[sourcejedi]

I've put a fair amount of effort into reporting errors in purchased books.

Shockingly, I've never been asked to grant a copyright license for these corrections! (Or given any other sort of explicity permission to re-distribute). Absolutely illegal and immoral. All I was asking was that _my_ copy be fixed, heh.

I don't think the average pirate upload is much different. It's not done in the expectation of making money. It's done in the hope that it will be more convenient for others to read the book they themselves enjoyed. At most, you've got a community where each pirate's labour encourages others, to the benefit of each. (Ignoring the scenario where their favourite authors discover they're not making enough money and need to go back to the day job...) starrigger's not detracting from any of that; I suspect most individual uploaders would treat this as a complete honour.

I would feel conflicted if the author took the electronic copy, sold it, and at the same time sued the original uploader for everything they had. But if the pirate book is showing up as a HTTP download, in the first page of non-piratical Google searches (or in searches _suggested_ by Google), then I don't see a problem with sending takedown notices.

Contradict me: show me a single pirate upload that says "copying is permitted provided no fee is charged; the original author is invited to pay me a nominal wage for my time in return for a commercial license". Perhaps it's a a failure of my imagination, but I just don't see how that could work.

One of the justifications for piracy is that an official ebook just isn't available, or is full of errors. From that POV, I think starrigger's doing exactly the right thing.

I don't think anyone's mentioned Rowena's discussion with Jap in the comments. It looks like she's actually succeeded with Muso, at least for the time being. A naive searcher at the moment will find a lot of links that don't work, underneath a legitimate free sample. (Her official free sample even shows up on some of the file search sites!). For whatever reason, she's had very bad experiences with pirates in the past, so if this makes her feel happier about publishing ebooks, I think that's a good thing. (If you like that sort of book :P).