The y-axis then represents how much that book’s sales changed after someone seeded it, I assume by uploading a torrent. So some books increased by 10-20%, some decreased by 10-20% and some remained unchanged. In general, there is no correlation between how much a book was selling vs. how much it changed after seeding.

Like others, I’m not really sure why this correlation would be relevant. A much more interesting correlation would be TOTAL DOWNLOADS vs. sales change.

This would actually tell you more about the effects of file sharing. As it is, we don’t even know if these books were traded.

Of course, there could be more slides showing more interesting graphs. I wasn’t able to get any out of the “slide deck” though — I seemed to be able to get a bunch of audio files.

Hope you’ll post notifications of when that (and other videos of interest, such as your own blistering indictment of Amazon and Audible for their DRM) becomes available.

The y axis is the change in average weekly sales seen in the four weeks after a seed first appears for a title. The baseline is the average weekly sale for the four weeks before the seed was seen. The x axis is the average number of units sold in the four weeks prior for a total of eight titles tracked.

This slide shows a test for “bigger book” bias (there wasn’t much of one). The next slide in the presentation demonstrates the positive correlation of seeds to growth in sales.

/goes off to find screwdriver/

(*Judging by what I see on torrent sites)

Of course, if it is pirated, I will probably add my own work to the report and track the change in sales.

We are conditioned to fetishize consumer goods. Along comes this new technology and many of us can’t help ourselves, we hoard.

I still don’t completely get what it’s showing, other than that post seed sales and prior sales have a very weak (and probably not significant) positive correlation. I’d personally want more data. Doesn’t seem like a lot to go on.

Do pirated editions cannibalize existing sales? Do they contribute to existing sales? Do they have no impact? Do the impact in unpredictable ways?

I would love the value-added to this data that a bit of your inimitable contextualizing might provide.

I’d like to see other presentations too, if there are any available online.

Did you see the post on BBG the other day on the miniature projectors? Perhaps we can form a small corporation, and send in a request for, say, 3 of the mini projectors. Perhaps my rubber ducky will see new life as a cyborg.

Downloadable free books — pirated or no — and libraries serve the public by offering free “loss leader” samples of authors’ (and by extension publishers’) works (or in business parlance, “product”), and many readers will then migrate to the hard stuff, from reading online to reading actual printed books, or from borrowing books to buying them.

(And don’t forget that not everyone downloads books. In addition to people who just find books easier to handle, there are also many people who are not technologically savvy or affluent enough to download books or use book-readers. Many people don’t even have their own computers or are dropping their home internet access in these hard times. They use the library’s computers instead.)

Libraries also fill a gap in the system by offering access to out-of-print and back-catalog books that may be hard to come by either in print or online, making it easier for readers of series or completists who like an author or genre and want to read *everything*. This actually builds demand for future books of that author or genre, and if the readers don’t buy them, they will often urge their libraries to. Which may lead to more readers and eventually more demand.