Individuals who pirate my books are also more likely to buy them in the future.
Piracy is just about accessibility and trust. If the person can't afford to take a chance, they pirate. And if you win them there, they'll buy.
(Nit: Zero of that applies to corps. Thanks Anthropic, Meta, and everyone else.)
It would be interesting to see at what point of notoriety that is no longer true. Like is this still a factor for Stephen King, or at that point is it really just lost sales?
As for scale... There is only a tiny fraction of the industry that can support their life on writer's income, let alone be a household name.
It probably does become just lost sales at that point, but to reach that, you're probably already beyond most competitive forces, leaving only piracy around.
Unfortunately, I'm Australian, and my government saw fit to narrow their interpretation of current laws, to make AI scraping of illegally obtained data, legal.
You now have to prove direct harm - not the indirect harm happening to the entire industry.
[0] https://www.oaic.gov.au/news/media-centre/global-expectation...
You think more piracy leads to more sales, but surely this is correlation, not causation? It seems far more plausible that popular books get pirated and bought more, hence the correlation.
Piracy creates an invested reader. Its not much different than games selling by offering free demos.
There is a _causation_ there, because the reader likely never would have discovered me, otherwise.
But if you're not Stephen King, then more piracy is going to make a direct, causal, positive impact on your sales.