“Of all the people who didn’t buy one of my book’s today, the majority of them didn’t buy it because they never heard of me, not because someone gave them a free copy.”
– Cory Doctorow
Piracy or Obscurity
Doug Cornelius on compliance for private equity real estate
This is completely true. Publishers vastly overestimate the danger of piracy. For textbooks it’s a real concern. But for ordinary novels? There just aren’t enough readers overall (compared to music and movie audiences); pirated digital versions are still too hard to find and download; e-readers are still too rare (most people wouldn’t consider reading a novel on a laptop screen, either); and there is not a community of techno-savvy book-file sharers (i.e. pirates) as there is for MP3’s and movies-via-BitTorrent. The reasons go on and on. Good grab, Doug.