Intellectual Property Law

The Impact of Piracy on Book Sales

By Marty Schwimmer

Magellan Media Partners: "The Impact of Piracy":

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.

Full post as published by Trademark Blog on June 08, 2009 (boomark / email).