E-book Piracy. Don't Do It!

Hello, everyone! I hope everyone is having a wonderful day. Once again, Milena has been nice enough to open up the floor here at Written Expressions and let me blog for the readers.

Today instead of talking about lusty heroes and feisty heroines, I'm going to blog about a much more serious matter.  E-book Piracy: that's right the illegal downloading of copyrighted e-books.  Unless your publisher has a secure adobe or mobipocket versions of your work, then there is very real chance of this happening. While the publishers all include a disclosure of the piracy law in the beginning of any e-book you buy and have all the required copyright information listed, less than honest people still are doing this.  The New York Times reported in March of 2009, that there were over 9 million illegal downloads of ebooks.* That's just mind boggling.

Some may ask why the authors get so bent out of shape about this since the files sharing sites such as Demoniod or Astatalk are basically giving the author free publicity. They're not.  It's no different than working a regular job for 40 hours a week and expecting to get paid for those 40 hours.  Imagine if you opened your paycheck and found out they only paid you for 30 of those hours.  I know someone who would be screaming bloody murder at the office.  It is the same thing for an author who has spent months writing a story, doing numerous edits and revisions and then waiting several more months to see their book come out for publication.  Now, it's out and your book ends up pirated within the first week of it's release.  I'd say that would be enough to piss of even the calmest of authors.

This is one of the reasons why the government passed a law to stop this from happening and have attached $250,000 fine if you get caught.  The only problem is that unless the person is a habitual offender it's hard to enforce this law. Even when an author finds their work pirated, it's nearly impossible to get it removed from the share sites.  Sites like Demoniod and Astatalk hide behind the fact they are a hosting site only and aren't responsible for any infringement of copyright laws that a member might break when posting an e-book. In fact to get it taken down most of the time you have to contact the member personally to remove it and the two sites I've mentioned above you have to have an actual membership with them to even speak to other members of the site.  I've been told by other authors that there are times when they do it ahold of a member, they claim they didn't realize it was a nontransferable file. Evidently they don't read the notice in the front of all ebooks about it being illegal.

So next time you buy an ebook take the time to stop and read the disclaimer at the front of the book.  E-books do not have the same  rights as regular books.  They are nontransferable and are the property of the author  and/or publisher.  You wouldn't steal a purse or rob a bank, so don't steal an author's hard work.  They definitely won't thank you for it. 

So if you find an ebook you absolutely love and want to share with a friend, buy another copy. Even when you buy more than one copy of an e-book it still usually ends up being cheaper in the long run because ebooks are usually a fraction of the cost of a print book. My most recent release, Nisey's Awakening, runs around $7 for the ebook but is close to $18 for the print version.  So a reader can easily buy 2 copies for less than the price of one print book.

Any way, I'll get off my soapbox now. :)

Happy Reading to all,

*Reports Finds 9 Million Illegall Downloads of E-books by Motoko Rich, New York Times, January 19, 2010. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/report-finds-9-million-illegal-downloads-of-e-books/