Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
At the risk of repeating myself, it is a completely false analogy to compare borrowing a book from a library to downloading it from the internet. Firstly, every library from which someone borrows a book has bought that book, perhaps several copies of it. This HP eBook was created from photographs of a illegally-obtained manuscript which nobody paid for. It's a totally different situation. Secondly, in the UK at least, authors get paid for library loans on the basis of how many of their books are borrowed by libraries, nationwide, over the course of a year. Not a vast amount, but popular authors get a few thousand $.
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Well sounds to me that if you buy the argument that ebook piracy causes massive sales losses, then libraries are at least as bad as piracy. In the States, authors don't get a royalty paid when their books are checked out of a library. Even if that is the case in the UK, the publishers are still getting cheated out of profits with library books <G>. Consider- a library buys 10 copies of a popular book, and each copy is checked out 25 times over the course of a year.
250 sales are lost!!!
Bottom line- IMHO, most of the people who borrowed the book wouldn't have bought it anyways, had it not been available at the library. The point I am making is that on cannot logically presume that a sale is lost for every e-book illegally downloaded.
BTW, do the authors in the UK get all their friends and family to check out their books multiple times to increase their payments?