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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31861
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31861
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

It appears to be just the cost of doing business. Pretty much everything I am going to say here comes from [https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/book-piracy-a-non-issue/](https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/book-piracy-a-non-issue/) but I will sumarize.

First, in the days of paper, authors only got paid for a fraction of the people who read their book. Many readers borrowed the book from a library or from a friend. Many bought them a second hand book stores. Many read them in the common room library of Inns and B and Bs or found them abandoned on the train.

Ebooks could actually mean more sales for authors since you can't lend or resell an ebook.

And it is vanishingly unlikely that pirated ebooks represent lost revenues. The people who pirate books were likely not going to buy them if they could not get them for free. And since (unlike physical goods) there is no unit cost for a ebook, you don't suffer shrinkage or a lost sale.

This is why, as Tim O’Reilly explains in a quote in the linked article, O’Reilly books does not use DRM. He reckons it is actually better to sell 10,000 books and have 100,000 readers than to sell 10,000 books and have only 10,000 readers.

You will probably make a lot more money by spending your time and energy on writing more and better books than by worrying about book piracy.

Original score: 102