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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

They aren't talking about free, they're talking about theft. -yawn- Yet another content creator upset that they can't make money on piracy.

"If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list."

Yeah, that's a BIG hint that piracy and sales aren't linked in any useful way. Stop wishing you could turn any portion of that into real sales. Download numbers aren't related to sales numbers at all.

Just face reality: Your book isn't actually popular at all.

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Yeah. It's sad that this author cant sell more books, but the people who download books are not the same people who buy books- it's the same as with people who download movies. It's hoarding plain and simple.

I would seriously suggest that the author have a look at Cory Doctorow's work. Right on his home page, you can download his books in any free, non drm format you like. Yet he seems to do quite well selling his books too.

Heck, if your book is out of print and still getting 800+ downloads a week, I'd contact the download site and tell them you'd bless the download if they put a donate link in the book or on the download page. What have you got to lose?

Or, you could always sue your customers, that's worked well for the RIAA.

That's a pretty good suggestion. The 800 downloads won't go away. If she offers the book for download at her personal site, she can have a forum there for fans to talk and give feedback. That would give a better idea of the real interest in the book and she'd have control over it and better good will from readers.

"Download numbers aren't related to sales numbers at all."

You have two groups of people, one buying, one pirating, and they share the common goal of obtaining x.

To claim pirated copies are completely unrelated when there's quite obviously that relationship is just as extreme and silly as claiming they're all lost sales.

"To claim pirated copies are completely unrelated when there's quite obviously that relationship is just as extreme and silly as claiming they're all lost sales."

To be sure, there is a relationship, but it’s not at all obvious what the sign of the relationship is.

John Scalzi noted that physical sales of his books shot up after he released free ebook versions (33%, 20%, and 9% for The Ghost Brigades, Old Man's War, and The Android's Dream, respectively).

I'm not arguing that pirating ebooks isn't wrong -- I think the author should have the choice of whether or not her own works are available for free. Just sayin', your "You have two groups of people, one buying, one pirating, and they share the common goal of obtaining x." model oversimplifies things.

The common goal is not just obtaining x - people buy a book to have a physical book and the sensory experience reading it. People who download (pirated versions of) books may or may not do the same with the book.

Given that people who pirate books often download more than they would ever buy (or consume, for that matter), I think the equivalent would be more people sitting in a bookshop and casually browsing the book. Saying that you can convert HALF of the people who browse through your book in a bookstore to buyers is, if anything, proof that you lost contact with reality.

The one thing that I do completely agree with in the article: "If you REALLY can’t afford books, ask your library to order them." Libraries are a great way for people to share books, and usually the cost of actually running the library (i.e. staffing and room) dwarfs acquisition costs for the books. Hence, recommending a book to your library that other people could like is generally a good thing. (And you have a nice, physical book, and the authors get some money. What's not to like).

I agree, this is the reason DRM should be relaxed to allow 20-30% of the book be readable without license. As it stands it's 100% readable when the DRM is stripped off.

This is only really worthwhile if I get to pick-and-choose the 20-30% myself (which implies I could get the full 100% if I wanted to make the effort). A table of contents, chapters 1 and maybe 2, possibly 3, and perhaps an epilogue and index may constitute 20% of a book but wouldn't be very useful in many situations. As a concrete example, many programming books devote their first 100 pages or so to introductory material, even if around page 500 they start going into 3D vector spaces or such. I'm interested in that later material, not the introductory stuff, and I'd feel cheated if a Google-indexed Index page led me to believe I could get some free info when I couldn't.

Edit: I would concede that fiction titles can benefit from releasing chapters 1, 2, 3 as a further hook into getting people to buy it. But people and publishers do this already, have for a long time, it works pretty well for them.

It's worked fairly well for music, but in the case of reference material I agree it's a poor substitute to skimming the actual book. Maybe something like a Zune Pass for books would be better. Flat fee, read as much as you want, keep rights to download some for keeps.

She's popular to the tune of 800 free downloads per week and 10 sales per week.

Anecdotally, one of the ISVs over on Programmers.stackexchange had a piracy problem; when he started detecting pirated software and reminding the user to buy, not steal, his sales numbers directly went up.

I think this idea that downloading IP for free is ok is really wrong. If you want something, you should pay the price for it, whether the price be fixed or negotiated. IP piracy is theft.

Where do libraries fit in your world?

They have paid the price already. You pay the libraries cost either directly or through your taxes.

A single copy being handed out potentially infinitely! For free! THEFT!

Some countries actually pay a fee per time leant out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right

And a single copy can only service a small number too, not an infinite number, as only one person can be in possession of it at one time and usually borrow it for weeks at a time.

So if I call up my local library and make sure the book is available, it is ethical to download the pirated copy... right?

No, you should check out the book so they know people are interested in it and perhaps then will order more copies. Maybe it would then be ok to download it and use it for the period you have it checked out, but even that is debatable because then you might be supporting the continuation of the illegal distribution, causing more people to download it illegally.

Making the front page on Reddit surely helped as well.

She didn't even say what stats site the "800" number came from. Could also be a completely bullshit number.

Personally contacting potential buyers might incite them to buy your book, no matter if they were pirates before or not. It doesn't necessarily scale to do that. Though some authors actually do promote their books (go on tours and read from the books, for example).

I don't want to defend downloading, but it is a fact of modern life, so complaining about it is unlikely to help.

Of course it's wrong, legally and usually morally too, but complaining about it won't fix anything.

If 800 people a week were downloading something of mine, after I was done dancing in the streets with joy, I'd try to figure out how to convert those downloads to fans, then sales.

>>"If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list." > >Yeah, that's a BIG hint that piracy and sales aren't linked in any useful way.

There was an article on HN a while ago about how 1% isn't the lowest possible number, as in "if just one percent of people who see our ad buy our product..." I'm sad that this is happening to authors, but it does sound a little like whining at this point.

She wouldn't have hit the NYT Bestseller list if that happened since she forgot to also add half of those people who didn't buy the books in the NYT Bestseller list.

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