TOC: Piracy may boost sales, research suggests
13.10.09 | Catherine Neilan
A year-long study has revealed that peer-to-peer piracy could actually boost sales, rather than eat into overall purchases.
Brian O'Leary, founder of publishing consultancy Magellan Media, measured the impact of peer-to-peer piracy on titles published by the US house O'Reilly for 71 weeks. At today's Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt, the first in Europe, he revealed that while non-pirated books (both print and e-books) showed a "trending decline" after an initial sales peak, the sample titles saw a second peak at the onset of piracy. From week 19, which is on average when titles began to be pirated, to week 23, which was the average second peak, sales rose 90%.
O'Leary told The Bookseller: "You would expect, if piracy had the net effect of reducing sales, that the curve declining before piracy activity started would decline even faster because people had access to digital content. At first, we expected that there would not be decline, but we did not expect an uptick. What we saw was not just an uptick, but a strong uptick."
The time lag before pirating activity occured also suggested that negative impact would be less significant, he said.
The sample sizes were small—40-45 non-pirated books and 21 pirated books—and O'Leary told delegates he was "here to recruit" participants to build on the research so far. Thomas Nelson titles were added to those being studied in August, and he urged other interested publishers to get in touch or "at least go back to measure and find out what is going on with their books".
O'Leary hypothesised that O'Reilly titles would be more negatively affected by piracy than trade publishers' titles, because they do not carry DRM and are marketed to a "technically sophisticated audience". Professional publishers, meanwhile, would be hit worse than O'Reilly books. "We are not pro-piracy – we believe in the value of intellectual property," he said. "But if pirated content helps someone, it's at least viable marketing position."
Comments on this article
By The Geoff
There's a fair few potential problems with this dataset. Firstly it's (by admission) too small to be particularly meaningful. Secondly it's (again, by admission) a niche market, and one concerned with itself in this context. O'Reilly write books for coders, and coders prefer to have a real book *and* an ebook. Seriously, the geeks often prefer a real book; switching between your code, output and ebook is a hassle, better to have a paper copy next to you, and it enforces little breaks for the eyes and hands. So it's about piracy amongst coders, a demographic who prefer paper books and can most easily pirate the paper books they've bought. The spike in piracy could even just be a statistical lag between the near instant spread of pirated versions and the considerable delay in real sales figures, including returns and the like, are reported by whatever source, Neilsen I'm guessing. It's very interesting and all, but there's just too many variables and too small a sample size, it's not actually saying anything meaningful.13 Oct 09 20:35
By Peter Cox
This is the sort of optimistic news that we in the publishing business are more than keen to hear. Sadly, it flies in the face of both common sense and indeed the experience of the music business, where estimates suggest (Zentner, University of Chicago) that piracy reduces the probability of buying music by 35% to 65%. Apologies for the reality-check...15 Oct 09 16:27
By Robert
Geoff: What the data suggests is that people sampled pirated versions of the books, then went out to buy the preferred paper copy. In other words, piracy worked as a cheap form of advertising. Your presumption that "computer geeks" are more likely to buy a paper book than the average Joe, is questionable. Peter: The problem with research on piracy is that most of it is commissioned by the media industry. Independent studies on the other hand show that: * pirates buy more music than the average person * sales are shifting from hit list artists to niche artists * sales are shifting from CDs to online sales and concert tickets * the music industry as a whole is enjoying steadily increasing profits Here is an article explaining why 75% of all artists profit from file-sharing: http://torrentfreak.com/why-most-artists-profit-from-piracy/ An interesting fact here from Sweden, is that while the movie industry is supposedly dieing, the Swedish cinemas continue to report record sales each summer.23 Oct 09 10:25
