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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I'm insinuating anything. I'm forthrightly saying I don't think the evidence is clear enough to support the conclusions in the OP. I then pointed to specific problems - we don't know the publication date for the first book, the piracy date, the trend of sales before piracy, or what trends are typical of similar books. I also think the author's jump to accuse an Amazon employee of piracy is evidence of a tendency to jump to unsupported conclusions.

I personally doubt the author is lying. I assume the author is stating what they think and giving the evidence they have. That's good, but I don't think their conclusion follows from their evidence.

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> Non-real number example: OG1 was selling 100 books/month by 2012. After piracy this dropped to 60 books/month. For instance, August 2012 had sales of 100 books, and by November 2012 it had dropped to 60 books/month. Over time, this slowly tapered from 60 to 50 to 40 to 30 to 25 books/month by 2015-2016. That's how drastic things were.

If post author had correctly identified the time that the book started getting pirated, the drop in revenue in that 3-month period is much more drastic that before and after, and is the most likely cause (another cause would need to have very compelling evidence).

It's like if I told you I lost my 1-year-old credit card and suddenly 3 months later I saw notifications of $10k in extra charges and therefore think someone is abusing it, and now you're objecting "but you don't even tell me what month this happened in??", "but how do you know those notifications were legit?!", "how many notifications did you get normally?!", etc...

At that point, you're throwing common sense out the window and insinuating the other person is either just stupid or deliberately lying to you, whether you explicitly say this or not.

Sales dropping over time is more common [1] than unexpected $10k charges to a credit card. It also has many more explanations. The scenarios are so different, the analogy is frankly dishonest.

[1] It is, in fact, the rule. And can be much faster and bigger than 40% in 3 months: https://www.addthis.com/blog/2014/04/21/can-social-buzz-pred...

We may agree that piracy is theft, but 'ALittleLight has a point.

From Novembrer 2011 — when it was published — to September 2012 — when the author believes it's been "pirated" — there is a window of just 10 months. Not 21 months. 10 months.

Now, did sales beging to drop only after September? Were them already going down? How long before? How do sales typically go over time for books? For Amazon books? Other possible causes?

Moreover, I think your analogy is completely off. Here is a better one.

You can't find your credit card anymore. You are notified of suspect online payments by your bank. Thinking about it, you're quite sure you left it at the supermarket; and you somehow conclude that that sneaky cashier must have stolen it.

But it turns out, your son got a trojan while trying to pirate a PlayStation game on your family PC with the magnificent Windows XP, and your card number was saved in Google Chrome.

A drop of sales is so common, and espeically a more sharper after the core customer base has bought the book.

So yes, the OP is probably a novice to the whole book selling buisness.

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