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Originally Posted by rhadin
I'm not so sure that piracy = popular. Piracy simply means that one person liked it and made it available. Or that the work was available to be pirated and adding another pirated item to one's list of pirated goods gives one greater stature in the pirate community. Or . . .
My point is that it is a big jump to equate piracy with popular, especially when no one knows how many downloads of pirated books actually lead to the book being read.
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I think this is the fundamental issue. I think a few years ago it was the case (who was trolling USENET downloading every pirated book they could find?) but anymore it's more along the lines of "it's there? I'm grabbing it" whether they'll read it or not. I remember file sharers in the dorms back in the late '90s where some of these kids had hundreds of thousands of MP3s. They were clearly not listening to all (or even most) of them but pirated them anyway. I'm sure there are folks with thousands of pirated books on their computer who will not read a fraction of them.
You can even see some of this mentality evidenced in the Freebies forum on here:
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Yup, it's free on Smashwords, I've had it in my library for a while. If anyone has read it please let us know what you think.
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While the book in question isn't pirated by any stretch, it's still along the lines of "it's free? I'll take it."