> How do you know how much you're losing?

I have screenshots from the billing system, and I can easily prove that.

> It's easy to attribute low sales to piracy, when in fact people do not buy books, period.

The fact you're saying "period" means you're not ready to listen, but like to stick to your point of view. This will only affect your ability to see the truth.

> I have screenshots from the billing system, and I can easily prove that.

Unless the billing system tells you explicitly "you see the lack of people here compared to last month/year/some other time period? well, we actually possess the technology to find out who these potential people would have been, so we reached out to them and asked if they were going to buy your book. they all said 'yes, but not anymore, since I can now pirate it' and that's why your book stopped selling as well as before", how can you be sure you were going to make that money?

You misunderstood them. "Period" does not refer to the entire argument, as in "no one can change my mind", but to the sentence "people do not buy books", as opposed to "people do no bus books because they [...]"

Bookscan numbers are highly inaccurate and represent a floor.

https://www.comicsbeat.com/just-how-accurate-is-bookscan-any...

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...

It’s pretty easy to attribute the drop if the sales dropped at the same as the pirated version was released

Not necessarily. Wouldn’t most book sales (especially in small niche interest groups, which is what this sounds like) be expected to come very quickly after the release date and then drop off very quickly?

You might also have hit a cliff in sales as a function of time after publishing. You can't really extrapolate from your sample size of 1.

Most book authors simply don't make money from books. Especially if it's a technical book.

Ah, yes. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Yes, there might be other variables affecting it too, but a blanket statement of "Piracy doesn't reduce sales" when it's primarily studied in the higher volume form of video game sales which are often pirated immediately after release and thus the effect is not clearly visible is not a good argument either.

I feel blanket statements are generally not a good fit for serious discussions. We have to keep asking the questions that will guide us closer to better data.

I can't imagine the only good studies being on games. I'm sure similar studies for other forms of entertainment/art exist too. Games are also harder to pirate, and has its own problems that are virtually non-existent for books.

And if we were to go down that route, we can further divide the affected people into publishers, authors, book stores etc. and only then can we figure out how the moral compass of each of us is really adjusted :)

Big movie studios/publishers making billions of dollars? Hard to feel sorry for them.

Indie authors/studios? I definitely have a soft spot for them.

those people would not have bought the game period... so its not a loss

My products also were affected by the pirating of your books.. Revenue dropped 80% for one of the saas products