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Actually the losses suffered by the copyright owner through people using illegal copies are quite real. This is because some of the people playing illegally copied games are doing so instead of buying a legitimate copy for themselves.

I'm sorry, that is false. You're missing an essential component of the equation. And I can't include people who would not have paid 100% as there is no mechanism for paying anything other than 100%: in the absence of an illegal copy those people would have done without and are therefore 0% loss. Ferrari isn't losing any sales to me.

The correct calculation would be: Delta (not loss!) = "Nbr of People who bought for some illegal copy related reason" - "Nbr of people who would have paid 100%, but illegally copied it instead"
This number could be positive (ie; 'illegal' sharing causes an increase in sales) as can be seen here.

From how I've always seen the numbers, there is (always?) a positive correlation between sharing and sales. While there will be argument about causation I would suggest that (at least) in the above example there is clear cause and effect.

Of course ultimately this is a business model question: Can we get content w/o charging on a per-copy basis. While it is easy to say that we had creative expression predating copyright; others reply that it was a different era. To those, I would suggest that the open source movement is a strong indicator that even today there are other ways for creative efforts to be compensated without the need for per copy charges.
Once that is resolved the rest of the discussion becomes somewhat moot.

Point 1: Underground could already be downloaded for free from Lieber's Web site, so it being "pirated" on 4chan wasn't that big of a coup.

Not quite. He originally released chapter 1 for free, not the entire book.

Somebody from the 4chan /co/ board then bought the full book, scanned it, and put up a thread with these scanned images. Steve Lieber took notice, joined the thread, and has now put up the book for free on his website. He also added a donate button in case you only want the digital version and want to kick a few bucks his way.

Point 2: Comic book companies do not track sales on a daily basis. The sales that went "through the roof" were sales of signed print editions from Lieber's Etsy store.

The online store is most likely not on the scale of national comic book stores, but who knows? Maybe a large number of his sales are made online. Regardless, it makes the sudden increase no less impressive.

So rather than a massive vindication of 4chan, "engaging your audience," or anything else, I see this more as a case of: A.) creator makes a product available online; B.) author manages (if inadvertently) to find an effective marketing channel for said product; C.) people who spend most of their time online notice the marketing and buy the product.

Pretty simple, really. Engaging his audience helped, but he would have been happy to engage anybody that came his way to begin with. The problem is, "build it and they will come" doesn't really work on the Web. Lieber lucked out that someone else noticed him and chose to promote his product in a way that he couldn't on his own. He was smart enough to pounce on the opportunity.

To be honest, I don't see your point here. You're arguing that the author was not "engaging his audience", merely finding an effective marketing channel for his product. But, the "marketing strategy" he discovered was engaging his audience; jumping into the fray so to speak, and directly communicating with the people copying (and most likely reading!) his book. He must have linked his website during the discussion, but I don't know if I would call that marketing, or even much of an advertisement, really. They already had his product, after all, just digitally instead of physically.

I think this post by Steve clinched it for the lurkers. http://undergroundthecomic.com/4chan_thread_20614483.html#20642617

Steve Lieber is a nice guy and a talented artist, and his comics are worth reading, but let's put this scenario into a little perspective. This is not a case of Steve posting to 4chan and then all the little 4channers running out to buy his comics.

Point 1: Underground could already be downloaded for free from Lieber's Web site, so it being "pirated" on 4chan wasn't that big of a coup.

Point 2: Comic book companies do not track sales on a daily basis. The sales that went "through the roof" were sales of signed print editions from Lieber's Etsy store.

So rather than a massive vindication of 4chan, "engaging your audience," or anything else, I see this more as a case of: A.) creator makes a product available online; B.) author manages (if inadvertently) to find an effective marketing channel for said product; C.) people who spend most of their time online notice the marketing and buy the product.

Pretty simple, really. Engaging his audience helped, but he would have been happy to engage anybody that came his way to begin with. The problem is, "build it and they will come" doesn't really work on the Web. Lieber lucked out that someone else noticed him and chose to promote his product in a way that he couldn't on his own. He was smart enough to pounce on the opportunity.

The author here did the same. All books are available for download on his site for free as PDFs. http://www.undergroundthecomic.com/2010/10/whole-book-for-free-or-learning-something-from-4chan/

http://www.undergroundthecomic.com/2010/10/pictures-help-us-learn/

At a quick glance, I'd say he got 30x the sales he saw from his Boing Boing review.

Apparently, he even posted the scans on his web site. On that note, can anyone recommend me a good comic viewer that will browse/open this type of .cbt files on Windows, or even better a comic viewer that could browse/open this type of .cbt files on my Evo (Android phone). There are so many manga/comic viewers out there, I'd rather not waste my time trying a different bunch of them.