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?
It is not limited to them: "the study’s conclusion: With the exception of recently released blockbusters.."
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."
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.
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.
If post author had correctly identified the time that the book started getting pirated, the drop in revenue in that 3-month period is much more drastic that before and after, and is the most likely cause (another cause would need to have very compelling evidence).
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.
[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-pred...
From Novembrer 2011 — when it was published — to September 2012 — when the author believes it's been "pirated" — there is a window of just 10 months. Not 21 months. 10 months.
Now, did sales beging to drop only after September? Were them already going down? How long before? How do sales typically go over time for books? For Amazon books? Other possible causes?
Moreover, I think your analogy is completely off. Here is a better one.
You can't find your credit card anymore. You are notified of suspect online payments by your bank. Thinking about it, you're quite sure you left it at the supermarket; and you somehow conclude that that sneaky cashier must have stolen it.
But it turns out, your son got a trojan while trying to pirate a PlayStation game on your family PC with the magnificent Windows XP, and your card number was saved in Google Chrome.
So yes, the OP is probably a novice to the whole book selling buisness.
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.
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.
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.