I haven't seen any evidence that the shrinking earnings of authors are related to piracy. From what I've read, publishers are simply retaining more of the profits for themselves and, often, theorizing that piracy is somehow raising their costs yet providing little by way of documentation.

https://www.statista.com/topics/3928/reading-habits-in-the-u...

That's what sukilot said: it is a fallacy to assume that people would pay for content that they can't pirate. In actuality, it's the other way around: people pirate content that they can't pay for (either because they have no money (at all or in a currency that the publisher accepts), or because the publish refuses to deliver the content (either at all or in a format they can actully use, ie not DRM-encumbered or otherwise defective)).

That would be great if I’ve misunderstood and the Internet Archive is really only lending our books that aren’t for sale. (And, as is probably universal on this site, I think DRM in books is both bad and dumb: bad for accessibility, dumb because of how easy it is to OCR text).

Likewise, unless I misunderstood, they already had a legit lending library system set up, but they broke the rules and made it infinite free copies for everyone.

I hope there is a happy ending to this story, because I like the internet archive, but at the moment it looks like they got their legal advice from the same minds who came up with Freeman Of The Land.

> That would be great if I've misunderstood and the Internet Archive is really only lending our books that aren't for sale.

I'm not sure if they are only lending books that aren't for sale, but my understanding is that the overwhelming majority of the books involved are in fact not available for purchase. A book that is only available in DRM-encumbered form is not available at all.

It seems unlikely to me that piracy is a major factor, as headline-grabbing as it often tends to be. It's hard for me to even hazard a guess how the IA's "emergency library" would really affect things; it's not piracy in any conventional understanding of the term, but maybe that makes it more likely to cost authors potential sales, because it's so easy to read the book for free. But I want to triple underline that maybe and surround it with question marks.

There is no fallacy in my statement, it's an anecdote supplied to show some fairly popular, published authors are not making enough money to quit their day job. For those authors, losing income would be painful. It's an example that proves the comment I'm replying to isn't correct.

I'm not even arguing that they would lose money.

That’s a reply to an argument for abolishing BitTorrent, and not on-topic. What the Archive did is obviate the need to even pirate: everyone could get content “for free” from a legal entity operating under US laws and subsuming all liabilities.

Suddenly you can get your book for free without even the legal or ethical hazards.