Confessions of a Book Pirate

If libraries had unlimited copies of all books in print and you could borrow them instantly whenever you needed them, most of the main motivations for buying books would disappear, and the book publishing industry would operate very differently than it does today (whether or not that would be better, by providing more access to information, or worse, by removing the incentive to create, is open for debate).

So while in some sense downloading a book and getting it from the library might feel the same, in that you're reading the book without having to pay for it, the reality is different because all of those constraints have been removed.

As with things like music and movies, the primary problem here is that the physical medium imposed real constraints that are a big part of how and why the current business model for publishing has functioned. Just because it's possible to remove those constraints doesn't mean it's necessarily the ethical or pragmatic thing to do.

For the case of libraries, I think it's very much up in the air what the future will look like. You could imagine imposing the same constraints on digital copies via DRM, or imposing those contraints only for new releases, or charging for digital access but leaving physical access as free, or simply moving to some sort compulsory licensing model. But I don't think that digital equivalent exists yet, and I think it'll be a long, difficult road to ironing those questions out.

Unfortunately, I don't know what the digital equivalent of the library would be.

Of course that would be hard. You'd have to find a student which is selling, and then seeing if the book is well preserved.

That's one of the values of having a store. They pay you less because its easy to sell for them. Just the same, you could try and find a student that wants to buy your used book for more money. That's hard tho, and the store knows that, and charges accordingly.

I agree it sucks tho, specially for students who are usually short on money, but its an open market. It's a somewhat similar situation with used games in Madrid.

4. Indexing. I fulltext index all of the books that I have for situations when search results from the internet aren't that useful and wikipedia article is confusing.

1) When you steal your neighbour's car, that's the worst because you're completely depriving your neighbour of the exclusive use and enjoyment of their property.

2) When you copy a digital product that your neighbour has created, and then sell it for profit without paying royalties, then that's pretty bad, but less bad than 1). Your neighbour can still sell / use their works but you have deprived him/her of exclusivity in selling their works.

3) When you copy your neighbour's digital product for your own enjoyment, then you are depriving your neighbour of a potential sale. Still bad, but less bad than 1) and 2). It's only when everyone does it and your neighbour loses all their potential sales does it become as bad as 1), i.e. tragedy of the commons.

I'm not at all suggesting that reproducible digital products are public goods, but they share some similar characteristics in the context of piracy that I think are interesting, namely non-rivalness and non-excludability. And as mentioned before, a tragedy of the commons scenario occurs when everyone (or lots of people) engage in piracy, just like what happens when all fishermen over-fish a lake.

This obviously suggests that some kind of regulation is needed, which I suppose is the point of copyright laws. But what I'd like to know are the economic effects of piracy, for example:

What is the "piracy elasticity of demand"? In other words, how does demand for a product change as piracy levels change? Obviously as piracy levels approach 100%, the demand would be near zero, but what are the changes between 0 to 100%. Of interest is if there are any "sweet spot" levels of piracy where demand actually goes up.

I suspect there's a possibility that at low levels of piracy, the positive effects from things such as word-of-mouth marketing, early adoption / user familiarity (particularly in software) and try-before-buyers could offset the negative effects of lost sales. (Has anyone done this research?)

Anyway my point is that I don't think all theft is created equal, and that some kinds of theft do not dis-incentivize producers as the OP has asserted.

May I suggest that, since you're' using Wordpress, consider using digress.it?

http://digress.it/

It makes for very nice user commenting on book material.