I’ve been doing a bit of research into ebook piracy, and I
have come to the conclusion that any author who is worried about their book
being pirated should worry about something they can actually do something
about. It seems just about every published ebook is being pirated on multiple
sites right now. Spending time trying to track down all those illegal download
avenues will just waste an author’s time. An author might have success having
their book taken down from one website, just as it pops up for free on another
website.
Warning on Google+
My initial research into this topic was prompted by a post I
saw on Google+. The post had a link to a website and said something along the
lines, “my ebook is illegally posted here for free, check if yours is.” I have
not published any ebooks but I was curious, so I went to the site and searched
for books from a few local authors who are yet to become big names. In all
cases, the search provided links to free copies of their books.
I thought I would do the right thing and message the authors,
just in case they were unaware. Which I started to do, but then thought maybe I
should add a link to the pages concerning their books. When I went back to the
site, their books no longer came up in a search, so maybe the initial post on
Google+ had resulted in so many take down notices, that the site had given up.
Or maybe Amazon threatened them.
General ebooks
I did not copy down the sites name, but since then my
research has come across similar sites such as general.ebooks. Once again I found
many of those yet to become household name author’s books for free on them.
Including a book written by a friend which I helped edit. General ebooks is clever
in the way it is presented because it has links to paying and legal downloads
of the books, but then down the bottom it has a big GET BOOK icon, which links
to one of at least three illegal download sites. The General ebook page for
each book even has a big red Report Copyright Violation tag on the page in an attempt
to make it look like a legitimate site.
One of the sites linked to General ebooks is
download-genuis.com. There I found three files for one author’s books. I did
not download them because I was unsure of their safety. Another of the sites
that general.ebooks linked to was www.fat-game.com.
Before accessing the ebook, registration is required. It says registration is
free but a credit card number is needed to ensure that the user is from an
acceptable country. I did not register because if a company is involved in
illegal downloads who knows what use my credit card details might be put to.
Authors like Molly
Greene have had success with getting General ebooks to remove their
copyrighted work. But how many other sites link to sites like fat-games?
Probably hundreds, maybe thousands, and how many sites contain the actual
illegal downloads? Again probably hundreds. There are enough such sites for
companies like MUSO who are hired by publishing companies to track down copyright
violating websites.
Peer-to-peer
And then there is pirating from peer-to-peer networks. Rightscorp
is a big anti-piracy company in the US and it estimates 500 million ebooks were
distributed by peer-to-peer networks in 2013. In an attempt to fight back publishers
are now watermarking their ebooks to track illegal downloads.
At the moment the publishing industry says it is not
concerned with ebook piracy. Companies like HarperCollins and Hachette says
that piracy doesn’t hamper sales to any discernible degree, so maybe individual
authors should not worry either, at least for the moment.
