Quote:
Originally Posted by dsvick
The answer to the main question is easy, I come down on the "piracy is bad" side. It is stealing, people are taking something that they did not pay for - whether they read it or not, intend to pay for it later or not, or are doing it to teach someone a lesson, it is still wrong.
With all that being said however, there is no way to measure, unfortunately, how much piracy impacts sales. The only way to answer this would be poll a sizable percentage of pirates and find out why they got the pirated version and what they intend to do with it. For every answer you get that is "I took it because it was there" that is not a lost sale, however every
, or similar answer, is a lost sale.
I'm not sure what the answer is, or even if there is one, until then though you have every right to continue to protect your sales by issuing take down notices.
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It is. And that is the sad part of piracy. But what makes it more so is that for a very small investment on my part, I can skip dark-net downloads completely, take my very capable 5MP webcam and a $0.50 paperback and create my own version in just a few short hours - all without putting a dime in the author's pocket. And I recoup much of the dead-tree investment simply by trading it back to the used-book store. (10%-25% of cover price in store credit around here) Or, if I want to do so, I can just check the book out from my local library and accomplish the same thing. Yet another failure to put money in the author's pocket. But who's to blame, the 'pirate' who just wants to have an electronic version of the novel, or the publisher for failing to follow through with digitizing the backlists???
And I note that in the U.S. there's no real legal backlash against copying for personal use. Sure, it's against the law to *sell* that digital copy, but as I'm only seeking an e-book for personal use...
Again, in a perfect world, all backlist titles would be rapidly digitized and marketed by the publishers - for a reasonable price. Too bad the publishers refuse to work towards making this a 'perfect world'.
Derek