$3 billion online book piracy dwarfed by $1 trillion cost of offline pirates

I love the smell of satire in the morning.

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A lovely post on the cost to the publishing industry of offline piracy from the Go to Hellman blog.

“Apparently, over 2 billion books were “loaned” last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go to Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself.”