it took 20 weeks on average until a book showed up on either a Torrent tracker or a PDF hosting site like Scribd. And sales generally went up after a book showed up on these sites, if only for around six percent on average. The books also never stayed popular on torrent sites for a long time, suggesting that P2P at this point in time doesn’t have any long term effect. The report also looked at e-book give-aways as a way to increase the awareness and eventually the sales numbers of a book. The results of these findings suggest that free PDFs can significantly help to market a new book, and even give books that have been on the market for a while a second marketing push. In one case, a book saw sales increase by 155 percent because of a free download.
