Quote:
Originally Posted by PKFFW
Just as people do not take the idea of "every download is a lost sale" seriously because there is no evidence for it, so should the idea that "most/lots of people just like to download for the sake of it and would never buy or read the books" be taken with a grain of salt.
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Oh, sure. Do note an important distinction between 'every download is a lost sale' and 'most/lots/many of people download for the sake of it', though. The first statement is falsifiable - if I can find a single case of a download that didn't result in a lost sale, it's false. The second isn't - no matter how many people I point to and say 'those people are downloading to collect, not to consume' somebody will inevitably say that that number, whatever it is, doesn't qualify as 'much/lots/many'.
But if we phrased it as 'some downloads are lost sales, some downloads are people downloading for the sake of collecting, and we have no empirical evidence of how many people fall into either of those categories' we wouldn't have anything to argue about. And if not for the heat generated by meaningless arguments, the whole series of tubes that powers the Internet would grind to a screaming halt, and
then where would we be?