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I'm confused how the author knows that piracy caused the decline in sales. Wouldn't sales naturally decay over time anyway? The author doesn't even know the mon

I'm confused how the author knows that piracy caused the decline in sales. Wouldn't sales naturally decay over time anyway? The author doesn't even know the month the book was pirated, so I'm pretty skeptical that they've measured the impact of piracy reliably. I also doubt that pirating a book selling 100 copies a month would be worthwhile for an Amazon employee with the needed access and know-how. If I had to pirate an ebook with zero insider connections I would just use a script, maybe something like autoit, to page through the ebook on my Kindle Cloud Reader and screenshot every page. Use tesseract to do OCR on the collection and now I have a poorly formatted copy of your book. I assume I could spend a bit more time on this and come up with something better that would keep formatting. I agree that piracy is bad and basically theft (disclosure, I pirated Excession because it wasn't available on Kindle and I knew I wouldn't buy a physical copy and Iain Banks is dead so I don't feel bad). I don't think this post is particularly compelling though.

solarengineer 6y ago
To add to what you’ve suggested - at least the cleanups can be outsourced via fiverr and such. (Edit: typos)
dataflow 6y ago
> Wouldn't sales naturally decay over time anyway? The author doesn't even know the month the book was pirated, so I'm pretty skeptical that they've measured the impact of piracy reliably. What...? The author gave a pretty darn clear timeline: - I released Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition in 2011 - Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition was pirated around August or September of 2012. - "Book sales immediately dropped 40% over 3 months."
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  I disagree that that's clear. What month was it released in? What month pirated? What was the trend of sales up to that point? Even the phrase "sales immediately dropped 40% over 3 months" is unclear because things that are immediate usually don't take 3 months. A graph showing sales with an annotation on when the piracy happened would be clear. Even better if it could be compared to similar books and sales figures.
  - dataflow 6y ago
    Can you clarify what exactly you're insinuating here? Do you think it's likely that sales in fact have been dropping 40% every 3 months but the author is too clueless to notice it for any other 3-month period except that one? Or are you alleging the author is lying? What scenario seems more plausible to you here than the one that involves piracy actually having caused the drop?
    - ALittleLight 6y ago
      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.
      - dataflow 6y ago
        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.
        MikeUt 6y ago
        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-predict-video-game-sales/ https://www.addthis.com/blog/2014/04/21/can-social-buzz-pred...
MikeUt 6y ago
A suppressed European Commission study found piracy to have negligible effect: https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-study/ https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s... The study’s conclusion: With the exception of recently released blockbusters, there is no evidence to support the idea that online copyright infringement displaces sales. While this result is not unique, but consistent with previous studies, it begs the question: Why did the Commission, after having spent a significant amount of money on it, choose not to publish this study for almost two years?
- indeedmug 6y ago
  That study has to do with blockbuster movies and not purely digital goods. I am guess that things like ebooks and video games behave very differently. I heard of stories of AAA devs saying they can tell when a crack was released because their sales took a nose dive.
  - MikeUt 6y ago
    > That study has to do with blockbuster movies It is not limited to them: "the study’s conclusion: With the exception of recently released blockbusters.."
Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
There is a very obvious lack of respect for all other possible effects in the reddit post. A good reason for sales to drop 40% would be book sellers not featuring it anymore as "this years new and hot" a year after release. Another one might be the saturation of the market that is the authors larger social circle. Not mentioning such effects at all and just going "sales drop - must be pirates" sounds unreasonable and more like scapegoating. Honestly the whole post seems to me more like a desperate attempt at advertisement instead of any reasonable foundation for discussion.
- throwaway316943 6y ago
  Honestly, the drop in sales he describes sounds like every indie release ever. I don’t think it was caused by piracy, that’s just how sales work in niche markets.
fock 6y ago
I've also never really pirated books, because there's very nice, legit and convenient sources to get them - namely physical, DRM free ones also available in public libraries... (only exception: George R.R. Martin when I didn't have 200€ to spend, because the library was reserved for years to come). This changes for movies, where I try to buy Blu-Rays nowadays but I won't let copyrightholders kill my physical drive for it, so if they think they don't want me to give a suitable, high-def media I can effectively do whatever I want with: piracy it is.
swiley 6y ago
> If I had to pirate an ebook with zero insider connections I would just use a script, maybe something like autoit, to page through the ebook Some of the more abusive text book publishers would only allow you to read their books via a very poorly done web application. In college I wrote scripts to do this and build pdfs from the screenshots because it was way too painful to read that way.

solarengineer 6y ago

To add to what you’ve suggested - at least the cleanups can be outsourced via fiverr and such. (Edit: typos)

dataflow 6y ago

> Wouldn't sales naturally decay over time anyway? The author doesn't even know the month the book was pirated, so I'm pretty skeptical that they've measured the impact of piracy reliably. What...? The author gave a pretty darn clear timeline: - I released Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition in 2011 - Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition was pirated around August or September of 2012. - "Book sales immediately dropped 40% over 3 months."

ALittleLight 6y ago
I disagree that that's clear. What month was it released in? What month pirated? What was the trend of sales up to that point? Even the phrase "sales immediately dropped 40% over 3 months" is unclear because things that are immediate usually don't take 3 months. A graph showing sales with an annotation on when the piracy happened would be clear. Even better if it could be compared to similar books and sales figures.
- dataflow 6y ago
  Can you clarify what exactly you're insinuating here? Do you think it's likely that sales in fact have been dropping 40% every 3 months but the author is too clueless to notice it for any other 3-month period except that one? Or are you alleging the author is lying? What scenario seems more plausible to you here than the one that involves piracy actually having caused the drop?
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    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.
    - dataflow 6y ago
      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.
      - MikeUt 6y ago
        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-predict-video-game-sales/ https://www.addthis.com/blog/2014/04/21/can-social-buzz-pred...

MikeUt 6y ago

A suppressed European Commission study found piracy to have negligible effect: https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-study/ https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s... The study’s conclusion: With the exception of recently released blockbusters, there is no evidence to support the idea that online copyright infringement displaces sales. While this result is not unique, but consistent with previous studies, it begs the question: Why did the Commission, after having spent a significant amount of money on it, choose not to publish this study for almost two years?

indeedmug 6y ago
That study has to do with blockbuster movies and not purely digital goods. I am guess that things like ebooks and video games behave very differently. I heard of stories of AAA devs saying they can tell when a crack was released because their sales took a nose dive.
- MikeUt 6y ago
  > That study has to do with blockbuster movies It is not limited to them: "the study’s conclusion: With the exception of recently released blockbusters.."

Jon_Lowtek 6y ago

There is a very obvious lack of respect for all other possible effects in the reddit post. A good reason for sales to drop 40% would be book sellers not featuring it anymore as "this years new and hot" a year after release. Another one might be the saturation of the market that is the authors larger social circle. Not mentioning such effects at all and just going "sales drop - must be pirates" sounds unreasonable and more like scapegoating. Honestly the whole post seems to me more like a desperate attempt at advertisement instead of any reasonable foundation for discussion.

throwaway316943 6y ago
Honestly, the drop in sales he describes sounds like every indie release ever. I don’t think it was caused by piracy, that’s just how sales work in niche markets.

fock 6y ago

I've also never really pirated books, because there's very nice, legit and convenient sources to get them - namely physical, DRM free ones also available in public libraries... (only exception: George R.R. Martin when I didn't have 200€ to spend, because the library was reserved for years to come). This changes for movies, where I try to buy Blu-Rays nowadays but I won't let copyrightholders kill my physical drive for it, so if they think they don't want me to give a suitable, high-def media I can effectively do whatever I want with: piracy it is.

swiley 6y ago

> If I had to pirate an ebook with zero insider connections I would just use a script, maybe something like autoit, to page through the ebook Some of the more abusive text book publishers would only allow you to read their books via a very poorly done web application. In college I wrote scripts to do this and build pdfs from the screenshots because it was way too painful to read that way.