Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski
You fight piracy with convenience. If you only need to tap a few keys on your Kindle to read the latest John Grisham book right now, then people will pay rather than hunt out a torrent, wait for it to download and then try to figure out how to convert an amateur PDF file to something your machine will read properly.
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The knock-on effect of people getting used to one method or the other for obtaining their books should not be ignored either, just as people can get into the habit of buying their books if they are available the opposite is equally true, if a person ends up having to go off and find the book they want without buying it then you could very easily end up with them doing that for all their books and the overall market is harmed and not just the sales of those few stubborn authors.
The thing that some authors/publishers don't seem to want to accept though is that for some people, no ebook version = a lost sale.
Using myself as an example, the 3 books I was most looking forward too in the last month or so were the latest discworld, the latest in the hhgttg trilogy and the latest wheel of time book.
The first one was out as an ebook and I bought it right away and they might even gain a paperbook sale later as I wouldn't mind getting a signed copy. The hitchhiker book was not initially out as an ebook and as a result I haven't yet bought it because I bought some others I also wanted to read in the meantime, it showed up as a download before an official release so they are going to lose the sales of some people due to that. Finally, there's the latest wheel of time book, not out as an ebook for another year and I do not intend buying the paper version, it's been available as a download for some time and I am sure the ineptness of the publisher is going to cost them a lot of sales overall.