Pirated Books – Readers

Have you ever bought any Pirated Books, readers? If you read books in paperback, you probably haven’t instigated any unauthorised transactions, because the investment necessary and the low return make book piracy unprofitable, but now that so many people are buying ebooks, or digital books, there is a new opportunity for the pirates.

Music and film have long had to deal with the problem of digital piracy, because it is so easy to copy good-quality music albums and videos from the Internet and burn them to CD. Now, it is the turn of authors to get ripped off by illegal digital downloads.

Pirated Books

If you don’t buy your ebooks for your digital device like a Kindle tablet from a reputable source such as Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, GooglePlay, Xinxii, Lulu and the like (there are several more of them), you could be buying pirated books and unwittingly helping to rip off your favourite authors.

A tip is that if you are looking for a specific ebook on a search engine and you see it listed on Amazon for a price, but also see it elsewhere for free, the free one is almost certainly a pirated book.

Assistance, Please!

Please, help the people who write the stories you love by not getting them free by downloading books from book pirates onto your ebook reader.

The other day, I was researching a book of mine that I thought should have sold much better, and found twenty-four firms offering it free. One, just one of those twenty-four, gave the statistics that it had been downloaded from their site 995 times, and read on line on it 760 times. That represents 1,755 lost sales to me, and I have sold less than a hundred copies.

How much more prepared to write would we authors be, if we were paid for every book that was read?

And writers and the publishing industry are suffering at the moment from the illegal download of pirated content.
‘So, what?’ you might say, ‘It is not easy for any of us’ and that is true, but at least you are not getting mugged every day on your way home after you finish work.

If you are an avid reader, where would you be without your favourite authors to lift you up when you needed it?

Criminal

On the other hand, why should I spend months preparing a book, so that a thieving pirate can give it away as an unauthorised sweetener for some other deal (eg: in order to obtain your email address, so he can sell it to a spammer)?

You may think that this article is only about ethical issues, but it isn’t. Not only do you run the serious risk of having your email address sold, but the pirated ebook could contain viruses or a Trojan horse which will spy on your every key-press and send it back to its master, who may then be able to steal your identity and bank balance.

Stolen Books

Nothing is for free. Digital content pirates are not good Samaritans or Robin Hoods. They steal from me to give to you, so that they can steal from you too! A sprat to catch a mackerel. They are not on my side, and definitely not on yours either!

In fact, those who download pirated software are potentially the biggest losers in the whole sorry charade.

So, my plea to you, dear reader, on behalf of all writers is, if you care about your books, please care a little about their authors too, and do your bit to help them get what they deserve by shunning pirated ebooks, so that writers are encouraged to write the books that you like reading.

Please LIKE and SHARE this article using the buttons below and visit our bookshop

All the
best,
Owen

Podcast: Pirated Books – Readers