Comment by ffsm8

Comment by ffsm8 11 days ago

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If it does, then the author is sadly misguided and got convinced of someone that isn't true.

The people that download the book from these sites would never have bought them. Having your book downloaded by 10k people doesn't mean you've lost 10k sales, what it does mean is that you've got up to 10k people that wouldn't have bought the book anyway talking about it, effectively becoming word of mouth advertisers.

This isn't quiet as true for movies/tv series etc, because their value (entertainment time/price) is so much lower. Books on the other have usually cost $5-30 and will take 4-30 hours to read through. At that price point, very very few people will download the books to save what amounts to a single meal. Especially if you consider that so few people actually read several books per year (that's essentially $<30 per year "saved" via illegal downloads)

It could become an issue if a for-profit company could serve them legally however, I agree with that. It's hard to really talk about that, though ... It's a pure what-if/speculation after all

grepfru_it 11 days ago

Ah yes, the piracy never hurt anyone approach.

How many of those 10k purchases didn’t buy it because it was available for free somewhere? The point is, as you said, you don’t know.. However we do know the opposite is true, once Napster went away people started paying for Pandora. Netflix password crackdown lead to increased subscriptions.

When your desirable product isn’t available for free, people will trend towards buying it.

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  • yazzku 11 days ago

    You're mistakenly throwing books and music into the same bag.

    I often download books before buying them because I otherwise have no reasonable means to judge their content. This is not much different from flipping through the pages of a book in a library before buying it. The appeal of reading from an actual physical book is not something that any digital form can replace, so the book being available in digital form won't stop me from buying a copy. I also have no interest in Kindles and DRM.

    Music, on the other hand, might be a different story except for select audiophiles who prefer vinyl.

    So I don't think we can generalize to "product" like you do in your argument. Details and facts actually matter.

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  • more_corn 10 days ago

    The science shows that piracy increases the amount people pay for content not the reverse.

    Corey Doctorow has the right idea. <sic> “I give my works away for free. Every time I gain another fan I gain another person who might want to own the hardback of my new book.”

    If your desirable product is available for free more people find you, like you, follow you, patronize you. A lot of those people have money and are happy to give it to you to support you continuing to make good work.

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  • ffsm8 11 days ago

    Your example is strange, as that was clearly a distribution problem. It's been well covered and could be observed with Netflix too, until they've reintroduced this issue.

    This distribution problem doesn't really exist with books at the moment as Kindle exists.

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