Quote:
Originally Posted by Doranna Durgin
Just as a data point, Dennis--and to show the pitfalls of assuming on short data--my Baen webscription books have been consistently and continually pirated, and even though they're finally removed from the Baen site/servers (years past when they were reverted, I might note, including one book that was put up *after* it was long reverted), they still show up. (I think I have several sites to hit with a DMCA even at the moment.)
I have never been happy with that program from an author point of view, which is not politic to say, but I think it's important to remember that appearances can be deceiving (hey, it's 5am my time, I'm gonna use cliches and make typos). I'm sure others feel differently, and have their own reasons. Mine are certainly much deeper than DRM issues.
Just one illustration of how things look unexpectedly different from the other side, sometimes.
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Doranna, I'm sorry to hear of your negative experience with the Baen program. I've found it to be a
customer-friendly site, but their royalty rate to authors is on the low side, and they do make mistakes. (They put my Free Library books up for sale for a while, by mistake. But they caught it, apologized, took them down, and sent me a check--enough for dinner at a downscale restaurant.)
Re your pirated books, are you certain it's the Baen
ebooks that were pirated? Thousands of SF books that are paper-only are up on the darknet, as I learned when I was just getting into this and a fan sent me a zipfile of pirate PDFs of most of my books, all of them scanned and ODR'd versions of my paper editions. (He did this in the spirit of, "I thought you might like to know these are up, and maybe you can use them," not "Hahaha." In fact, I
did use one of them as the starting file for the legit ebook of one of my pre-computer novels.) Unless you've downloaded and verified, I don't think you can assume that the torrents have pirated editions of the ebooks rather than the paper books.
This is probably a topic for another thread, but...at first I was mad, and then I decided that the pirates were probably doing me a favor, though illegally and unintentionally. The vast majority of the reading world, even the SF-reading world, has never heard of me or my books. Why not make the best of it and accept the free advertising? It's not as if most of the people who download those torrents would have bought the book, anyway--though it's possible that some might later, if they discover that they like my writing. I suspect the real truth is that most pirated books wind up sitting inert on people's hard drives; someone just downloaded them because they
could, and they'll never read them.
I'm not defending the pirating--it's clearly illegal--but it's way low on my list of things in life to worry about.