What percentage of books read by Americans in 2025 (or choose another relatively recent year) were pirated?
What data makes you think it's low?
Observations of fellow readers, conversations with self- and traditionally-published authors, and some knowledge of the market?
But what is low, anyway? For the sake of argument I could believe 10, 20, even 30% of all the books people read are pirated. I would be surprised if it was higher, but let's just say hypothetically it's 50%. I think that's a reasonable conservative estimate. So, in this scenario, the remaining 50% of reads can in principle be monetized by their respective authors.
Abolition of copyright will drive that monetizable share essentially to 0%, for reasons I've outlined elsewhere in this thread.^[1]. I consider that meaningful, and I have personally had conversations with published authors who state that the royalties they receive are financially significant, which is why I'm here in this thread taking the position that I'm taking.
I think we're in the same ballpark here.
> Abolition of copyright will drive that monetizable share essentially to 0%
I'm in favour of copyright, though I think 70 years after the death of the author is so long it's silly. Even your grandchildren will have died of old age before your copyright ends.
It's strange to think of something like Star Wars being in the public domain, and the effects that might have on our cultural and media landscapes, but if you step back it feels even stranger that something intangible yet so culturally important can be continuously bought and sold and exploited by people who had nothing to do with its creation (almost 50 years ago).
In that sense I probably have a lot of common ground with the "abolish copyright" people, but I feel that most of them are champing at the bit to throw the baby out with the bathwater without having any skin in the game themselves. (sorry for the idiom overload there)
If Star Wars were public domain due to shorter copyright, the newer works and characters would still be protected. Another film studio could make a new movie based off the original trilogy, taking things in a different direction than the new movies. I'm not sure this is likely though, just like no one is rushing to make 3rd party Mickey Mouse cartoons since it entered the public domain. It probably changes things a lot less than copyright proponents worry about.
Even with books, which are much cheaper to produce than movies, the original author would probably capture most of the money from their works under shorter copyright (e.g. 25 year copyright). If you like a series from a particular author, you want new books from that author. You're not going to read A Game of Thrones and then continue with a sequel written by someone else. And as long as the author keeps writing, they're expanding the canonical world in their series with freshly copyrighted IP, and fans will primarily want new works that build on that.
And if an author writes a sequel so bad that fans abandon the series and someone else writes a better sequel that fans flock to... well, the world is better off. Even the original author may be better off if it improves the popularity of the series.