Thieves and ignorance.

[Margo]

I'm not going to get back into the justifications argument for stealing ebooks, but I thought people might want to hear about an experiment run by Andrew Burt of the Critters Workshop. He made an ebook available for sale and also put it up on bittorrent for free after a poll he had put up on 'pirate channels' indicated overwhelmingly that the pirates would willingly pay a 'fair price' donation to a writer if a book was made available for free. In fact, in the poll, the pirates indicated that their 'fair price' on average was higher than what he was going to charge on other sites. So how many people downloaded the free bittorrent and then paid the 'fair price' donation? Less than 1%. So much for the idea that stealing leads to purchasing.

Kind of reminds me of all the people who say in surveys that they desperately need bus service in an area, but then the route gets one rider a month (literally). What people say they will do and what people actually do...not the same thing.

Easy to steal. Too time consuming to be honest.

[Guardian]

Margo. It's always depending on the material and the advertisement. Few pages ago I mentioned another, different example, "Metro 2033" by Dimitrij Glukovszkij, who achieved the opposite, something what Andrew Burt unfortunately couldn't achieve with his "The Last Flight of the Sarah Mae". "M2033" was a quality material (I never read TLFotSM, so I can't tell anything about it's quality.) and M2033 was advertised very well. It had it's own official homepage, few updates from the author, and the guy slowly built up his fanbase to few hundred thousands (Which is a pretty good number even for a first time author, but it's fantastic for a free novel.)... then M2033 is became a national bestseller, first in Russia, then it's became a known series all around the world. I'm wondering this is not worked in the U.S. as this M2033 Experiment was in Russia, where torrent downloads are usually between high and very high. Well, it seems it's also depending on the region or maybe Mr. Burt made a mistake in the marketing. Or Mr. Glukovszkij knew a trick how to grab the audience's attention, something what Mr. Burt maybe didn't know. The possibilities are endless. But as you can present a negative example, I can present a positive example. And M2033 wasn't the only novel which is worked on this way (It's just my favorite example.).

EDIT: I just checked the torrent of the The Last Flight of the Sarah Mae. 3 seeds and 0 leechers. Total downloads: 8,618. First of all, something is definitely not right with this if you have only 3 seeds (Person who is actually sharing the product), 0 leechers (Means, there is no active downloader), uploaded 276 days ago and there was only 8,618 downloads since it's release (Average is 31 downloads per day. It's a really poor average. Well, even my little website had much more visits on it's first weeks per day and it was just an "under construction" static website in those weeks, not a downloadable product what people can read for free.). And the most important in this case; there is not a single comment for this torrent. So #1: people maybe didn't like it as there are no feedbacks at all. Not a single one, #2, based on the poor share and daily downloads ratio, presumably it wasn't advertised properly. If there would be, I don't know... 150 seeds, 450 leechers, total downloads: 50,000 within 150 days, I would say, you're right. But in this case I must say, unfortunately this product, this experiment is presumably failed because of the lack of marketing and advertisement (Even in this case you need a proper marketing or people won't know about it at all. Especially if you're making an experiment, like this one.). I can't and I won't judge the novel as I haven't read it yet. Maybe it's a really good novel (I hope so.), but if it's not advertised, it won't go anywhere and it won't sell. I just analyzed at the statistics and everything is told by the numbers.