was cheaper to buy PC clones and copy software from work than to buy the cheaper hardware and their own software.
John Dvorak once devoted an entire INFOWORLD column on how the PC platform owed its dominance to piracy. He was exaggerating but not much. One of his points was that dominant PC software owed part of its appeal to squeezing out competitors via piracy. That the network effects that made the software desirable because of user familiarity came from both the legal and illegal user bases.
Again, exaggeration, but not totally wrong.
Pirating the works of an author you enjoy can be self defeating...
...unless the author is Patterson or King or one of their peers. And today, what with sales getting spread across much larger catalogs, even they are impacted.
Besides, it's been documented that a lot of sites promising free (shh!) pdf ebooks don't actually deliver the books. But they do deliver drive-by malware and trojans.
It's not just illegal and unethical but also dangerous to your computing health.