Hard data on ebook piracy versus sales — slides from O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing panel

One of the absolute highlights of the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York this week was Brian O'Leary (Magellan Media), Mac Slocum (O'Reilly), and Chelsea Vaughn (Random House) presenting a panel called Challenging Notions of "Free", which presented a long-term, quantitative study of the effects of ebook piracy on book sales. There's a lot of hot air bandied about by people who argue that free ebooks generate or cannibalize sales, and it's a hard problem to study, but here at last are some good, crunchy stats and analysis to add to the argument.

The authors have generously given me permission to upload their slide-deck to the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerial-ShareAlike license, and they've set up a form for anyone who wants to sign up to get the full report for free when they publish it in a few weeks.

Challenging Notions of "Free"