Pirating doesn't hurt sales imo. Pirates won't buy a product, they want to possess it. If they read it is a different thing. The bad thing though is, others pay a lot of money for that information, which is then available for a lot more ppl then it was supposed to be.

And not every person is privy to torrents, so a pirate can easily send a pm to a random newbie and sell a super expensive ebook for half price. I feel that if you are going to be a sole distributor of a thinly targetted product, then you owe it to yourself and to your costomers to keep that product protected. I have quite a few text books at home (and I'm certainly not special here), but I can find <1% of the illustrations, and very little of direct quotes. If, while putting a book out strictly on ebook formats,the author cannot protect his or her product, then s/he would be better putting out the book in print.

It's obviously great to have the technical stuff at one's fingertips but perfect application is impossible as that means adjusting to opponents perfectly.On top of the technical stuff in the books is mixing play and adjusting well,and that requires skill and practice.

Because it's impossible to scan stuff?

I'm not sure there is a practical way to protect 'expensive' information you want to sell on the open market. You can embed identifying information in each copy but even then - that only tells you who distributed it. What then?

How many copies of Theory of Poker are on torrents (honest question because I don't know)? If the potential customers know that they can only get the real product from me, and in a ~book~ then that takes away incentive to steal, and also makes it far harder to have your work pirated.

Pretty much every book both real and of the e- variety is available.

The real pirates in many of these cases are the sites that host them.

They hide behind the "free information, yay" banner. If they were non profit sites, it would at least be an argument, but most of them are not.

For example, one torrent site is run by a guy that just makes money off of affiliates. How much do you think it costs to run some forums on a site? Pennies. And there's no content, it's just stolen material from others. So it's just a business person, too lazy to do something legitimate, making money off of hosting a site where people can more easily steal other people's work. Donations, ads, rakeback (for the poker ones) and other "necessary support to keep this site up" is just a joke of a cover. Run some numbers on how much these sites likely NEED to pay the bills, then ask an affiliate the type of money they make off each person that signs up. These people just make a very nice living off of other people's work. It's unfortunate.

A lot of the people there get a kick out of stealing material, and it's relatively risk free from the user's end, similar to people that talk a bunch of junk in the online poker rooms about fighting or what have you, but are very intimidated by real social encounters.

And a lot of people that steal this material (download, view, etc.), sure they wouldn't have been customers to begin with. But it's not like I can just go into a movie theatre or view some high end lap dance or museum exhibit just because I wouldn't of paid real money to see it. That's not right, and if I did I'd be punished. That doesn't even apply to everybody, because there's always people that would have purchased something that will take the free route, especially if there are no consequences to their actions.

Many people don't see the bigger picture though. The more things that get stolen, the more random people you harass online, the less resistance there will be as governments surely look towards heavier regulation on the internet in the future.

If I had a product that was routinely stolen, and a senator asked a group I was involved with for our opinion on internet regulation, I might be more inclined to say "you know what, it's the wild west out there, people steal my merchandise regularly with no consequence." I'm sure many of you can apply that to a bigger picture and see how this sort of stuff is overall very bad. Even if you don't think it hurts many of the businesses or the users don't get a lot out of the stuff they steal. If anything, there's absolutely no reason for this if nobody is benefiting from it. Many negatives, zero positives, seems pretty simple.