What I found in this article: unrealistic suggestion that Google should decide which page on the internet contains or doesn't contain copyrighted material.
What I didn't find:
1. A single piece of data, even of the anecdotal variety, that piracy is responsible for his declining royalties. By his own admission: he doesn't know and there are other trends that might explain decline in print sales.
2. A description of how he tried to find new ways of making money in the world of declining dead-trees sales.
I've bought several technical, self-published books as PDFs. I believe some people (e.g. HN regular Amy Hoy) make decent money doing that. Has the author tried that? No.
I bough 30+ books on my kindle. Did the author try to self-publish on kindle in order to get higher royalties (70% vs., say, 15% from print) hence more revenue (even with lower price)? No.
His books would be perfect for such an experiment because he already has an audience thanks to 4 popular books he wrote in the past.
Essentially every page on the internet contains copyrighted material. Which pages contain copyright infringing material is another matter entirely. Because copyright is based on permission, you have to know who has given whom permission to do what, and that data simply isn't available. You can guess, but if third parties became legally liable for being wrong, things would get ugly fast.
For example, just the other day, the book "Basics of Compiler Design" was up on HN. The authors are giving a PDF of it away for personal use and at-cost reprinting. If one naively assumed that everyone giving away PDFs of published books was some sort of evil pirate, they'd have been banned from Google for their generosity.
What I didn't find:
1. A single piece of data, even of the anecdotal variety, that piracy is responsible for his declining royalties. By his own admission: he doesn't know and there are other trends that might explain decline in print sales.
2. A description of how he tried to find new ways of making money in the world of declining dead-trees sales.
I've bought several technical, self-published books as PDFs. I believe some people (e.g. HN regular Amy Hoy) make decent money doing that. Has the author tried that? No.
I bough 30+ books on my kindle. Did the author try to self-publish on kindle in order to get higher royalties (70% vs., say, 15% from print) hence more revenue (even with lower price)? No.
His books would be perfect for such an experiment because he already has an audience thanks to 4 popular books he wrote in the past.