ebook piracy post rec

[cimorene]

mirabella is so, so right about ebook piracy.

Now, you could make the point that every one of those thousand paperbacks has (presumably) already been bought once, and therefore represents a positive cash flow to the author at some point in the past; while the pirated e-books, by definition, are a commodity that has not resulted in cash flow, ever. This is, strictly speaking, true. But going from Point A - people are getting something for free that they really shouldn't be - to Point B - and therefore the author is being directly harmed by lost sales due to piracy - is like me saying the reason I'm not rich today is that everyone on Earth didn't send me twenty bucks for my birthday every year like my grandmother did. Worse, it's like me making a budget where I spend like every person on Earth is a potential source of twenty bucks every January 24th and then being surprised and pissed off when I come up short.