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The economic reality of today is that words and publishing are cheap. If you have something to say and need to get the word out to as many people as possible, that's wonderful. If you need to eat, then accept this is how it is and write for an audience that's willing to pay you for your work even if it's available for free.
Furthermore, assuming your work is priced reasonably, imagine the content was not available within a shadow library. Would the people pirating it have paid? Or would they have given up, barred due to their financial situation. Personally, I can say confidently that I have never once pirated something I would have otherwise paid for
All of my college text books were leaps and bounds more than this, my lowest costing book might have been $75. Most of the books cost well over $150 and many of them couldn’t be purchased online. Most came with some online class learning aid which if you bought the book second hand you’d have to pay the full book price to get the access code anyway. These publishers are out of their minds.
Some of them, if my writing was of any value.
Personally, I can say confidently that I have never once pirated something I would have otherwise paid for
That's fantastic. Thank you. But I'm sure you know at least some people who have downloaded things just to save even a single dollar.
No, I don't. I've watched people pirate things, certainly, but never have I watched them while thinking "if piracy wasn't an option, they would have paid". Indeed, for many people piracy is a long and difficult process as they kludge through ad-laden pages and dead links. That's why services like Spotify are so successful. On paper, you could have pirated the music, but in practice piracy is much harder. There is nothing analogous for the publishing industry, but I would gladly pay upwards of $20 a month for access to all books.
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-pir...
This was true in 2011 and it's just as true now.
2. Here, you are contending that knowledge should only be available to those who can pay. That's a completely valid opinion, but let's just be clear about what it is insinuating.
If the price is not set "fairly" (in the sense of "I'm willing to pay this price"), people will look for the good on another market (the gray market).
Look at the whole market, look at market prices, understand how piracy works. If you want to not have your work pirated, you probably have to do what Steam did for video games (and very successfully!) You must sell your work at a price and format that beats piracy for the end user. Piracy involves hassle and risk. But it is the only way to get DRM-free content for most consumers that they truly get to keep forever. If you sell your book for a price your target audience can’t afford in relation to the value it provides, and you may not even sell your book in a true digital ownership way, but only effectively license it, then some consumers won’t want to buy that and piracy is an alternative.
You may say that you are unwilling to offer your work at a price palatable to people more than piracy. And that is your prerogative. But you will always have a degree of piracy in what you put out then. This is the market reality.
You should calculate what makes most sense to you — maybe it is higher price and piracy, maybe it is lower price, DRM-free and no piracy, or if neither work and you truly can’t sell your work in the actual reality of the market, maybe not doing the work makes sense.
Piracy is often significant effort and risk. Not high but significant. First, one must learn the means to pirate content. Second, they must keep strong privacy and security habits while doing so. Third, pirated content may have malware, even pdfs. Finally, the quality is often a bit lower. There are very real downsides to privacy — effort and others. Then there are also benefits that I spoke of.
Steam has largely validated what I’m saying. So no need for extra arguing. Look into how it cleaned up video game piracy. Many people used to, especially in less economically developed regions such as Eastern Europe, pirate as main means of video game consumption. Now, it’s mostly Valve’s Steam.
And the "significant effort and risk" argument is garbage when multiple methods of transmitting pirated content (and checksumming it) is easy as cake.
People used to pay more for music due to scarcity. Piracy makes music more easily available — you are right, so it does decrease scarcity by competition. But so do many other things like the streaming platforms you mention.
The same can be said for average quality published works — very many are available, much too many to charge scarcity pricing. With AI texts flooding the market, the value is further lowered.
I am merely bringing attention to the reality that the works we author compete with market forces, and that through this competition, piracy can and has demonstrably been out-competed in some cases. If the author can’t compete but they want the sales, then it’s a good idea to rethink putting the work out there.
The second point about effort and risk, I don’t think can be dismissed so easily. Checksuming is all well and good, and other protections. But go out into the real world and ask people in the street how many checksum their downloads. :)
You really just have to offer a better deal, and it doesn’t have to be a perfect one. Don’t hyper-focus on preventing IP from being shared by people. So long as there are mass storage devices and paper copy machines, there will be piracy. People used to even transmit computer programs over radio at night in Eastern Europe shortly before the collapse of USSR. You can’t outlaw all means of piracy even if you take down all the sites, but there is a different way to combat it with your own creative products — offering a better legal deal to pirates. And there is evidence that it works. :)
And if it doesn’t work for you, then the market doesn’t work for you. That’s the practical reality. We can daydream about piracy not existing but it will remain a daydream — maybe a nice daydream, I don’t know. But I do know it is not the market we have in reality.
As to your question, I'm sure those who were more intellectually inclined throughout history tended to do well despite not having a printing press and its offspring. If you're truly putting out something useful to the people, be it ideas, stories, etc, then you should have no problem getting by from your output.
A good example of this is larger projects in the OSS community. Large companies don't pay for it, because it's just expected to be free.
Software is used by enterprises and by individuals. Books are mostly used by indivuals (yeah, I know your Friendly Corp might have an educational budget for you).
Enterprises are less likely to pay for books (as the whole cost of running the procurement process is prohibitive). But people (like individuals) don't have this limitation.
"EU study finds piracy doesn’t hurt game sales, may actually help"
This study was suppressed until Felix Reda leaked it:
Instead, write a TOC and say a first chapter. And give it free. Then establish a target price/profit you want in total for each additional chapter. Setup a "fund me" and release the chapter ONLY after you've received your full payment.
If your content is good, people will pay enough for your next chapter. And you will be fairly compensated for your writing work.
How much could he raise for each next chapter?