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Originally Posted by Harper Kingsley
Well, I personally get very sad when I Google my name and find out that people are downloading my books all over the Internet. Anyone can say that books should be free and I don't deserve compensation for my work because it's not really work, it's just words on a page, but I do like to feed my kids and I would really like to be out of debt someday.
It's just me taking care of myself, I don't really have anyone else to turn to. That being said, I love to read and I love the idea that people are reading things I've written. I know that I'm not the only person in dire financial straits, so I try to keep my prices at an affordable range. And yes, I am arranging for paperbacks to be available, though I really hate formatting PDFs 
I don't DRM my books because I know what a hassle it can be trying to read one with a big ol' security mechanism on it, but the way things are going I'm thinking about doing it to any I publish on Amazon in the future. Why? Because people buy books, copy them, then return them. Then five minutes later the book is on some torrent site. Lame. |
Well it sucks that your books are getting pirated, but really whatever format books are in, ebooks, pbooks whatever. If people want to pirate a book they WILL pirate them and can.
The Harry potter books when released in pbook format got scanned and converted to epubs by pirates within days of release, so even just publishing pbooks is no defense.
I like to compensate authors for books I read and I do (I buy all my books), so we have no disagreement on these points.
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I highly doubt Amazon is going out of business in the next couple of years, and with the availability of programs like Calibre, you can change the format of an ebook to whatever reader you have. So there's a good chance that in the future you will never have to repurchase any ebook as long as you have a backup copy.
I have rebs I turns into lrfs that I turned into epubs and then into mobis, and they're still perfectly readable five years later. Anachronistic ereaders are no longer the hardship they used to be because technology has moved past that point.
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if you used calibre and and converted amazon books and whatever other formats that use DRM, then you must have cracked the DRM, which is illegal in many countries. Which means you have broken the law and could be seen as an act of piracy.
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I have a collection of original Andre Norton paperbacks that even though they've only been lightly read, just the passage of time has yellowed the pages and soon they'll be falling apart.
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Well like I said I take care of my books and I have lots of quite old books (going back 40+ years) which are doing just fine.
I can't speak for the book you say is falling apart, but with good care a pbook will last for years.
What happens if the HDD you have your ebooks stored on fails? (and eventually it will)..
You may well be able to redownload it assuming the company you bought it from i still around and what with the amount of large companies going out of business there's no guarantee amazon will be around in years to come for you to re-download your ebooks.