Do you think this actually hurts sales though? I’ve always been of the impression that the vast majority of people pirating wouldn’t have bought it anyways. Yes they’re getting it for free, but at least they’re enjoying your work when they wouldn’t have otherwise.
> Do you think this actually hurts sales though? I’ve always been of the impression that the vast majority of people pirating wouldn’t have bought it anyways.
I'm not sure how applicable it is for books, because generally prices are more uniform for books than they are for software, but in the case of software I wonder if the ones who lose sales to piracy are the makers of more affordable software?
Imagine a world where piracy was effectively impossible for most people, and you want to do some occasional image editing. You look at Photoshop and it is way out of your budget. But you don't actually need most features of Photoshop. You find that Pixelmator Pro can do everything you want, and at $40 you can afford it and it is a good value. So you buy Pixelmator Pro.
In a world where piracy only takes a little time and effort you pirate Photoshop.
In both scenarios Adobe doesn't get any of your money so we can't say that pirating Photoshop in the second scenario cost Adobe a sale. But it did cost Pixelmator Team a sale.
In general, I suspect that the main effect of piracy is to change our allocation of spending within certain categories or groups of categories, without changing the total we spend in those categories.
That's been my theory as well, that the ultimate victim of Photoshop piracy in the 90s/00s was Paint Shop Pro. Adobe didn't seem to care, professionals still needed their properly licensed copy at Adobe's prices, and students who learn with pirated Photoshop might become actual professionals with paid licenses in the future.
But at $0 vs $0, Paint Shop Pro was a lot less appealing that it would have been at $99 vs $399 or whatever Photoshop used to cost.
“Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though,” [Bill] Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. “And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
Charles Piller, "How Piracy Opens Doors for Windows", *Los Angeles Times8, April 9, 2006
Absolutely. It's a common and very old belief that GIMP's worst enemy isn't just Photoshop, it's pirated Photoshop. The same was being said about desktop GNU/Linux and Pirated Windows XP.
That's essentially a price discrimination strategy (intentional or not). Adobe could just offer a free version with super restrictive license, and results would be the same without any piracy involved.
To be honest, these days outside of some categories like games (where the prices are relatively uniform) if you just need something to use casually, there's probably one or more open source options. Of course, the open source option may actually be the best one as well but, even if it isn't, it's probably good enough for the odd task now and then.
That totally makes sense! When I think about pirating, usually movies, tv, music, and books come to mind, but in the case of software, that absolutely makes sense.
I think it does hurt. Some wouldn't buy anyway. But the mindset has changed.
If you do the right thing, you're out say $30 for a book. If you do the wrong thing, you get the book and still have your $30. Some people don't care about others, and that mindset continues. (its kinda a Tragedy of the commons where the "common" is the market place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons).
DRM makes it worse, not only did you do the right thing and buy the book, now its not as useful as the copy someone "didn't pay for". So pushing people toward the free and better.
> I’ve always been of the impression that the vast majority of people pirating wouldn’t have bought it anyways.
I used to generally believe this as well, but then services like Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, etc. came along and put an end to the golden age of music piracy. Maybe these people wouldn't have bought the book at a full retail price, but there is very likely a price they would have paid to get the book in a convenient manner. Even the article basically admits as much. The author's complaint isn't the price, it is the convenience.
> services like Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, etc
Which are all subscription-based and not unit-based. There is no cost to explore and listen to random songs when you've already paid your subscription anyway. Switch to unit-based and suddenly way less exploration. So it's unit-less pricing + convenience.
Fundamentally exploration is much more important for music than it is for books due to the time it takes to consume a single unit. Either way, usually the most important part is showing that a customer is willing to make the jump from $0 to $0.01 and there are numerous music services that have shown that pirates are willing to make that leap in the right circumstances.
It solves part of the problem but quickly imposes a tragedy of the commons. These sub-10$ services pay peanuts to the creators. In order to make any meaningful money you have to have millions or hundreds of millions of views. To reach that scale you have to create something appetising to the masses which frequently entails clichés and sub-standard work. I do hear plenty of songs, movies, books rehashing the same old things following a cookie cutter approach.
I do remember reading a twitter thread of creator who sold books and earned a six figure income when a youtube creator chimed in and reported earning less than $300 for more than million views. Not an apples to apples comparison but you quickly see how youtube/spotify would actually create market pressures which discourage people from creating works of cultural and social significance.
In such a world, books like GEB and Piketty’s Capital would never see the light of the day.
It seems as though taste has not been improving with the Internet's adoption. I was just reflecting on this today and how SEOs rank according to "reputation", which is now just a network of mass media publishers which fill out the first 3-5 search pages. "Reputation" in the 90's was drastically different than today, where the average webmaster was likely a professor.
Also, what's noticeable with cultural works or "products" is the purchasing behavior is very much a crowd-effect. Very few people are inquisitive about such products; they will likely commit to a buy through word-of-mouth, and even then it may be after the 2nd or 3rd different person recommended a film or book. So the "psychology" of such purchases also favors the mass consumer who is looking for some temporary amusement, rather than a soul pathfinder looking for their chords to be plucked.
It might in some situations. With music for example, some bands have successfully encouraged people to buy their releases by including "rare" tracks that, if they were released previously, were done so on obscure titles that even collectors have a hard time finding. If everything an artist creates is easy to find online through piracy, there's no trove of "rare" material unless it's stuff that's never been released (like practice sessions or stuff that didn't make the cut for previous releases, much of this stuff is simply subpar and doesn't encourage purchases much).
Its hard though to carry that idea over to books though. What would be the extra material, unabridged versions? Not many books have abridged/unabridged versions to choose from.
I guess the closest parallel would be books people buy because they have to, not because they want to. By that I mean things like textbooks where, if they were available easily on pirated sites, everyone would just download. I kind of think publishers know this, and that's why so many now carry a one-time use only keycode to unlock online content. If you have to retake the class you can't access the online content again without repurchasing, even if the book itself has not changed.
I pirate most books unless they are available at my local library. I feel bad about it but I do it anyway.
If I'm being honest, if there were no piracy options I would be buying alot more books. Probably not as many as I pirate but still probably 500 dollars a year or so worth.
The catch is that it is true that if a book is unable to pirate I will probably not buy it. This is probably true for a lot of people. The reason is that there are other books available to pirate. That is the key distinction. If there were no piracy options I would be forced to buy some, but because there are piracy options I buy almost none and therefore you could say I wouldn't buy them anyway if they arent available to pirate.
