It's all Bram Cohen's fault
Charles Petzold on why he doesn't sell as many books as he used to : (Undoubtedly another factor contributing to crummy book sales is BitTorrent, but that's so painful an issue I can barely bring myself to discuss it.) This is so much bullshit. Every idiot who comes up with this excuse should be required to pay a zillion bucks for a lecture by Eric Flint. The simple fact is that if a well-paid US computer programmer finds it cheaper to spend a few hours looking for a book torrent on the 'net and downloading it, then you're doing something really wrong. Where is the link to the ebook variant, Charles? Put it on the freaking web for 10 bucks and you'll have removed any incentive to look for a free version. Anyone still doing that would never have bought the paper version of your book anyway. (I paid $25 for The Tomes of Delphi and another $50, if I remember correctly, for shipping.) Another problem, of course - as Eric points out - is that most people never know a...