Quote:
Originally Posted by Cinisajoy
Hey. I just read through the article.
This got my attention.
" My brother put it on every pirate site." Pirates didn't steal her books. She did it herself to prove a point.
That proves a point all right. If you put something out there free, people will take it.
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You misread the article.
Book Four was a neutered copy: only the first 4 chapters, over and over again, with a statement at the end of the fourth chapter that piracy is bad. People on the forums allegedly asked if someone found a legit version (= complete version), because they had to go and buy it on Amazon because they couldn't find one.
Thus, she has proven her point that, if you circulate digital ARC's or an e-book ends up on the piracy sites, people won't buy the book.
As she said: it's not 2004, this is the smartphone generation. What she means is that, now that internet is ubiquitous (at least it is in the Netherlands, with something like 90% of households connected to high speed internet), and people know how to use it. In 2004, piracy might have cost a book here or there to someone in the know (that was even before e-books started to make it big in 2007, and way before the 2010-2011 boom), but now in 2017, practically anybody can pirate a book.
If you put something like ""A title of a book recently released" epub download" in Google, there is a BIG chance you'll find it with a bit of digging. If you put "site:********.***" behind it, a hit is almost guaranteed if an author is at least mildly popular.
I know. I've been there, because I wanted to BUY a book at Amazon, but wasn't allowed to because I didn't live in the US, and Kobo (or any EPUB provider I looked at) didn't have it. It's one of two books I acquired in this fashion, and if they had been available later, I would still have bought them: but they aren't. Both aren't even on Amazon any longer, and it's now rumored that both of them were illegal, but very well done scans/OCR's of books that were never released as ebooks officially.
A third book, which I bought through Kobo ("A Neverending Story") is gone there as well. It was (is) an absolutely perfect digital representation of the red/green hardcover version I own, but it's nowhere to be found now. It's even gone from my Kobo library. So I actually may have _bought_ a pirated copy of a book.
There have been numerous threads about Mary Steward's Arthurian Saga on Mobileread, which is in this same bind: there are (were?) several ebook versions at Kobo and Amazon, but it's still not clear if they are/were legitimate.