She's popular to the tune of 800 free downloads per week and 10 sales per week.
Anecdotally, one of the ISVs over on Programmers.stackexchange had a piracy problem; when he started detecting pirated software and reminding the user to buy, not steal, his sales numbers directly went up.
I think this idea that downloading IP for free is ok is really wrong. If you want something, you should pay the price for it, whether the price be fixed or negotiated. IP piracy is theft.
She didn't even say what stats site the "800" number came from. Could also be a completely bullshit number.
Personally contacting potential buyers might incite them to buy your book, no matter if they were pirates before or not. It doesn't necessarily scale to do that. Though some authors actually do promote their books (go on tours and read from the books, for example).
I don't want to defend downloading, but it is a fact of modern life, so complaining about it is unlikely to help.
No, you should check out the book so they know people are interested in it and perhaps then will order more copies. Maybe it would then be ok to download it and use it for the period you have it checked out, but even that is debatable because then you might be supporting the continuation of the illegal distribution, causing more people to download it illegally.
And a single copy can only service a small number too, not an infinite number, as only one person can be in possession of it at one time and usually borrow it for weeks at a time.
Of course it's wrong, legally and usually morally too, but complaining about it won't fix anything.
If 800 people a week were downloading something of mine, after I was done dancing in the streets with joy, I'd try to figure out how to convert those downloads to fans, then sales.
When considering programmer to be "anyone who writes some code", I agree.
But when considering programmer to be someone who is comfortable:
- operating on multiple planes of abstraction
- using recursion/pointers
- 'seeing' the concepts embodied under computer languages
- 'seeing' the code flow
Then, yes, the programmer does think differently. Because it's his job to think this way to communicate correctly to the computer. Not that it's unattainable by someone outside of the field, but by the act of becoming competent, it changes the one coming in.
Only the first one is a skill that 'non programmers' would readily exhibit, the rest of them are things that you learn as you go while you learn to program.
Outside of math I think you'll have a hard time explaining what recursion is to someone that does not already know how to code at a basic level (a subroutine that calls itself! wow!), seeing the concepts 'under' computer languages may be something you could discuss with linguists and/or mathematicians again but not with others and 'seeing the code flow' you might be able to talk over with a laywer or someone in to electronics (who can 'see' the currents flow when looking at a schematic).
I'm not saying anything about innate ability. Just as a lawyer gains 'legal lenses' as they work through law school, so do programmers gain 'software lenses'.
Do you make the same judgment about saving files? If it's important enough to be saved to the filesystem, it's important enough to be remembered forever?
What about general edits in your editor? If it's important enough to have been typed so undo in my editor works, it's important enough to be part of the project history so someone else can see my typos when they're (as I've heard used as an argument for why you should never squash commits) tracking down a bug they can figure out the train of thought that led to that work?
The right kind of advertising is pretty awesome, because it provides value for me. Right now, Stack Overflow and Amazon have the best ads out there, IMO. SO took a while to get decent ads too.
I watched some stuff on Hulu the other day. Fancy cars, teeth whitening commercials, drugs I don't ever anticipate using, and other useless stuff to me was marketed at me. That's just not a good ad model I think. I would love to see some really new and interesting products - not Another Car|Soda|Beer commercial.
TechCrunch had a good guest article arguing that Hulu's poor targeting is intentional: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/08/hulu-opec/
Hulu has enough information on its users to target ads very narrowly, but since it's run by a conglomerate of media companies, it intentionally does not do this in order to avoid competing with traditional (untargeted but highly profitable) television advertising.
I think - supposing that Mrs. Chua was grossly misrepresented, which seems a bit likely - that the WSJ owes her a public apology and the opportunity for a rebuttal piece.
