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Originally Posted by Hamlet53
Hey, if authors and/or publishers want to put their material out there for free download because they think it will actually increase their sales and income good on them. My problem is with book pirates that presume the same right.
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I'm not going into the morality of it; I'm just addressing the thread topic: "Is piracy likely to harm ebook sales?"
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Maybe you haven't walked around your neighborhood recently. Blockbusters are disappearing like the American buffalo; victims of businesses like NetFlix, cheap prices to just purchase DVDs, and pirate sharing on torrent sites. I'll not try to argue the relative impact of the three.
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My local Blockbuster is doing fine. Though I'll have to admit, they've been doing without my business for a few years.
Partly it's the cost issue: when I can own a movie for life for what it would cost me to rent it twice, I'm more likely to go the purchase route. Another part is the selection: They have several zillion copies of the latest releases, but the stuff I really want to watch? If they ever had it, it went on the "pre-viewed" table (oh, how I hate those "pre-" weasel words) a year ago. I like anime and classics, cheesy old SF and historical documentaries, and especially old TV shows on DVD (the fact that I write fanfic for some of the latter may be involved). Another part, actually, is the proliferation of useful review websites, and of things like Amazon's recommendation engine. I don't have to rent a movie for a couple of nights to find out if I want to buy it anymore, and with the price of purchase dropping so close to the rental price, there's little cost advantage in doing so. Oddly enough, the bonus content is another rental-killer. I'm the person who buys the deluxe edition of the DVD because I love the behind-the-scenes features, the storyboards, the production art, the cast interviews ... all that stuff. Sometimes that's twice as much material, running time wise, as the movie itself, and because of its fragmented nature (ten 10-minute segments of interviews, for instance) you tend to go through it more slowly. Rentals preclude slowly enjoying the bonuses over the next couple of weeks, even if they have them (and they generally don't). Also, there's Redbox. If I'm going to rent a recent release, I can get it at Redbox for a dollar for the night I want to watch it, instead of renting it at Blockbuster for the equivalent of renting it for several nights at Redbox. In other words, I only have to pay for the time I'm actually using it.
You know what I'd like to see at a physical bookstore? And what someone needs to start marketing to the independent stores? A little kiosk sort of like a Redbox machine, where I could go through a publisher's whole backlist, buy the books I want, plug in my Reader, and have them all loaded. For an extra few bucks (per purchase, not per book!) it could burn them to CD for me as well (perhaps with a copy of Calibre included for the benefit of people who don't know about it yet). Something like that would allow Joe's Bookstore to sell as wide a selection of books as Barnes & Noble in the space of a soda machine. That's my dream store: one where I get the personal service of a small bookstore, the selection of a giant chain, and the pricing of an online discounter. Add a few comfy chairs, some charging ports, a selection of new and used ebook readers for sale, a rack of accessories like cases and lights for the most popular models ... there's money to be made there.
A little machine like that -- an ebook kiosk -- would, if it was affordable (probably some kind of leasing + % of sales option) be a huge draw to used bookstores, too. Among other things, the ebook kiosk might generate some money for the publisher on sales of used books: how many of us, after buying that worn but precious volume to at long last fill in the gap in some SF series, would go straight to the ebook kiosk and buy the electronic version, too? Among other reasons, I'd do it so I didn't have to worry about the paper one falling apart. I recently spent about $60 at Baen, and out of the dozen or so books I bought, only two were ones that I didn't already have in physical form. I wish I could do that at my favorite used SF store.
Sorry for the threadjacking!