Matthias: think back to before you transitioned from being a library reader to a book-buying customer. You didn't have the disposable income to buy books, did you? In which case, you were not a lost sale.

True, but if I'd have had perfect library access once I had the income, I probably still wouldn't have bought books. OTOH, if I'd never had library access at all, I probably wouldn't have developed a reading habit.

On the subject of CDs and music -- one of the dirty little secrets of the music industry is that musicians make most of their money from merchandise and live performances.

I'm willing to believe that for music, but even there it mostly works for bands with established names, and with very few exceptions, this requires the whole promotional infrastructure at the disposal of The Man. For other creative endeavours, it's not going to work (Neither Stephen King nor Richard Stallman sell enough T-Shirts to make a comfortable living, AFAIK).

On the influence of free e-books on sales -- can I suggest you look at Eric Flint's editorials for the Baen Free Library experiment? He's got the actual sales data to back up the thesis that giving e-books away for free towards the end of the books natural sales cycle actually sells more copies of the paper editions.

Very interesting figures, but not entirely conclusive to me because there are no decent quality electronic bookreaders yet (Although, admittedly, there are laser printers). Therefore, the current state of the art is ideal for publishers, because readers can do plenty of sampling, but every sane reader will actually buy the book. A few years ago, I read Connie Willis' _Doomsday Book_ off a Hugo CD. Took me a week and gave me serious headaches.