Online Piracy Can Boost Comic Book Sales, Research Finds (torrentfreak.com) 36
A number of studies show that piracy helps movies, TV shows, and music albums find a much wider audience, which in turn, often times, help in boosting their revenue. But what about comic books? A new academic study shows that piracy can have a positive effect on comic book sales, too, albeit under certain conditions. From a report on TorrentFreak: Manga, in particular, has traditionally been very popular on file-sharing networks and sites. These are dozens of large sites dedicated to the comics, which are downloaded in their millions. According to the anti-piracy group CODA, which represents Japanese comic publishers, piracy losses overseas are estimated to be double the size of overseas legal revenue. With this in mind, Professor Tatsuo Tanaka of the Faculty of Economics at Keio University decided to look more closely at how piracy interacts with legal sales. In a natural experiment, he examined how the availability of pirated comic books affected revenue. Interestingly, the results show that decreased availability of pirated comics doesn't always help sales. In fact, for comics that no longer release new volumes, the effect is reversed. "Piracy decreases sales of ongoing comics, but it increases sales of completed comics," Professor Tanaka writes. "To put this another way, displacement effect is dominant for ongoing comics, and advertisement effect is dominant for completed comics," he adds.
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First, when I own physical media I know that I'll have permanent access to the contents, within the scope of my player working and my display and sound system working. Given that I've got VHS and Laserdisc still functioning in the mix I don't think this is all that big of a problem. Online content providers, both properly licensed and unlicensed have shown themselves to be unreliable for a number of reasons. Sometimes a provider clos
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Third, going through the motions can be a means to determine if one really wants to watch something, or if one is just doing it as the path of least resistance. Personally I feel I watch too much TV and spend too much time on the Internet already, without having a streaming service and without having cable or other pay-TV. It makes it a lot easier to actually go do something else besides vegetate on the couch if I find myself not able to make a choice for what to watch.
So your logic is you deny yourself of the obviously better streaming service because it's "too good" and would compel you to use it? I would suggest you apply that thinking to other aspects of your life and see how it goes. E.g., wife too good looking? Trade down to an uglier wife, because after all, you'll be less apt to waste time pursuing sex with her all the time.
That's obvious as hell for Japanese stuff (Score:2)
If it weren't for the original pirates
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It seems that a digital format standard allowing overlay, and then giving free licence to produce those overlays would be a good idea.
For video, I guess that's SRTs (maybe with improved handling so you can provide suggested positioning, color, and contrast along with the text?) and overdubbing, but really what you want to do is give people access to the editor's timestamp and an easy method for adding subs or SAP keyed to it.
Sell the original, fans produce and distribute the translation files. Seems kind o
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Manga in particular doesn't get published in the US until large groups of fans and translation groups put together their own scanlations and publish them
Not actually true. The English-language manga publishers such as Seven Seas make educated guesses based on the source material and content and whether the story will sell in Western markets and roll the dice. I've got the first few volumes of one licenced manga series that never made it all the way to the end with two different publishers because they gue
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What would help sales of manga is making more of it available in an open digital format. Physical manga takes up a lot of space given its entertainment value/time to read. The larger format, superior contrast to standard pulp paper, and higher portability (without a proprietary "reader" application or constant internet connection to read on a website) makes the scannlator's "product" superior.
I recently contributed to a Kickstarter for a certain manga title [kickstarter.com] that has had trouble getting an official English r
But... (Score:2)
But... but... the MAFIAA have told us that that is TEH 3VIL!!!!!!!
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Piracy has saved me plenty. I try to try before I buy. Last time I got burned was Doom 3. Played about 4 hours and hated it. Have not played it since. I downloaded Civilization 6 and what not pleased with it. Deleted the game and saved myself $59.99.
Though consumers want demos, it is not financially wise for publishers to release them. If a consumer tries a demo and dose not like the games, then that is a lost sale. If the consumer has to buy to try and the consumer hates it, then the publisher got
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On Steam, you can ask for refunds on games you played for less than 2 hours.
In fact I sincerely think that Steam did more against piracy than any DRM scheme. They actually responded to many arguments made by pirates :
- You can get refunds (no need to pirate to try)
- You can get games really cheap if you wait (you can still play if you are poor)
- It is convenient : you can play all games you purchased on any PC with Steam installed, and provided you have a good internet connection, once you decide to buy a g
They'd never believe it (Score:2)
Big Media would never believe such a study. Even if Einstein, Hawking, Newton, da Vinci, Galileo, Tesla, Faraday, Keynes, Friedman, and Marx all participated in the study.
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Oh yes, they believe it.
But they will never admit it publicly. Why should they? No matter how much piracy benefits them (if it does), they still want you to pay.
And I'd love to see all these people you mentioned work together. I am not sure that putting so many strong personalities together will go anywhere but it will be quite fun to watch.