[bart_spoon]

I think it is your reasoning that is naive. Of course there are people using IA to access a book that, were it not free, would not buy the book. These people are neither plus nor minus in terms of revenue. But for your point to hold, everyone who downloaded the content would have to fall into this category. Almost certainly a large number of users would be those who might potentially buy the book but will simply download it if its free. These people would be lost revenue.

You can argue about the size of this group, but the counter argument would be that there is a valid fear that if it is normalized and allowed to continue, this group will grow larger and larger over time. You can argue by trying to compare this to libraries, but libraries still buy their copies of the book, and checking a book out from a library comes with restrictions that don't exist here. There really isn't a way to spin this where it doesn't result in some amount of lost royalties for the author.

[kerkeslager]

We can go back and forth with thinking each others' reasoning is naive, but reasoning isn't how we discover the truth. Frankly, to both sides of this argument, real-world evidence or GTFO.

There's plenty of totally reasonable hypotheses for why giving away content can be profitable OR unprofitable, and plenty of real-life examples of both as well. The fact is, with regards to this situation, we don't know, and this conversation shouldn't center around a problem that some people have only hypothesized exists.