Originally Posted by Worldwalker

If piracy really harmed ebook sales, Baen Books would be out of business. They not only don't weep and wail about "theft", they have a huge list of electronic copies of some of their finest books available on their website, in many handy formats, that they encourage you to download and share with everyone you know. They pack CD-ROMs in the back of some of their books (not sure if they still do) with more of the same, and again, with an exhortation to copy the CD and give it to everyone. And it pays. By and large, people want to feel virtuous, and if they can get a good product, a product that fills their needs, at a fair price, from someone they respect, and with warm fuzzy feelings attached, they'll buy it. Aside from the substantial cubic footage of dead-trees books I've bought, and continue to buy, from Baen, I shelled out about sixty bucks a couple of weeks ago for another batch of ebooks. They deal fairly with me, and they give me a good product for a good price, so why shouldn't I?

(by the way, I should point out that all of my ebooks are either legitimately free, such as the BFL and PG, or properly paid for; I'm discussing the reasons for piracy in hypothetical, not personal, terms)

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Something else to consider: Remember the early days of the video rental industry, when the studios tried hard to shut the stores down because they feared rentals were cutting into the sales of their $50+ videotapes to the handful of people who had players? Yeah, about that ... now DVDs sell for $10-$20, there's a Blockbuster on every corner, I don't know anyone including my elderly mother who doesn't own a DVD player of some sort ... and movies can make more off of DVD sales than they do at the box office. Everyone buys them. They found a price point that makes them cheap enough to buy to make it worthwhile to buy the necessary hardware, and with said hardware being widespread, there's a huge market for the DVDs. So instead of where the video industry started, with a tiny handful of people paying $200 in today's dollars for each movie, they have practically everyone on the planet paying $10 each for zillions of movies.

Originally Posted by JaneFancher

Ahhhh...poor Harlan. (joke, guys, joke) You know, in person, he's one of my favorite convention people and he's extremely smart. But he is a bit of a pit bull when it comes to his legal rights.

But there ya go. What I've got to do is go post all my stuff to pirate sites (badly scanned versions, of course) then post that the pretty and legit copies are available at CC!

Whole new ad campaign! (where's my pirate hat?) Arrr!

Yes! I knew there had to be one.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Heh. Post non-OCRd scans in PDF form, with some skewed & slightly cut-off pages, scanned flatbed so the middle between the pages has that awful dark line that covers the edges of the words near the center.

Attach a letter-sized PDF page to the beginning--"Here's Jane Fancher's book so you don't have to go to closed-circle.net and buy the fancy ePub & Mobi and other ebook versions for $5. Save five whole dollars by reading this version!"

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

It tends to make people pirate them even more. It's become known as the Harlan Ellison effect. Before he sued a fan over some book that had been out of print for 20 years there wasn't much of his stuff available, now all of it is. People upload them all on a regular basis just to annoy him.