sweno Wrote:I think that Ayiekie's point of piracy = hurt sales may be (and probably is) true for software.By the by, thank you Sweno (and a shoutout to Wengfook as well) for acknowledging that piracy hurts software sales (well, at least conceding it as a "probably"). I'm not being sarcastic - I have been in enough of these debates that I was honestly startled to see somebody acknowledge that rather than blithely ignore it.
But books are not software, and there are distinct benefits to having a physical copy over a digital copy (even if I sometimes forget that).
But Ayiekie requested evidence, so here is what I can find:
Baen (previously mentioned)
Scientific study of 41 books and how free ebooks affected sales (hint: they went up)
And several authors have also tried this out and found it works:
Nathan Henrion, Peter Watts and Cory Doctorow are just the ones I can remember. I'm sure there are others out there that I don't know of.
I do really think you're onto something with books, Sweno (at least until Kindles or equivalent are so widespread that ebooks are equally desirable to regular books). The problem is that I can't really see manga as being equivalent to books; the advantage to having a physical copy is there, but it is so much smaller than that of having a scanlation (and scanlations offer their own advantages, notably a faster release schedule and being able to easily grab everything that's available, as well as, obviously, it being free) that I do not believe it overcomes the overall tendancy of people to pirate and not buy.
Taking your evidence into consideration I'll admit that the impact of scanlations may be less than (for instance) fansubs, but I find it difficult to believe it would actually help the industry, given both my posted reasoning for why there isn't a strong aversion to scanlations as a product unto themselves and the real-world marketplace performance where manga sales in both America and Japan have collapsed in the past several years (and in Japan's case, this does not correlate with the global recession for certain; I'd have to check when the massive decline of American manga sales began). On a smaller scale it's worth noting that several series' that were popular in scanlation (Bo-bobo-etc. springs most readily to mind) absolutely tanked in official release, further indicating that scanlations |= sales.