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Piracy from an author’s point of view
November 22, 2010 | 2:13 pm
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By Paul Biba
Here’s another article on piracy written by an author. Brenna Lyons is the author of over 80 published works and a past president of the Electonically Published Internet Connection (EPIC). Here’s a snippet:
Your average author has not already built the size of audience a blockbuster or bestseller already has. For an author trying to build an audience, the strain of mass piracy is crushing. When a new author sells 60 copies of her first book and finds more than 2000 pirated copies in the same period, it is keenly felt, when compared to an author that sells two million copies finding the same 2000 pirated. Contrary to pirate legend, the bestselling books are not always the most pirated as well. If that was true, I would be matching some of the NY Times bestsellers I know in actual sales, and it’s clear that’s not true.
Thanks to Marilynn Byerly for the link.
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The idea isn’t to stop piracy – that’s just not going to be possible – it’s to reduce the cases of lost sales due to it. People pirating your books and selling them are direct lost sales – they’re people you can sue, since they actually have money. When you put them out of business, their customers are going to be looking for the books they “sold”, and some of them will be purchasing your legit editions. Simply suing and going after file sharers is a losing proposition however – you won’t get any significant amount of money out of the lawsuit, you’ll waste time, and you also won’t put a dent in the amount of pirated books or get more sales. Both file sharing and selling pirated content is equally wrong, but at least you can get something out of going after the sellers.
Educating your fans like you suggest is also a good idea, but I’m not quite sure how you’d do it in an effective way. One thing just struck me – you could talk about it in an author note at the end of a book I suppose. It’s not like the pirates would remove it
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Rowena said:
“Another publisher was prepared to offer her a contract for those reverted rights. Then, they checked the pirate sites, noticed the download numbers, and withdrew their offer to publish.”
I think you can blame the publisher for that, not the pirates. They were the ones who chose to base their decision on download numbers, which as we all know mean very little. About the only thing you can glean from download figures is how popular/marketable a franchise is. It may seem counterintuitive, but in this case high numbers could actually be good thing – it means people know of the author and his/her books, and sales potentials are a lot higher. The number of lost sales will be higher of course, but in total the book would be worth more.
Not having the book available legit at all is definitely lost sales, and it’s even more of a piracy driver. It may be that publishers, agents and authors will have to switch to different revenue models to do it, but not offering content is a recipe for promoting piracy.
PS. I know publishers go out of business, but the NBI example isn’t really a good one for this discussion. The ebook market (piracy or otherwise) simply wasn’t a factor in 2004 – the market size was too small for anyone to realistically base their entire business model on it.
Whether or not a file sharer makes money, he/she is still a pirate. That person is stealing potential revenue from the author by giving the book away to hundreds of other people, some of whom might have purchased it if they didn’t have a free source. I focus a lot of my anger for file sharing on the sites that host the practice. Even when you point out to sites like Astatalk that they have a file sharing pirate on their site they don’t ban the pirate, they simply remove the book link. Then they hide behind the fact that they only host the pirate, they don’t support his/her piracy. Nice try. If you host the practice you support it and are therefore part of the problem. If these sites would ban the pirates the practice would dwindle considerably. Pirates depend on the anonymity of being part of sites like Astatalk. If they had to host their own piracy they would think twice before doing it.
I am an author with a small press and piracy is plain wrong, folks! Two of my books found their way onto sites. Piracy sucks! It cheats writers out of their due. Authors toil to write great stories and people want them for a price of a song. Well, maybe not since the music industry is getting its act together and getting the freeloaders who steal music. As far as the “I would never have read a new author unless I had gotten it through file sharing ” bull …please! Buy the book from a legit website if it intrigues you so much. Just tell the truth. You got a bootleg copy because it was free or costs next to nothing. And you didn’t want to spend real money on an unknown author. I still hope to make a living by writing but piracy will keep me in a day job to pay bills long past what I had planned.
Piracy is no different then shoplifting. or a person buying an item they know is stolen. That’s what is, thief. When we talk about loss of sales, people say that we can’t prove that all those people would buy the book. True. But with a few exception, pirates sell our work. That means it’s sold.
What the consumer doesn’t realize or refuses to admit is that the author who wrote the work has a right to receive payment for their work. I wonder if the pirate’s consumers get away without paying a garage for an oil change, the doctor for his exam, the restaurant/grocery store for their meal/food. I doubt it.
And before someone says it’s the same as selling a used paperback, I’m going say no it isn’t. Only the one copy of a book can be sold to one reader at a time and not resold except by that reader. In addition, mass-market paperbacks are designed to wear out after a specific number of readings—weak glue is used for the binding. That also limits the number of re-sales.
In contrast, pirates offer thousands of copies of a title. Only the publisher or legitimate bookstore can do this. So where does this leave the author and publisher, swirling down the drain. Where does this leave readers and lovers of books, without much choice or books to read.
The piracy issue is very simple. I’m not okay with people stealing from me. Are you?
Anne Kane
LOL! I’m sorry to laugh, but Frode… You have no concept who you’re talking to here. I’ve been epublished since 2002, with publishers that did in fact base their entire business model on ebooks and thrived doing it. My first three publishers are still running today, though they all do print as well as e NOW. Only one of them did print and e both when I started with them, and that was an older company that had been purchased by a new owner and had ebook added to an existing print line.
While most established indie/e publishers do eventually add print to the line-up, the early adopters started out as ebook only. And some of those early adopters from the 1992-1995 range are still standing and doing business today. There’s a great article on EPIC’s site about it…or was last time I checked.
Even today, Carina Press from Harlequin (which is running the great indie experiment right now…please support it! it might just show NY conglomerate that there is another way) started out ebook only, though I’ve heard just this month that they are adding audio and print to their lineup soon. There are also several other Harlequin lines, including Spice Briefs, that are ebook only. And that’s NY conglomerate. In indie, it’s not unheard of to find a newer epublisher doing ebook only for several years before deciding whether or not to add print.
In 2004, one of the two brothers that started Fictionwise (I can’t recall if it was Steve or Scott) was the keynote speaker at EPICon in OK City. I was in the crowd, and I could probably find out which, if I pulled my old binder out from that year. BACK THEN, he was talking about the losses to piracy, about how they break DRM, about which books they chose to or didn’t choose to pirate….
Back then, he was making comparisons that still hold true about the industry today, including reader reactions to pricing and DRM. Back in 2004, he was telling NY conglomerate (in their first, little publicized foray into ebooks) that DRM was a major issue for them, both in terms of piracy and customer satisfaction.
The actual quote from him was that, based on their numbers, “Secured/DRMd formats cause ten times the customer service inquires that unsecured do. A reader that has a problem with a single secured book is ten times less likely to purchase a secured book again.” Now mind you, these gents (having opened their doors in 2001) had the numbers to make such statements and back them up.
Piracy is admittedly a WORSE problem today than it was in 2004, because we have a lot of new readers coming into the market blind of the laws and getting misinformation. In many ways, I feel sorry for a new author trying to build an audience today, even compared to me building one in 2002-2003 range. But piracy did exist and was a major pain in the backside, even as far back as 2004.
Brenna
Tara,
No hard feelings. Everyone needs caffeine once in a while.
And no, I didn’t forget about the music industry at all. However, there are some very vocal bestselling authors that seem to forget that not every author has had the benefit of building their audience before piracy got quite as bad as it is today. When you’re selling two million copies, the piracy may not seem that pressing. I do contend that, over time, it will be felt in declining numbers of audience, unless there is a change made, even by these bestsellers that support piracy now.
And many of the pirate catch-phrases only hold true for NY conglomerate and some only for bestsellers or blockbusters.
I’m not sure who mentioned this one…may not have been you… But we do attempt to educate. A great little community called AWaY (Authors Without a Yacht) grew out of an anti-piracy group.
AHA! Yes, there is a reason for the yacht line. Grinning… The name of AWaY grew out of a pirate comment about how greedy authors don’t need another yacht. The truth is, most of us don’t own one and never will own one, realistically.
Back to the subject. Members of AWaY have done everything from answering questions on Yahoogroups and AWaY social sites to doing radio shows on the subject for both authors and readers to doing interviews with Copyright Alliance to educating senators. Heck, I have the very bad memories of trying to educate the FBI, back when they were in charge of piracy…before it became the property of Homeland Security and then the Justice Department. Much to my dismay, by the time I educated one office, it moved on.
But…sadly, education only works on a few pirates. Many of them don’t want to be educated. They want to get their books, no matter what. Shrug.
Brenna
Perhaps you’re right Brenna – it was possible to have a working business model at that time. If you are, that actually even makes it more likely that the reason NBI went under was not due to piracy, but due to other factors. Either way it’s not really something I’d use as an example.
Piracy may be worse today, but the number of paying customers is also appropriately much larger. There’s also a much larger global market potential than before, since you can sell ebooks to places where paper books would either not sell in large enough quantities, or it would be too expensive to produce and market.
I am not a “poorly published” author griping about piracy. I have been in the business for over 25 years. I still publish in print. I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to personally produce my backlist in electronic format for readers who are unable to buy my earlier books in print. I use DRM free formats and sell worldwide. And the instant I put a book on Amazon, it begins showing on pirate sites. So let’s not call piracy helping the poor or the disenfrachised. It’s theft, pure and simple, for whatever idiot reason anyone does it. Just because pirates can get away with piracy does not make it legal. And it doesn’t matter how many books are stolen or how frequently now because eventually, if it’s not stopped, the theft will only increase.
Writers are already being squeezed out of the industry by conditions the casual reader does not understand. The numbers of original books on bookstands now decreases daily because of these conditions. If readers want original fiction instead of ten-year-old bestsellers, then they need to recognize that writers need to eat, too. Because until we’re sure we can make a living at writing books, we won’t be producing a lot of good original fiction for the electronic markets, and the print markets are buying less and less.
Frode,
Yes, the market is larger. Everything is, but the global market existed back in 2002, as well. With my first book release, I started talking to readers in my audience that were in Pakistan, Germany, Portugal…and so forth. People were purchasing from publisher sites and Fictionwise worldwide. When Amazon came in, their initial throttling was due to their reader availability, but now Amazon, LSI, and other distribution channels are offering worldwide distribution, as the publisher sites and Fictionwise did originally. The pendulum swings.
Now, the main problem I see is that conglomerate press (save Harlequin…and they get it!) isn’t taking advantage of the global market as they could. While these distribution channels allow worldwide distribution, it is up to the publishers to choose it or not. Indie usually chooses it. Conglomerate often doesn’t.
They have a lot of reasons for it. Some make sense. Some admittedly don’t, to me personally anyway. You’ll hear a lot about how they want to protect their overseas market, and if we’re talking about translations, I see their point. If they are talking about English language books, I don’t see it. Yes, I have been accused of oversimplifying their problems, but this is how I see it…
Until a few years ago, conglomerate overseas deals (I mean English language ones) did not include ebook rights. That was a major change for them to start including them and caused quite the stir, at the time. Now that they have the ability to offer English language ebooks directly via distribution channels, they aren’t doing it, because now the rights are often bundled in the contracts their overseas partners have and expect to have signed. I find it amusing that conglomerate was willing to throw its bulk around with Amazon but not with other partners in this business. Simply put, there’s no reason to wait to exercise worldwide ebook rights in English language. None that I can see. I’d love an intelligent answer on that one, but no one is providing one past a dissmissive answer of “Well you don’t know their problems.”
At the risk of oversimplifying again, if the conglomerates wrote English language ebook worldwide rights into their contracts with some authors (those willing to try it) and did a test run, they might find it works to their advantage to do it widely. But NY turns on a railroad turnstyle and not a dime.
Brenna
I lost my husband of 43 years last year. At the time of his death I developed atrial fibrillation and suffered a mild stroke. As a result, I am not able to work outside the home. My writing is the only thing that helps to supplement the social security I now receive. When a pirate gives my work away, that hurts me in ways I hope she or he never has to experience. Correct that: yes I DO hope she or he has to know what it feels like. Every dollar counts to help me make it month to month. Having someone blithely take my work, copy it and give it away hundreds of times over is like me going to their house and stealing what they have worked to accumulate.
When you download an illegal copy you ARE a thief. You ARE committing an illegal act. You ARE nothing more than a run of the mill cheat. No, you are NOT exercising your right to free speech. You are exercising your ability to steal. You are infringing on MY rights. You are stealing from me and every author you copy. No matter how you try to justify it, it is wrong. It isn’t funny. It isn’t something to roll your eyes about or smirk at. It is a serious problem and you are doing nothing but perpetuating the problem.
Great discussion !!
Frode – you are so right. “We don’t know how much, if anything, piracy affects book sales, just like we don’t know how piracy affected music sales. What we do know however is that piracy is here to stay, and that the only thing authors and publishers can realistically do is try to mitigate the major factors driving it: availability, price, regioning, format, and DRM. ”
It is clear from the brilliant discussion here that there are many smaller publishers who are doing the right thing and that is encouraging. What they don’t realise is that globally they are at the margins of the market and in the eyes of the wider global public they are mostly invisible. It is the actions and marketing methods of the big 6 that is causing so much of the aggravation among the early eReader adopters and causing them to look to alternative sources for their eBooks. (No that is NOT me justifying it)
Where you are mistaken above is that in the Music industry there has never been a single independent research result that shows any significant loss of income to that industry while there have been a couple of good quality studies showing the opposite, such as Harvard Business School’s Oberholzer. The Music Industry has been on the decline, in sales terms, for decades. This is largely due to the increased competition for peoples money and time from all forms of computer games as well as other leisure activities.
Brenna wrote: “The idea that mitigating the driving forces will somehow stem piracy is very short-sighted.”
I disagree and the experience of the Music Industry supports my view. When legal downloading took off a few years ago after Apple launched iTunes and started charging a reasonable price, and when the rest of the industry followed suit, music sales surged enormously. Unfortunately for them the overall sales has continued to decline, but this is simply part of the modern trend of diversification in entertainment imho. Every industry has it’s day and the music industry has many many other competitors for people’s time and money.
Brenna: You refer to “NY conglomerate” when you replied to my comments on the Big Publishing industry. I have no idea what you mean but It would take some evidence to persuade not just me that Amazon and B&N and Apple et al do not sell the vast majority of global eBook titles online.
Personally I am delighted to hear that so many small publishers you know of are selling well. You talk about the reporting process being inadequate, which is unfortunate. However it is not so easy to create a reliable reporting process on sales numbers if there is no audit of the numbers. It is too easy for sellers to over report in order to boost their reputation and hype their titles. Does anyone really believe the numbers put out by Amazon on a regular basis ?
What I find frustrating about many of the posts above is the conceptual view of pirates and piracy. The people who run the torrent sites and other sites that host pirated copies are NOT the people that matter in this. They are no different to millions of other criminals who operate across the world. They make money driving hits to other sites on the whole. I find it endlessly amusing that people actually believe their site stats and those linked to their sites. There is a complete ring of fraud involved in all of these reporting systems that are created to make the visitor feel he is only one of millions and therefore downloading illegally is fine. I can only guess that people chose to believe them because it suits their argument. I cannot see any other excuse.
Anyway the people that really MATTER are the public who visit these sites and download files. I believe (no I have no research evidence) that the vast majority of them prefer to pay for legitimate and legal goods, given the chance. When the big players in the ebook industry start to give them that chance they will take it.
[In passing I would also say that the early adopting phase of the eBook there is a much higher proportion of geeky IT savvy people. This is common to a lot of electronic gadgetry. It is inevitable that this brings a higher awareness of the possibilities of torrenting etc.]
When eReading expands into the greater reading public in 2011 and 2012, millions of ordinary people with little knowledge of such things will be purchasing and reading eBooks. Unlike the crazy music loving teen kids who downloaded billions of tracks from torrent sites for the hell of it, these readers will be of a completely different profile and are far far less likely to be involved in this practice I am certain. I know quite a few people in my social circle who are thinking about and discussing ereaders but who are very reluctant because of what they have heard about the DRM and other problems. They don’t want to have to get involved in a lot of IT issues simply to own their ebooks. They want to be able to buy easily and keep what they buy for however long they themselves want, on whatever device they chose. When they get their wish they too will join the eReading public and have no interest in downloading illegal copies. Yes I know that they can already do this with many smaller indie style publishers but I suspect that non-IT literate new buyers of Kindles and other eReaders tend to look to Amazon et al first until they become a lot more aware of the wider market.
I am not a best selling author. I am struggling to make a name for myself in a difficult market. When I learned my book was being pirated, I was devastated. I’m barely making enough money to support myself and yet people are stealing from me.
Howard- you said that there is no proof that piracy is hurting anyone. Perhaps it doesn’t really seriously impact sales and revenue. But that is not the point. Pay attention: taking something that does not belong to you without payment is theft. Pure and simple. If you take an apple, a penny from a charity bowl, steal a hardcover book or download something that should be paid for you you are a thief.
We can’t stop you from stealing- lots of pirates out there- but if your morals allow you to steal then there is no hope for you as you try to justify you actions. Who is being hurt by your free download? The answer is you. You mother must be real proud of you.
***It’s interesting how the authors that I think write the best have little to nothing to say against file sharing on their blogs.***
Just because authors choose not to focus on this issue on the their blogs does NOT meant that they have nothing against file sharing/piracy. Simply put, I think most of us know that there’s no way to convince people who want to take our work for free not to do so (though I dearly wish I could show up at their job and refuse to pay under the same “if I like it, maybe I’ll pay next time” excuse).
“Jack” – I have no intention of tackling your insulting and abusive post.
I think it is unfortunate that a really useful and interesting discussion about the impact of piracy, and ways to tackle it, is being swamped by long hysterical and irrelevant rants accusing someone here of stealing their work. and reminding us ad nausea that piracy is illegal and bad and stealing etc etc etc. It contributes nothing and just destroys the value of the discussion. It is pitiful and unfortunate for the site.
The other day I read an interesting comment that focused on another issue but fits this topic perfectly as well. Let’s say you have a stadium and host athletic events for which you sell tickets and also operate concession stands. Of course you get paying customers coming in. But what if you also have to allow anyone who wants to just walk in to also come and watch and enjoy as much soda and hotdogs as they wish etc without paying a penny? Pretty soon the freeloaders far exceed those who pay. Are you going to stay in business? The answer is probably no.
Writers, musicians, actors etc are now in this same boat. We are struggling becasue too mamy people think they do not need to pay for our products. And think about it: entertainment is as much a product as food, clothes, your car, etc. You do not expect to get them for free but if something is on the internet you do? WHY???
I write because I love to write but if I cannot be paid for my efforts which are now my main work, I will stop. I am sure most other artists of various types feel the same way. If you want the supply of new music, literature, movies/video etc to decline until it dries up and no new works are produced, keep on stealing our efforts and swapping with firends, uploading to torrents and all the rest. Would YOU work if you did not get paid? Well, I won’t either.
I do not understand the argument that people who love their work should do it for free, or should not try (no guarantees) to make a living at it. Is this what we tell a farmer? a teacher? Hopefully, some of these people like their jobs. But they still deserve to be paid for doing them. I also don’t understand why writers, artists, musicians, photographers et al don’t deserve the protection of the law that others expect. No retailer could stay in business if they didn’t have the force of the law protecting their merchandise. Yes, they’ll still lose some due to theft. But if we said the govt. is not going to prosecute shoplifting ever again, then stores would quickly go out of business as their goods walked out the door without payment.
If we don’t have the protection of the law for all of us, soon we won’t have it for any of us. It’s a slippery slope to say some kinds of theft are okay because of this reason or that reason. When you enjoy the fruits of someone’s labor without paying them for it (unless they choose to give it to you), you are stealing from them. Whether it’s taking a pair of blue jeans from J Crew, a bucket of strawberries from the farmer’s field, or the story imagined, written down, and edited by a writer. That’s precisely why copyright laws were first written.
I think the goal of most of us is to educate people to understand that piracy is harmful to many people. No, we won’t stamp out all piracy. But it is not a victimless crime.
“Sharing”a book? I write books hoping readers will buy and read them if they like my writing. If what you mean by “sharing” doesn’t involve buying the book, then in effect no one is paying me to to read the book. Paying some else, maybe, who is now “sharing” the book for a price. I never minded finding my print books in used book stores when I was writing for New York publishers. Why not? Because the life of a paperback book is limited. Maybe four or five readers beside the one who originally bought it had a chance to read the book before it disintegrated, losing pages and the like. But now I write for electronic publishers and an ebook doesn’t deteriorate no matter how many hundreds of people read it. And I only get paid for the one copy the “sharer” is selling. Think about it. Authors need to eat and pay taxes /rent and have expenses. Most of us have families as well. So, no, “sharing” isn’t the same. What someone called “sharing” is actually the same as stealing money that should go to the author. Which is why it’s called piracy. Jane
I have nothing to add to this discussion except to support my fellow authors Brenna Lyons and Patrick Rice and Kalen Hughes and others who have eloquently argued against piracy. Piracy hurts authors across the board–it’s not a victimless crime–but more than that, it’s stealing, just as if you walked into a bookstore and took a physical book off the shelf and let without paying. I don’t have time to fight this growing problem by blogging about it or making it my primary cause, I handle it behind the scenes, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care or don’t think it’s a threat to my livelihood. I get google alerts daily about pirated copies, both free downloads and titles for sale illegally. It’s a growing and serious problem that as more people move to ereaders, authors and publishers–big and small–must address.
This author’s take on piracy makes a lot of sense to me: http://moirarogers.com/blog/archives/1814
Howard, you made this statement:
Anyway the people that really MATTER are the public who visit these sites and download files. I believe (no I have no research evidence) that the vast majority of them prefer to pay for legitimate and legal goods, given the chance.
As someone who has people requesting my works (not to sample or try me out but asking for an upload of my entire collection of works, including those they consider their “most wanted”) and have themselves listed as living in the US (which means they can purchase the books quite easily, via my publishers sites, Fictionwise, Amazon, and other retailers), I can assure you that while there may be those who prefer to pay, there are also those who do not. I’ve encountered the same thing dozens of times, on numerous pirating websites, as I send out DMCA upon DMCA to have them removed (only to have them replaced again within a matter of days or sometimes hours).
The question becomes — would they have paid for the works if it wasn’t being offered via a torrent or a filesharing site if given no other outlet to obtain the material? Sadly, we’ll never know. If you offer something that someone is requesting for free, people will certainly continue taking it. To be sure, it’s impossible to tell if it’s a sale(s) “lost.” However, it’s also impossible to state for a certainty that it isn’t.
I echo the comments of my fellow author above, and those of the other authors who have spoken out against ‘piracy’. As a very small fish in a huge ocean, I am published by a small press and my Royalties are laughable compared to authors published with Big Publishing houses. But – we all work very hard at our craft. We spend hours, weeks, months and years writing a book, reviising it, and then sending it out to publihsers. Then there are more edits etc. etc. Even authors who are selling well make very little in return, (most don’t even earn anything approaching the minimum living wage, myself included) but we carry on writing because we love it. We also love our readers and will, when we can, cheerfully write a short story to give our loyal fans for free. Just because we love what we do though, doesn’t give someone else the right to give our work away themselves, and deprive us of what little recompence we might have had for the hours we’ve put in.And those who run pirate sites are niot only guilty of copyright violation but of actual theft.
Howard said: I think it is unfortunate that a really useful and interesting discussion about the impact of piracy, and ways to tackle it, is being swamped by long hysterical and irrelevant rants accusing someone here of stealing their work. and reminding us ad nausea that piracy is illegal and bad and stealing etc etc etc. It contributes nothing and just destroys the value of the discussion. It is pitiful and unfortunate for the site.
What is pitiful and unfortunate is the fact that these issues HAVE to be addressed at all. People who have NO moral compass are the reason we have to discuss this. I know many authors who keep quiet on the subject because of harassment against themselves and their work.
Discussion on the subject are NOT working because so many of you out there just dont care that you are stealing from authors. “They can afford it” attitude chaps my buns. Most of us CANT afford it. “Where did (author name) go? They had some really great books but you just dont see them around much anymore.” Becuase theives looted their bank accounts and made it impossible for the author to continue in her career.
Someone said they want to see hard facts…Okay, want hard facts? You think a writer makes TONS of money? Do you want to know how much the average author makes off of ONE sale of ONE title?
About $1.80.
THAT is IF the book sells for 4.50!
$1.80…I couldnt buy lunch at McDonalds for that! AND that is only IF the book actually sold for 4.50! If it was put on sale at a lower cost, the author’s share of that 1.80 is cut even lower.
Now, you tell me…IS piracy hurting my income? DAMN right it is! But do the pirates and file sharing people REALLY care ? No. I dont think they care. They’ve proven it often enough by continuing to be PROUD of the fact they are ILLEGALLY filesharing.
You want authors to continue writing and giving you books to read? Stop and think about the fact that they earn about a buck eighty for each copy, and that they’ve had a single title pirated 50 times–there went this weeks groceries. There went the payment to the orthodontist for the kid’s braces, there went the payment on the electric bill. How long do you think an author can AFFORD to stay in business of writing quality books for you to enjoy?
But I guess we might as well be spitting into the wind. Illegal just doesnt matter to people like certain ones who have posted on this discussion and across the Internet on discussion boards just like this one.
When the day comes that an author can afford to hire an attorney, compile the actual names of the people who are illegally sharing their titles and sue the pirates in court for lost wages & copyright infringement, (and I beleive that time is getting closer than you think! I know of a case where one author was ABLE to find the names, home addresses and BUSINESS addresses of the pirates and is gearing up to take legal action!) and lets the pirate feel the lost income hit THEIR bank accounts, the theives will conitnue to strike.
I look forward to the day when this discussion is no longer warranted–but I know that realistically that day will never come. Theives will be theives and cheats will continue to search for ways to get something for nothing.
And yes I am prepared for the hate mail that my standing up for myself anf the rights of my fellow authors will incur.
Donica Covey