Quote:
Originally Posted by tirsales
Why? After all a given author does (normally) not write a single book, many books are available in different formats (e.g. audio book), etc
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I'm not saying there's a 1:1 relationship. I'm saying ebooks are a small portion of pbooks right now, and the impact of piracy changes with the shift to ebooks.
Let's say 99% of a book's sales are pbooks and 1% are ebooks. People who pirate ebooks are ebook readers; they often probably wouldn't buy the pbook reader anyway. The impact of ebook piracy is low to overall sales.
If you're a traditional pbook reader, the fact you can get an pirated ebook for free is irrelevant to you. You don't own an ebook reader, or don't want to read books on your PC. You're not even used to the idea of ebooks yet. You like the pbook, like most of today's readers.
As more pbook readers try and like ebooks, they'll shift from buying pbooks to buying ebooks. Okay, so every ebook sale is a lost pbook sale, but as long as people are making their margins everyone is happy.
But now you have a lot more readers willing to read ebooks. And maybe they think ebooks shouldn't cost as much as pbooks, or they resent the DRM (you'll find many of them here). They'll also become more savvy to the nature of ebooks. And a lot more of them will learn that they can just get pirated ebooks for free. After all, they paid $300 for their reader!
So as pbook sales shift to ebook sales, a growing percentage is "lost' due to ebook piracy. Yes, free ebooks, unrestrictive DRM, etc. help encourage sales in other ways. But that works for Baen whilst piracy is relatively low. Let's see how it works when piracy is relatively high. It's like comparing the impact of piracy in the music industry in 1990 vs 2000. Ebooks are still at the 1990 stage.