Vermutet habe ich es schon lange und Paulo Coelho ist sehr gut damit gefahren: Buchkopien online stellen fördert den Verkauf. Coelho betreibt (anfangs heimlich) seine eigene “Piratenseite” für seine Werke mit dem Erfolg, dass seine Bücher deutlich mehr verkauft wurden. Über seine Erfahrungen berichtete er auf einer Konferenz und unterstützte Pirate Bay öffentlich während ihres Prozesses.

Brian F. O’Leary fand nun eine Korrelation zwischen Buch-Kopien und Verkaufszahlen:

With a larger data set, we tried plotting the average paid sales of pirated and un-pirated content using a common starting point (that is, we plotted sales data week-by-week after publication). The results of the week-by-week and four-week rolling averages are shown on slides 28 and 29 of the BEA presentation. Both pirated and un-pirated titles showed similar growth in sales in the first few weeks after a title is published, followed by a decline after peak. Average sales for unpirated content start higher and peak later, although this may reflect the specific nature of titles in a small sample.

The primary difference between sales of pirated and unpirated content appeared in weeks 19 through 25, when sales for pirated content peaked a second time at a level higher than that seen in the first, sell-in period. This second peak followed the time (19 weeks) at which the average pirated O’Reilly front-list title was first seeded on a P2P site.

We stress that this is correlation, not causality, but the difference in the sales profile is notable and persists even when using rolling averages.

The impact of piracy

Impact of Piracy and Free on Book Sales (BEA 2009, Powerpoint) 2.0 MB

via BoingBoing