Consider hoarders. These are pirates who literally attempt to find every single book online that they can. These pirates are well documented. They’re obsessive collectors, list makers, compelled by something other than a love of literature. They do read many books, but when you see someone in a forum bragging about acquiring thousands of books a month, you’re not seeing someone who was going to be buying thousands of books had you only figured out how to wave a wand and banish piracy. So assuming all downloads are lost sales is a very dogmatic position to take. Not all downloads are lost sales.

As ebooks become more common, I wonder how much the performative and aesthetic aspects of book purchasing and display will change. I have an enormous bookshelf of books that I’ve spent the last couple of years building, with books I’ve found second hand, bought online and hunted for. I haven’t read half of them. Maybe downloading a gigabyte of ebooks will become part of the performative aspect of reading.

This is mainly because collectors stealing your book were never going to read or buy it. The other stealers are either about to become superfans, or are using the piracy as a discoverability method (like listening to radio before buying a CD, from their POV) to sample your work. So you get small loss in sales from people not buying it but pirating it, but a corresponding increase in buying readers who convert to paying fans after discoverability.

I guess the other thought is that many people purchase books and never read them. I wonder if, with the absence of the performative / collecting aspects of book purchasing, people will purchase fewer ebooks but read more of the books they actually purchase. I’ve been buying ebooks semi-regularly for the last couple of months, and have found that I’ll happily buy an ebook at any price up to $10, but only if I want to read it immediately. I have $50 printed books I bought 6 months ago that I’ve yet to open.

In any case, there’ll be some interesting data to be found tracking who buys ebooks and who actually reads them. A low price for ebooks might overcome the expectation that a digital file should be cheaper – even if the production costs of an ebook are the same as a print edition. But it might be harder to overcome the lack of a physical display of a book collection. I wonder how long before we see digital collected issues of ebooks, in the way we already see for DVDs?