One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
Global Gaming Factory X has acquired file-sharing site The Pirate Bay for SEK 60 million (USD 7.8 million).
Along with the purchase of file-sharing tech firm Peerialism, GGF intends to turn the website legitimate, offering compensation for copyright owners whose content is featured on the site.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/t ... -8-million
Along with the purchase of file-sharing tech firm Peerialism, GGF intends to turn the website legitimate, offering compensation for copyright owners whose content is featured on the site.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/t ... -8-million
Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
Nothing but a temporary win because new ones who will not obey copyrights will fill the void faster than you can say $7.8 millions.
Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
the Larry wrote:Nothing but a temporary win because new ones who will not obey copyrights will fill the void faster than you can say $7.8 millions.
Did you read the article?
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
the Larry wrote:Nothing but a temporary win because new ones who will not obey copyrights will fill the void faster than you can say $7.8 millions.
The correct way to put it is "faster than you can say napster".
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
That's great news - thanks.
Mundus vult decipi -per Caleb Carr's story Killing Time
Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
mrgoat wrote:the Larry wrote:Nothing but a temporary win because new ones who will not obey copyrights will fill the void faster than you can say $7.8 millions.
Did you read the article?
Yes, so what's your question?
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
The owners are still appealing their convictions and fines. The process could take a few years. It would be interesting to learn if there was a non-compete clause in the purchase contract.
Since there are several thousand torrents on The Pirate Bay and some torrents contain multiple copyrighted items, are the new owners going to look for all owners of rights...or are they just going to wait until people start knocking on their door?
Since there are several thousand torrents on The Pirate Bay and some torrents contain multiple copyrighted items, are the new owners going to look for all owners of rights...or are they just going to wait until people start knocking on their door?
Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
the Larry wrote:mrgoat wrote:the Larry wrote:Nothing but a temporary win because new ones who will not obey copyrights will fill the void faster than you can say $7.8 millions.
Did you read the article?
Yes, so what's your question?
Oh, sorry. My question was simply "Did you read the article?". Because you posted saying that the new owners will not obey copyright law. That, to me, suggested you missed the part in the article where it said a new, legal, company had bought it and were going to turn it into a paid for legal file sharing service. Like they did with Napster.
Your post about the new people not obeying copyright made it look like you hadn't read the article. That's all.
Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
David Alexander wrote:The owners are still appealing their convictions and fines. The process could take a few years. It would be interesting to learn if there was a non-compete clause in the purchase contract.
Since there are several thousand torrents on The Pirate Bay and some torrents contain multiple copyrighted items, are the new owners going to look for all owners of rights...or are they just going to wait until people start knocking on their door?
In the article it says:
""We're a publicly listed company, so whatever we take over has to be legal," added Pandeya. "To be legal, you have to have content providers who are paid. That's what we want."
Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
mrgoat, with 'new ones' I meant new torrent sites and new peer-to-peer file exchange servers. Or put differently, even if Pirate Bay goes legal now, new pirate bays will spring up serving illegal contents for free.
The void this creates will attract others to fill it.
Maybe now my reasoning is clear :-)
The void this creates will attract others to fill it.
Maybe now my reasoning is clear :-)
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
I don't understand the thinking behind the purchase though. Making the site legit probably won't do anything but kill it. It worked for Napster because at that time there really weren't many other easy ways to download content. Today, if you want to find content to download legally there is rarely a shortage of places to go. Granted 8 million is a relatively small amount but unless the file-sharing stuff they are talking about is groundbreaking people will just move on to other sites.
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
To me this looks like an expensive version of "Whack A Mole."
Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
the Larry wrote:mrgoat, with 'new ones' I meant new torrent sites and new peer-to-peer file exchange servers. Or put differently, even if Pirate Bay goes legal now, new pirate bays will spring up serving illegal contents for free.
The void this creates will attract others to fill it.
Maybe now my reasoning is clear :-)
Oh! I thought you meant the new owners!
And yes, of course, I didn't actually mean it would stop piracy. It was a joke after the recent piracy thread.
Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
Matt Sedlak wrote:I don't understand the thinking behind the purchase though. Making the site legit probably won't do anything but kill it. It worked for Napster because at that time there really weren't many other easy ways to download content. Today, if you want to find content to download legally there is rarely a shortage of places to go. Granted 8 million is a relatively small amount but unless the file-sharing stuff they are talking about is groundbreaking people will just move on to other sites.
You miss the point, I think. Which is the purchase also included their new proprietary software dubbed P2P 2.0. The plan, as I see it, this.
Content owners need to distribute large files. This costs money.
P2P is distributed hosting, effectively. P2P 2.0 will be leased to the content owners and/or ISPs so they can get their content distributed more effeciently and cheaply. And the users of the service are set to be financially compensated for letting the system use some of their bandwidth.
Very interesting idea to me.
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
No I get that, but since I don't know their plan I still think it strange to take over a site rather than start it out on your own. The Pirate Bay is a well-known name sure, but most of those users will be moving to other sites when the content no longer becomes free. Users have already commented that they will be leaving when and if it requires any form of payment. I think the idea the company is pitching is interesting but I think that buying the name will only hurt them in the long run.
Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
Chris Anderson has a book out, called Free!
And yes its for free!
And yes its for free!
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
If this article is accurate, I can see why the book was free.
http://gawker.com/5301674/wired-editor- ... ld-be-free
http://gawker.com/5301674/wired-editor- ... ld-be-free
Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
Essentially his message is:
When offering your product for FREE always have a premium /upgrade content alongside it..........and that 10 to 20% will go this route.
So for the magic dvd or book market:
Offer the book free on line, have a hard copy for sale as well.
Dvd, show the sleights, but not the effects.
Just a thought.
When offering your product for FREE always have a premium /upgrade content alongside it..........and that 10 to 20% will go this route.
So for the magic dvd or book market:
Offer the book free on line, have a hard copy for sale as well.
Dvd, show the sleights, but not the effects.
Just a thought.
Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
Interesting link David Alexander.............he's been on television as well sprouting 'his' philosophy.
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
Here is the announced business plan by the new owners of The Pirate Bay. It seems ambitious, it might work, although probably not on the scale they think.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-inte ... h-from-ads
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-inte ... h-from-ads
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
From that link I don't really see their plans working out too well. At the very least they certainly can't have 1G of my hard drive space no matter what they offer in return. Maybe it will work but I doubt it. At least they were smart to only give half of the sale price in cash, the other half is in stock.
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
The purchase of the name (which is basically the only thing worth the money) makes no sense for their business, they are not Pirates! There are hundreds of torrent indexes out there.
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
Here's some pertinent news on the larger issue
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009 ... dia-habits
apparently the market has evolved again - so how about a video game where you get secrets for points?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009 ... dia-habits
apparently the market has evolved again - so how about a video game where you get secrets for points?
Mundus vult decipi -per Caleb Carr's story Killing Time
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
Anyone remember Napster? This is almost exactly how that purchase was played out as well.
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
Jonathan Townsend wrote:Here's some pertinent news on the larger issue
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009 ... dia-habits
apparently the market has evolved again - so how about a video game where you get secrets for points?
Interesting article. The only thing I take issue with is the reason teens aren't using Twitter to be that it takes up text credits. Most people I know have unlimited texts so that matters very little. I have heard that the plans offered in Europe are different (i.e. they don't have unlimited text plans) but I don't know much about that or even how true it is.
Something I thought was interesting was how people aren't using phones for talking anymore and this is so true. I can't remember the last time I went over my 400 minutes but I use my phone all the time. When I am home I tend to talk to people over Xbox or PS3 networks or if I'm on the computer through Ventrilo or sometimes Skype. I guess if you aren't a gamer you are screwed though and still have to use the phone! :-P
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
If you are on the internet - Yahoo Messenger has voice chat - so Voice Over IP is there if you want to use it.
Mundus vult decipi -per Caleb Carr's story Killing Time
Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
Matt Sedlak wrote:Interesting article. The only thing I take issue with is the reason teens aren't using Twitter to be that it takes up text credits. Most people I know have unlimited texts so that matters very little. I have heard that the plans offered in Europe are different (i.e. they don't have unlimited text plans) but I don't know much about that or even how true it is.
Don't really know why you take issue with something in an article, when you state you don't know much about it or how true it is.
:)
Twitter stopped SMS support in Europe almost 12 months ago because of the prohibitive cost from the telco operators.
And there are very very few unlimited text packages here.
But I have Tweetie on my iPhone so don't care. :D (Oh, and I'm far from being a teenager!).
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
Because the article seems to state that one of the main reasons teens don't use Twitter is because of the cost of sending a text but this is not an issue for the majority of American teens. Granted the teen who wrote the thing was European but if American teens aren't using Twitter it is for a very different reason.
On another semi-related note, I just read that Microsoft will be providing it's next version of Office for free online...sort of. Too bad a lot of people who don't get that software bundled with a new computer (and a lot that do) have already switched to better programs like OpenOffice and others.
On another semi-related note, I just read that Microsoft will be providing it's next version of Office for free online...sort of. Too bad a lot of people who don't get that software bundled with a new computer (and a lot that do) have already switched to better programs like OpenOffice and others.
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
The Anderson book looks very interesting (even if he's not the sole author!)
I was in Cambridge (UK) today and read some of its chapters in Heffers bookshop.
The technology is pushing us toward free acquisition. I bought an external hard drive for my Mac at the new Apple store. One Terabyte. 1,000 gigabytes. Incredible. (My first Mac had only 30 megabytes.)
It boasts on the box that you can store 250,000 mp3 songs.
The cost of an itune track is at least 59p (basic rate).
So students are gonna conscientiously shell out 150,000 to fill their new box with music ? Course not. They'll resort to file-sharing masses of mp3 data.
My daughter is at university and they are connected to an intranet as well as the internet. Last year for her birthday she asked for a 500 GB storage unit. I didn't quite get why she would need such a large device. I later learned that on her campus they freely download movies, games, music, pdf books etc.
It can't be stopped. The authorities surely can't fine or arrest millions of people!
The Times They have already Changed.
Anderson's book tries to examine the 'problem' from a completely different angle and it's funny that he starts off with Monty Python and their contribution to You-tube and how this paradoxically gave them free publicity and increased their sales revenue.
I was in Cambridge (UK) today and read some of its chapters in Heffers bookshop.
The technology is pushing us toward free acquisition. I bought an external hard drive for my Mac at the new Apple store. One Terabyte. 1,000 gigabytes. Incredible. (My first Mac had only 30 megabytes.)
It boasts on the box that you can store 250,000 mp3 songs.
The cost of an itune track is at least 59p (basic rate).
So students are gonna conscientiously shell out 150,000 to fill their new box with music ? Course not. They'll resort to file-sharing masses of mp3 data.
My daughter is at university and they are connected to an intranet as well as the internet. Last year for her birthday she asked for a 500 GB storage unit. I didn't quite get why she would need such a large device. I later learned that on her campus they freely download movies, games, music, pdf books etc.
It can't be stopped. The authorities surely can't fine or arrest millions of people!
The Times They have already Changed.
Anderson's book tries to examine the 'problem' from a completely different angle and it's funny that he starts off with Monty Python and their contribution to You-tube and how this paradoxically gave them free publicity and increased their sales revenue.
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
PDFs of my books on free torrent sites are not increasing my sales revenue, I can assure you.
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
Richard Kaufman wrote:PDFs of my books on free torrent sites are not increasing my sales revenue, I can assure you.
And how, if I may ask, do you know that?
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
Larry...having been a niche publisher myself, I can tell you one way Richard or any niche publisher knows. Most books have "lives." In a niche publishing business, with access to and proper penetration of the market, you will quickly make the bulk of your sales - both retail and wholesale - in a relatively short period of time.
After that, the buyers drop off and sales dribble in. A bit of publicity and there may be a spike of interest, but the bulk of your sales come in the first flush. Of the tens of thousands of books published each year there are a tiny number that have a constant, steady demand. Few match "The Catcher in the Rye" with sales exceeding 400,000 a year. That's just an anomaly.
I had a magic manufacturer some years back tell me that at that time the market was so well-penetrated that with a new product properly advertised he would see 70-80% of his sales in the first few months of availablity.
This is why most magic books, compared to editions by mainstream publishers, have such small print runs. The market and the publisher's experience dictate the size of the run.
The market will support a run of five hundred or a thousand and that's the book's "life" or the actual demand for the title over a reasonable amount of time to justify the expense of publishing and provide a decent return on investment.
Once the book sells out can take years for demand to build up sufficient to spend the money on another print run. With a lot of books it never happens. They've lived their "lives" in the initial print run and what demand there is handled by the secondary/used market.
The torrents only make the demand less likely to build to the point where the cost of a reprint is justified if people can get the information on screen in a pdf for free.
After that, the buyers drop off and sales dribble in. A bit of publicity and there may be a spike of interest, but the bulk of your sales come in the first flush. Of the tens of thousands of books published each year there are a tiny number that have a constant, steady demand. Few match "The Catcher in the Rye" with sales exceeding 400,000 a year. That's just an anomaly.
I had a magic manufacturer some years back tell me that at that time the market was so well-penetrated that with a new product properly advertised he would see 70-80% of his sales in the first few months of availablity.
This is why most magic books, compared to editions by mainstream publishers, have such small print runs. The market and the publisher's experience dictate the size of the run.
The market will support a run of five hundred or a thousand and that's the book's "life" or the actual demand for the title over a reasonable amount of time to justify the expense of publishing and provide a decent return on investment.
Once the book sells out can take years for demand to build up sufficient to spend the money on another print run. With a lot of books it never happens. They've lived their "lives" in the initial print run and what demand there is handled by the secondary/used market.
The torrents only make the demand less likely to build to the point where the cost of a reprint is justified if people can get the information on screen in a pdf for free.
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
And how do I know that? Well, let's see ... perhaps it's the low volume of sales? Duh.
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
To be honest..I didn't realize just how many of your older books you still had available until just now when I checked out that section of the site. In the past, if I wanted a Kaufman book the first place I looked was eBay, then some of the used book stores and finally some of the forums. The thought to check and see if you still had a book available that was originally published over a decade ago really didn't cross my mind, as I'm sure it doesn't cross the mind of many others. This may be one thing that is helping to cause a lower volume a sales. It's a shame too because although the books may be available cheaper elsewhere I generally try to support the original publisher if I can in order to help persuade them to publish more content. But I already own nearly all of the Kaufman publications that I want. :(
Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
Richard Kaufman wrote:And how do I know that? Well, let's see ... perhaps it's the low volume of sales? Duh.
Just because sales are down does not establish causality with pirating.
There could be any number of reasons why sales are down: slow economy, less people choose magic as their hobby, too many other products, ...
How do you know it is pirating? Who knows maybe pirating even has a positive effect on sales but the other factors still mean your overal sales go down.
Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
The author Paulo Coelho has demonstrated that online book piracy has increased sales of his books in hard copy.
One of Coelho's fans posted a Russian translation of one of his novels online and sales of his books increased from 3,000 to 100,000 to 1m in three years, claims a report in The Guardian.
"This happened in English, in Norwegian, in Japanese and Serbian," Coelho said. "Now when the book is released in hard copy, the sales are spectacular."
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/ ... les-441677
The results of these findings suggest that free PDFs can significantly help to market a new book, and even give books that have been on the market for a while a second marketing push. In one case, a book saw sales increase by 155 percent because of a free download.
http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-1048.html
For the data they studied, pirated content show an increase after about 25 weeks and this seemed to cause a renewed interest in OReilly content and thus caused an increase in sales of about 20%.
http://www.teleread.org/2009/05/28/the- ... ook-sales/
One of Coelho's fans posted a Russian translation of one of his novels online and sales of his books increased from 3,000 to 100,000 to 1m in three years, claims a report in The Guardian.
"This happened in English, in Norwegian, in Japanese and Serbian," Coelho said. "Now when the book is released in hard copy, the sales are spectacular."
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/ ... les-441677
The results of these findings suggest that free PDFs can significantly help to market a new book, and even give books that have been on the market for a while a second marketing push. In one case, a book saw sales increase by 155 percent because of a free download.
http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-1048.html
For the data they studied, pirated content show an increase after about 25 weeks and this seemed to cause a renewed interest in OReilly content and thus caused an increase in sales of about 20%.
http://www.teleread.org/2009/05/28/the- ... ook-sales/
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
A magic book that sold 3,000 copies is a runaway hit. What magic book ever hit 100,000 in sales?
Comparing mainstream writers and publishers with a potentially wide appeal to niche marketing that services a tiny market doesn't work.
Comparing mainstream writers and publishers with a potentially wide appeal to niche marketing that services a tiny market doesn't work.
Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
David Alexander wrote:A magic book that sold 3,000 copies is a runaway hit. What magic book ever hit 100,000 in sales?
Comparing mainstream writers and publishers with a potentially wide appeal to niche marketing that services a tiny market doesn't work.
Niche sci-fi author Cory Doctorow puts it much better than I can. Heck, he *is* a writer...
:)
I think he makes some very interesting points and explains why *he* chooses to give away his books:
Why do you give away your books?
For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy. Mega-hit best-sellers in science fiction sell half a million copies -- in a world where 175,000 attend the San Diego Comic Con alone, you've got to figure that most of the people who "like science fiction" (and related geeky stuff like comics, games, Linux, and so on) just don't really buy books. I'm more interested in getting more of that wider audience into the tent than making sure that everyone who's in the tent bought a ticket to be there.
Ebooks are verbs, not nouns. You copy them, it's in their nature. And many of those copies have a destination, a person they're intended for, a hand-wrought transfer from one person to another, embodying a personal recommendation between two people who trust each other enough to share bits. That's the kind of thing that authors (should) dream of, the proverbial sealing of the deal. By making my books available for free pass-along, I make it easy for people who love them to help other people love them.
What's more, I don't see ebooks as substitute for paper books for most people. It's not that the screens aren't good enough, either: if you're anything like me, you already spend every hour you can get in front of the screen, reading text. But the more computer-literate you are, the less likely you are to be reading long-form works on those screens -- that's because computer-literate people do more things with their computers. We run IM and email and we use the browser in a million diverse ways. We have games running in the background, and endless opportunities to tinker with our music libraries. The more you do with your computer, the more likely it is that you'll be interrupted after five to seven minutes to do something else. That makes the computer extremely poorly suited to reading long-form works off of, unless you have the iron self-discipline of a monk.
The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper.
So ebooks sell print books. Every writer I've heard of who's tried giving away ebooks to promote paper books has come back to do it again. That's the commercial case for doing free ebooks.
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/#freedownload
From the FAQ on his novel Little Brother (now it's 8th reprinting)
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
I don't care what you think: you're not book publishers or authors in the field of magic.
Giving away electronic versions of The Complete Works of Derek Dingle (for example) is not going to generate extra sales: it's going to cannibalize sales of the hard copies.
Giving away electronic versions of The Complete Works of Derek Dingle (for example) is not going to generate extra sales: it's going to cannibalize sales of the hard copies.
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Re: One way to stop The Pirate Bay. Buy it.
David, I give you that certain characteristics are different, but customer behavior is the same. Customers don't change just because they are buying a book in a niche market versus a mainstream book. After all, they are buying a book they are interested in.
If piracy has a marketing effect increasing sales with mainstream books, then it will have a similar effect with niche books. Actually the effect could be bigger because mainstream books do have a larger ad budget. This means more already know about it and the piracy-marketing-effect will be reduced. However, in niche markets where ad budgets are pretty much zero, the piracy-marketing-effect could be bigger.
It makes a lot of sense. Think about it. I consider myself a magic nut, buying, studying, reading magic much more than the casual magic hobbyist. At least that is my perception. However, even for a nut like me, it is impossible to keep up with all new releases and catch up on old ones that I have missed. So naturally those that I hear more often about are more likely on my shopping list. Now extrapolate this to the casually interested hobbyist. For him or her this would be much more pronounced. He might have never heard about Kaufman books. On a torrent he downloads a Kaufman book. Likes it and searches out other Kaufman books, potentially ending up subscribing to Genii and buying several of his books.
It is really not so hard to understand the mechanism. What is difficult to judge is the degree at which this is happening, and at what degree simple piracy to avoid paying for it takes place.
If piracy has a marketing effect increasing sales with mainstream books, then it will have a similar effect with niche books. Actually the effect could be bigger because mainstream books do have a larger ad budget. This means more already know about it and the piracy-marketing-effect will be reduced. However, in niche markets where ad budgets are pretty much zero, the piracy-marketing-effect could be bigger.
It makes a lot of sense. Think about it. I consider myself a magic nut, buying, studying, reading magic much more than the casual magic hobbyist. At least that is my perception. However, even for a nut like me, it is impossible to keep up with all new releases and catch up on old ones that I have missed. So naturally those that I hear more often about are more likely on my shopping list. Now extrapolate this to the casually interested hobbyist. For him or her this would be much more pronounced. He might have never heard about Kaufman books. On a torrent he downloads a Kaufman book. Likes it and searches out other Kaufman books, potentially ending up subscribing to Genii and buying several of his books.
It is really not so hard to understand the mechanism. What is difficult to judge is the degree at which this is happening, and at what degree simple piracy to avoid paying for it takes place.