Quote:
Originally Posted by Raphi'Elohim
It looks like it is based in China and I think the Russians are in on it too. The Chinese would theoretically have a political motive to weaken the American economy this way as $300 million is significant.
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US trade in 2016 (the latest numbers on Wiki....) was almost $5 trillion. $300 million is a drop in the bucket.
And usually when book companies are talking about losses, they're estimating by the number of downloads. That's legit, from their point of view, but they didn't actually lose that amount in sales. The vast majority of pirates are not selective, they're downloading ebooks en masse and aren't reading most of them. They certainly would not be buying all of those books if downloads weren't available. The actual loss to the book industry is a lot less than the $300 million.
None of that, of course, makes piracy any more right (or moral?).