I'm confused how the author knows that piracy caused the decline in sales. Wouldn't sales naturally decay over time anyway? The author doesn't even know the month the book was pirated, so I'm pretty skeptical that they've measured the impact of piracy reliably.
I also doubt that pirating a book selling 100 copies a month would be worthwhile for an Amazon employee with the needed access and know-how. If I had to pirate an ebook with zero insider connections I would just use a script, maybe something like autoit, to page through the ebook on my Kindle Cloud Reader and screenshot every page. Use tesseract to do OCR on the collection and now I have a poorly formatted copy of your book. I assume I could spend a bit more time on this and come up with something better that would keep formatting.
I agree that piracy is bad and basically theft (disclosure, I pirated Excession because it wasn't available on Kindle and I knew I wouldn't buy a physical copy and Iain Banks is dead so I don't feel bad). I don't think this post is particularly compelling though.
I also doubt that pirating a book selling 100 copies a month would be worthwhile for an Amazon employee with the needed access and know-how. If I had to pirate an ebook with zero insider connections I would just use a script, maybe something like autoit, to page through the ebook on my Kindle Cloud Reader and screenshot every page. Use tesseract to do OCR on the collection and now I have a poorly formatted copy of your book. I assume I could spend a bit more time on this and come up with something better that would keep formatting.
I agree that piracy is bad and basically theft (disclosure, I pirated Excession because it wasn't available on Kindle and I knew I wouldn't buy a physical copy and Iain Banks is dead so I don't feel bad). I don't think this post is particularly compelling though.