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cool. yes, IP laws are nonsense, of course, but there's also the fact that the publishing industry is highly exploitative. I wrote a few books, but publishers know that academics have to do that for their CV, and they use that mercilessly. I get a notice every year that cumulative royalties or all my books combined come to about 10 Euro. Of course, academic books don't sell that much, but percentage-wise, it's still peanuts. If you're unknown, they TAKE money from you to sell your book and keep the money; if you're a bit better known, they do it for free and pay you 2-5% of revenue from the 401st or 801st book on; very rarely do you get paid from the get-go. So yeah, go search for your books wherever you like. The authors gain a lot more by exposure and virality of the book than they ever would from the sales price, unless you'r e George R.R. Martin or something (and even here, the virality of the book made him a lot more money through licensing than book royalties ever did).
Oh yeah. I saw a midlist author years ago complain that he'd lost 10K book sales based on the torrent numbers he saw. As if all 10K folks who downloaded the book would ever have bought it. There were probably 20 folks like that, another 1000 who discovered his work from the torrent, and just under 9K who downloaded it and never read it at all because ebooks are tiny and it's easy to download a ton.
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oh, absolutely. There are tons of studies on this, that piracy in the end is free PR much more than it is a straight up loss. The "2 download 0 1 lost sale" fiction is lobbied for by the publishers in courts, so courts use that fiction to calculate losses for the publisher, which increases penalties for those unfortunate souls who got picked up for it. It's widely known that these calculations are legal fictions, and BS.
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