Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
What we don’t have is Napster for ebooks. A widely known, easy available source of pirated ebooks with easy software for locating and downloading the material. I know....there are sites...but they are constantly shifting, bing shut down, coming back up. Finding what you want is not Napster friendly.
Were such a site allowed to exist....ebook sales would crater. Book sales would crater. And authors can’t go on the road performing concerts to make money.
You’ll notice that Gaimon hasn’t followed up and made all of his books available for free
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The big difference between music and books is that people have always been use to free music via the radio. Way back when I was a teen, before CD's, people use to record their favorite songs off the radio. People use to bootleg recordings from concerts. It was very, very common to record cassettes of your favorite album since records were fairly fragile. Giving copies to your friends seemed a logical next step.
When Napster came around, most teens saw it as an extension of that.
Frankly, a Napster for ebooks has the same issue that 3rd party ebook stores have. Getting the books onto the reading devices. Side loading books is the exception rather than the rule. It may be common for people here, but most are use to buying a book and having it automagically show up on their reading device. That's why all the major ebook stores are associate with either physical devices (Kindle, Kobo, Nook) or have apps that run on a tablet (Apple, Amazon, Kobo and B&N).
While there are likely thousands of people who use Calibre, or side load books, it's still a drop in the bucket compared to the over all ebook market.
Of course, we talk of Napster, but Napster didn't really last long and didn't have nearly the impact on Music that you attribute to it. Napster was launched in June of 1999, was shut down in 2001 and went bankrupt in 2002. Piracy isn't what changed the Music industry. What changed the music industry was iTunes and the shift to digital music. People stopped buying albums and started buying songs. You didn't have to buy the album to get the one or two good songs any more. Books and Movies have a very different dynamic.
Actually, if I were to point to a two major changes in the books industry, I would point to the demise of fiction magazines and the rise of audiobooks. The demise of fiction magazines (many of which still exists, but are a shadow of their former self) has come close to gutting the market for short stories. The rise of audiobooks has opened up a new revenue stream for authors and publishers.