With all due respect, Keira, you’re wrong. Authors should be concerned. Piracy is a long and painful hill, but the ball was rolling a long time ago, and it’s only going to pick up speed from now on. If the publishing industry continues to treat digital readers as it does now, it will run into the same problems as the music industry — an entire generation, their future prime consumer demographic, will not believe in paying for ebooks — and unlike the music industry, authors don’t have concerts and tour merchandise to sustain them as it stands now.

Technology and consumer demands both move faster than old industries. I foresee a lot of painful confrontations with reality in the next two decades.

However, the reaction from authors IS misguided in many cases. Focusing on the morality of downloading creative properly illegally isn’t going to stop it. Nothing will.

That’s right, nothing. Not legislation (cutting off people’s internet access for downloading a book is like repo-ing their car for driving to Shop and Save and stealing a pair of argyle socks), not DRM (with every technological advancement, there are 1000 ‘crackers’ online waiting to unlock it or circumvent it for fun and share the keys with the world), not even lowering prices and allowing swapping and all of the things ebook sellers and distributors SHOULD be doing but aren’t. Preaching certainly isn’t going to work.

Of course, making consumers happy through all of those open-access, lower prices strategies is the one path in the above list that will limit illegal downloading to the ignorant, the jerks, and the hoarders who don’t read them anyway.

But by all means, let some authors whine and cry about piracy and piss off old and potential new readers alike. More sales for me when I enter the market.

The smart people adapt. The stupid die.

It’s a cruel, cruel world out there.

That made sense to me. Sure there are other ways to read pirated ebooks other than a Kindle or Sony Reader, but most people are too lazy to do it and too distracted to read on the computer.

In addition, I think the average reader isn’t computer literate enough or doesn’t care enough to probe the internet for stolen copies of books. Music? Sure. Movies? Definitely. Books? Not so much.

Isn’t there studies somewhere that show how few people in America actually read books? Or how little they read? I’m fairly certain I read somewhere that the average American adult reads less than 10 books a year. How many sales can an author actually lose?

Found the article about ebooks: http://torrentfreak.com/publishers-fear-ebook-piracy-but-shouldnt