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Books: Does piracy now = marketing?

Started by mathewi · 1 year ago

Torrentfreak has the fascinating tale of an author — Brazilian-born “magical realist” novelist Paulo Coelho — who has been busily “pirating” his own books, including setting up a dedicated website to point potential readers to ... Continue reading »

4 comments

  • So let me see if I get this straight...p2p is responsible for album sales declining last year but responsible for skyrocketing book sales. But somehow this is evidence that p2p is an effective marketing tool for both. That makes perfect sense. Oh no, I'm picking on you again, better call a bunch of twitter people to protect you :)

    No, no...I kid...I'm just messin' with you

    But seriously, in the case of a book the physical copy is vastly superior to the digital version (sorry Kindle). So digital distribution is an effective marketing tool for books. That isn't true of music which sounds the same on an iPod no matter what.

    I'm not saying it isn't true of music too, I don't think it is but my point is just to point out that they are different concepts and what is true for one isn't necessarily true for the other.
  • Nice to hear from you again so soon, Tom. And you'll notice that no one
    responded to my Twitter call :-)

    First of all, who said that p2p was responsible for album sales declining? I
    never said it was, and I certainly don't think it's the only factor. --
    perhaps not even the major factor. Legal music downloads, of which there
    have been a few hundred million or so this year, likely have a lot to do
    with it as well.

    In any case, you're quite right that books differ from music, in part
    because people still want the physical product. But I fail to see why p2p
    can't be considered marketing in either case -- in the case of the music
    industry it's just marketing for something different, such as a concert tour
    or a T-shirt or a special boxed set of discs. Same concept.
  • I've heard of this to some extent, but thanks for clarifying. I do know some people are putting links and other promotional material in ebooks, then giving them away for free. If the ebook gets passed around, it becomes a free viral marketing strategy for whatever they are promoting inside. Some also say that because Google likes .pdfs, they get a ton of backlinks if the ebook is distributed and posted around on the net (because they put a link to their site in the .pdf and Google reads .pdfs).
  • i am a14 year old girl and i was wondering if anyone knew of any good books i could rent at the library today. i uasually rent nonfiction beauty books and meg cabot books but i rented them all already

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