

Paulo Coelho advertises on Pirate Bay front page  - rafamvc
http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2012/01/28/promo-bay/

======
nextparadigms
Something tells me MPAA and RIAA will desperately try to make the US Gov take
down TPB's site now too.

Piracy scares them, but real competition at this level where they can actually
poach popular artists from them must terrify them.

~~~
throwaway64
yes, it is interesting MegaUpload got taken out shortly before it was going to
launch its own label/music distribution system.

~~~
pyre
... but the investigation that lead to the take-down was 2 years in the
making.

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yannis
The most interesting aspect is Paulo Coelho's claim that ".. the physical
sales of my books are growing since my readers post them in P2P sites". This
is in agreement with what web applications used all along---lure users with a
freemium model---and a certain portion of them will eventually buy the
product.

~~~
cf0ed2aa-bdf5
Neil Gaiman has the same opinion as well:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI>

I think one of the effects we can observe here is cognitive dissonance. If
people pirate a book or a movie or an album they like but did not pay for it
they will have to cope with cognitive dissonance. A lot of people with then
buy the book they downloaded to 'make up for it' and/or will as Neil suggested
buy the future books of the newly discovered author.

The web is a great place to discover new things and it seems that Paul Coelho
and Neil Gaiman really see the upside of having their works out there on the
web for free and embrace it.

~~~
melvinmt
This is not cognitive dissonance, this is just guilty conscience that you're
talking about.

~~~
cf0ed2aa-bdf5
I am pretty sure what I am talking about is cognitive dissonance theory as
developed by Leon Festinger.

Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by a conflict of two cognitions.
In this case 1) "I like this book" and 2) "I did not pay for that book even
though I should have".

Now there are a few ways to resolve with that dissonance. A way to do that is
to change one of your cognitions, you could 1) tell yourself that the book
wasn't good at all and therefore not worth paying for, or 2) pay for the book
because you liked it - either way you eliminated the controversy.

~~~
mattgreenrocks
Don't forget the time-honored method of becoming an armchair economist and/or
expert in semantics.

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blakesmith
We're going to see more and more of this as time goes on. Artists are waking
up to the fact that the RIAA/MPAA are preventing them from interacting with
their audiences directly. You're making a very bold statement that speaks
straight to your fans when you align yourself with TPB (and also send a very
direct message to the MPAA/RIAA). Good for him.

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fpp
From Paulo Coelho's blog: ([http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2012/01/20/welcome-to-
pirate-my-b...](http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2012/01/20/welcome-to-pirate-my-
books/)) "...Nowadays, I run a ‘Pirate Coelho’ website, giving links to any
books of mine that are available on P2P sites. And my sales continue to grow —
nearly 140 million copies world wide..."

Chapeau and a great lesson how to do things:

One other way: We should stop accepting the labeling of sites with termini
that create negative soundings with the Vogons of the Entertainment industry
and instead play their game against them by using terminology that they are
more familiar with. That will also make some of them actually read critical
material.

In this case how about "agile communications on literature" or "active user
engagement with the content" or maybe "community building beyond consumption"
(Sorry for the high levels of nonsense but the best way to beat an overly
strong enemy is using their weaknesses and their weapons against them.)

------
tszyn
I think this is a short-lived strategy that translates poorly to other types
of content.

It works for Coelho because reading long-form content sucks on the devices
available to most users today, so people are forced to buy a paper book if
they want a good experience. In other words, the free digital copy serves as a
kind of crippled demo of the real thing -- like trial versions of software.

However, in 5-10 years, tablets and ebook readers will become more popular and
many more people will be able to read those free digital copies on devices
which provide a reading experience that rivals that of printed books. (This is
already possible on iPads and Kindles, but these devices are not widespread
yet.) We'll see how many people want to buy Mr Coelho's printed books when
they are able to get almost the same experience for free on TPB.

With a free digital alternative, the only people who buy something from Coelho
will be those who do it out of sheer gratitude. If you are a Paulo Coelho, you
can survive on that. Extremely popular writers will do fine regardless of
piracy -- kind of like Facebook is doing fine despite the lack of a serious
business model due to the sheer number of users. For less popular authors, the
"free digital giveaway" strategy won't work. Coelho doesn't see that, maybe
because he is assuming that every writer can become a Coelho if only they give
their stuff away for free.

As a case in point, we already know Coelho's strategy (give away digital
version, charge for physical version) does not work for short-form content.
Just look at the newspapers. They're doing the exact same thing: giving away
their stuff for free online and asking people to subscribe to the physical
version for a fee. Not many takers, unfortunately, as the free online version
is "good enough".

Needless to say, I don't see this approach working for movies, music and
software, either. In these cases, physical versions just don't offer enough
value over digital versions for most people.

~~~
unicornporn
E-books will grow a lot, but I don't see paper books becoming the vinyls/cds
of reading. I think paper books will still have clear benefits in 5-10 or even
20 years.

* You can take notes and make drawings in the margins.

* The notes will be saved in a format that reads that will be readable for a very longs time.

* A book lasts a lot of years. Put it in a shelf, it might very well be readable in 150 years.

* It's soothing, it's linear, it doesn't have a thousand purposes. The interwebs isn't a click away.

* You can leave them at a friends place or at the subway after reading. E-book readers today does not promote sharing and I can only suspect future readers will be even worse. Although we can hack them and make copies, most people wont bother. DRM is here to stay.

* It doesn't need batteries. I know e-paper uses little power and things will evolve. But e-books still require energy.

* You can drop them to the floor without breaking them.

------
sloak
Would this work if the author/artist were not as famous as Coelho or Louis
C.K.?

~~~
elwin
To give one example, there's Brad Sucks <http://www.bradsucks.net/about/> ,
who has always distributed his music online for free. Over ten years, he's
built a following and been able to switch from having a day job to being
mostly a full-time musician.

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mitchie_luna
Paulo Coelho is really amazing! He thinks differently. I agree with his ideas
that if P2P sharing is the way of introducing artist's work and a good idea
doesn't need protection. Of course, if the people know that your book or your
music is very good, then for sure, they will buy the hardcopy or the cd
because they want to own a product which was written or produced by well-known
writer or musician.

~~~
lubutu
The truth is many pirates download the work and never actually pay for it,
clearly feeling no real appreciation for the author. Maybe I'm a cynic, but
the problem has never been those of us who will, discovering an artist we
love, buy all their albums. The problem is with those who download for nothing
but selfish consumption.

(Which is why DRM is insane: it only affects those of us who actually buy the
product, while those who (inevitably) pirate it have far more pleasant an
experience.)

~~~
bad_user
But those that only download for consumption, wouldn't necessarily buy those
works. Also when speaking about music, some people will end up going to
concerts - and good bands are earning more from concerts than from CD sales.

~~~
lubutu
If the creator wants to distribute it for free that's fine, but one cannot
argue that when it comes to something like data it's okay to choose how much
you want to pay because "you wouldn't buy it for more than that." You can't
have your cake and eat it too.

I don't think this problem is worth the pain of DRM, but it is a problem
nonetheless.

~~~
pyre

      > it is a problem nonetheless.
    

I think the disagreement is over how much of a problem it is. It's not like
piracy is a new problem.

It's just that:

1\. The Internet has made distribution trivial.

2\. The price-point is now 'free' instead of 'cheaper than the original, but
still costs money.'

3\. Storage is now trivial. It's easy to pirate a 1000 PDFs of actual books.
It's less trivial to deal with 1000 actual books, even if they are free.

In general though, when people are arguing that the pirates wouldn't have paid
for the product at any price, they are attempting to dispel the myth that 1
pirate download = 1 lost sale. It's this calculation that is used time and
again to 'prove' how much of an issue piracy actually is.

------
Raphael
89 seeders on the collection.
[http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6443164/Paulo_Coelho_Ebook_C...](http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6443164/Paulo_Coelho_Ebook_Collection)

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paulovsk
Posso comentar em português nesse texto? Just asking :D

Muito boa a iniciativa do Paulo. Ainda não li nenhum livro dele, mas como é o
preferido de Will Smith, lerei em breve.

~~~
hazov
Translating for others that do know how to read the last flower of Latium.

> Posso comentar em português nesse texto? Just asking :D

Can I comment this in portuguese in this text? Just asking :D

> Muito boa a iniciativa do Paulo. Ainda não li nenhum livro dele, mas como é
> o preferido de Will Smith, lerei em breve.

Very good initiative from Paulo. I have not read any of his books yet, but he
is a favorite of Will Smith, I will do so soon.

Rather literal but does the job...

My response for you.

I did read a book from him after my then girlfriend recommend it, I really
hated it, I do not like the style of his writing and the esoteric thematic of
the book, it was also one of the earliest novels that he published and so it
had grammatically poor Portuguese.

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nathanpc
This is how you do it in the internet era.

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juliano_q
I am a not a big fan of his books, even reading a few of them occasionally.
But I am really proud of this guy being a brazilian. Great ideas.

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cstefanovici
This is great.

