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I agree that copyright is worse than religion for generating pointless arguments where neither side convinces the other, and both tend to get inflamed. The site would really be served by making a sticky post with a précis of the arguments both sides tend to trot out, and with moderators who would ruthlessly stamp out discussion of copyright in other threads.
But alas, that won't happen, so I'll just make one of my occasional posts. File-sharers buy more product? Maybe on average, but I'll freely admit that I buy nothing. Every ebook I read, every audiobook I listen to, and most every TV show or movie I view, I downloaded without paying for. Some were free samples or no-cost for other reason, but most weren't. They're just stuff I grabbed via torrents or fileshare sites or usenet.
Copyright had a three-century run: not too shabby. But it's fundamentally broken when it comes to anything that can be made into a file on the internet, and pretending it can go on in anything like the shape it had for physical products is ingenuous.
As for figuring out how popular particular books are, mr ploppy, there are lots of sites and modes for getting stuff. Most every day I download a "today's new ebooks" pack, which has 50-150 works in it (granted, the same book may show up in epub/html/mobi/lit formats and be counted four times), and about twice a month it will have something I want to read in it. On another site, one that specializes in audiobooks and ebooks, the two biggest current downloads are the audiobooks The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (1120 downloads) and First to Die by James Patterson (822 downloads). I have to go down to around 40 to find ebooks, with an 11-book pack of the Temperance Brennan books by Kathy Reichs (412 downloads), then around 90 for a 16-book pack of Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake books (339 downloads). No single-volume ebook shows up in the Top 100. (Parenthetically, the ebook matches for the top two audiobooks come in at 124 and 103 downloads.) Of course longevity figures into things, so comparisons can't be pure.
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