I've been fascinated by your posts about digital theft, David. There's no doubt you've identified a serious problem.

I remember seeing this as a doomsday scenario when I first started as an agent in 2001. Once published books started getting the mp3 treatment, we'd be in big trouble. Why? Two main reasons, I reckon.

1. Attitude. I think people genuinely do view file-sharing (theft, yes, but FS is more than a euphemism when you examine the process by which much music, and now literature, is disseminated digitally) as no worse than home-taping. One can of course be sniffy about home taping to make a moral point, but the fact is that back in the day home taping was condoned like billy-o. Everyone did it, no one objected. (Except the record companies, but no one cared about them. Especially as they were making record profits during home-taping's heyday, the late 70's to the early 90's.)

2. Technology. One of the reason home-taping was pretty much ok for everyone was because its capacity to diminish sales of original material was limited. Networks of tapers could only go just so far, if for no other reason then because the quality suffered with each re-record. Not so with digital, where every copy tends to be perfect. Add to that the means to disseminate one legitimate copy of a song or a book among literally billions of people at the click of a button. 

There's no question in my mind that, if ebooks become the lingua franca of the reading public, the current publishing model *is* broken. I agree with you that 'pirates' would sooner get their goodies for free than pay even a nominal sum like 99p. But I disagree when you say the majority are 'decent' people, who wouldn't traffick in free copies of books. It's just like home-taping. The only difference is that 'home-taping' this time around has potential t0 do the publishing industry irreparable harm. And I suspect consumers view that (if they consider it at all) squarely as our problem, not theirs. I don't really think we can effectively educate them out of that mindset, especially in the midst of the plethora of 'free' with which the net regales us.

The question is - if not that, what can we do?