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I wrote "Hacking Healthcare" for O'Reilly, which is still in print after 10 years, amongst others. My intention in writing it was never pecuniary but to hopeful

I wrote "Hacking Healthcare" for O'Reilly, which is still in print after 10 years, amongst others. My intention in writing it was never pecuniary but to hopefully encourage smart technology people to enter healthcare. It has sold more copies than many popular authors I read who seem much more "bestselling", which always surprises me. It is my opinion that piracy has helped that book much more than it has hurt it. It is very widely pirated in torrents in non-us countries from what I can tell from google searches and a longstanding history of emails to the effect "hey your book is being pirated [here]". I sincerely doubt that the overwhelming majority of people who pirate that work did so instead of purchasing it.

M277 5y ago
N = 1 here, but as someone from a third world country this is definitely true for my experience. Like, 90% of students here can't really pay US-prices for textbooks at all, so they resort to either piracy or buying imported used books (which are significantly cheaper somehow, but sometimes badly worn or old editions), or even buying printed pirated books. My university department even had someone who would pirate textbooks and print them and sell them to the students at cost (what it cost to print them), he was very popular and people to this day still remember him very fondly as he was arguably doing a major service... the students wouldn't have read the books otherwise. It may be legally wrong in the West, but morally? The author doesn't lose (like I said, the books wouldn't have been bought) and the students get access to knowledge they wouldn't have been able to access otherwise.
webmaven 5y ago
> It is my opinion that piracy has helped that book much more than it has hurt it. It is very widely pirated in torrents in non-us countries from what I can tell from google searches and a longstanding history of emails to the effect "hey your book is being pirated [here]". I sincerely doubt that the overwhelming majority of people who pirate that work did so instead of purchasing it. Tim O'Reilly agrees with you: https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxation-and-other-thoughts-on-the-evolution-of-online-distribution/ https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...

M277 5y ago

N = 1 here, but as someone from a third world country this is definitely true for my experience. Like, 90% of students here can't really pay US-prices for textbooks at all, so they resort to either piracy or buying imported used books (which are significantly cheaper somehow, but sometimes badly worn or old editions), or even buying printed pirated books. My university department even had someone who would pirate textbooks and print them and sell them to the students at cost (what it cost to print them), he was very popular and people to this day still remember him very fondly as he was arguably doing a major service... the students wouldn't have read the books otherwise. It may be legally wrong in the West, but morally? The author doesn't lose (like I said, the books wouldn't have been bought) and the students get access to knowledge they wouldn't have been able to access otherwise.

webmaven 5y ago

> It is my opinion that piracy has helped that book much more than it has hurt it. It is very widely pirated in torrents in non-us countries from what I can tell from google searches and a longstanding history of emails to the effect "hey your book is being pirated [here]". I sincerely doubt that the overwhelming majority of people who pirate that work did so instead of purchasing it. Tim O'Reilly agrees with you: https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxation-and-other-thoughts-on-the-evolution-of-online-distribution/ https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...