How to deal with ebook piracy

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Fayth

For the record, while I don't agree that every pirated file is a lost sale, I still believe that there is at least a decent percent of them that are. I feel that when people try to make it seem like piracy means nothing and has no effect on content creators they are just trying to justify their own piracy.

What about when content creators say that piracy has no affect on them? Is that because they pirate other people's work themselves?

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by CommonReader

Obviously pirated books do not equal lost sales. However, those people who have downloaded a large number of pirated books do not really have to buy books any more either, unless they are looking for a specific book that isn't available as a pirated copy. Someone who has downloaded e.g. 4,000 books and just 10% of those are books are books he is really interested in, is kept busy reading those books for quite a while.

No they're not, because there will be another 4,000 for them to download the next day, and the day after that. They don't download them to read, so there is no more or no less of a chance that they will still be buying books they do want to read.

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

No they're not, because there will be another 4,000 for them to download the next day, and the day after that. They don't download them to read, so there is no more or no less of a chance that they will still be buying books they do want to read.

Yes, think of the analogy of the local library. Would you rather have a library with 10,000 books on hand or one with 1,000,000? You'd want, of course, the library with a million books. You don't want to hear about a book, go to the library, find that they don't have it, and ask them to order a copy. You want to hear about a book, go to the library, and pick it up from the shelf. The goal of pirated book hoarding is to-- whenever you hear about a book, you look in your archives and you already have it.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

The goal of pirated book hoarding is to-- whenever you hear about a book, you look in your archives and you already have it.

That's the goal, but you never get to read a book, because you are too busy hoarding

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Jellby

That's the goal, but you never get to read a book, because you are too busy hoarding

Got it in one. Not to mention cataloguing, converting, etc. But another reason for downloading everything you see is because you don't know how long it will be there for. Some writers seem to object to their work being collected and catalogued by such people, so they spend all their day playing whack-a-mole instead of writing something new for the people that actually read books.