Hi.
If you’ve landed on this page, then you probably did a search for “free ebook” or “full text”, plus the name of one of the authors I mention on this site, commonly Michael Chabon, Giles Milton, Phillip Pullman, and so on, or the title of one of their books.
If you’re deliberately seeking illegal free copies, then you’re an arsehole and I’ve nothing to say to you — nothing will change your mind anyway, so move on.
If, however, you’ve ended up with the impression that anything online should be free or that free copies of books are allowed by the author or somehow helps them, or at least doesn’t hurt, and therefore it’s OK for you to seek them out, please pay attention for just a moment.
Every single time you help yourself to a free copy when previously you would have bought or loaned the book, it directly takes a sale (or library loan) away from the author. Not only does that directly affect their royalties ie how much money they receive for the months of work they did to produce the words you are enjoying so much, but it also impacts their relationship with their publisher and their whole career — because if their publisher does not see enough sales, they will dump that author.
Ebooks are available for free legitimately, often because they are the first in a series or an early work. But those are available from or at least promoted on the publisher’s or author’s website, or listed on proper retail sites. If you’re picking up free ebooks by mainstream authors via sites like Wattpad or Feedbooks or just posted randomly on various sites, those are not sanctioned by author or publisher.
In these cases, you’re stealing from the author and fucking up their chances of their publisher sticking with them. If you like an author, why would you deliberately do that to them? Or, more self-interestedly, why would you ruin your chances of seeing more books from them by screwing their writing career now?
If you don’t want to pay, borrow from a library — it counts for the author.
If DRM is affecting you, buy the copy and circumvent the DRM — it’s just as illegal as downloading free copies, but at least the author, and publisher, get something.
If geographical restrictions are stopping you, try entering your profile as US anyway (even on the credit card page) — apparently that works sometimes. Otherwise, there’s that library, or Amazon’ll most likely have the paperback available just as cheaply as the ebook version.
Hi Wendy, I landed here through Fishpond, not wanting free ebooks. I love your warnings, love your style and have a deep affinity with your direct language. I have a huge smile as I type.
I have been studying some notes on Digital Rights Management (DRM) to protect some of my own work and when I have it right in my head and understand it more, I’ll certainly be sharing this with other writers.
Well said and thanks for saying it so directly. Writers everywhere will send their applause to you!
Chris
Actually my question is there a way to turn the books on my shelf into ebooks. I trying to figure out how to travel with my bookshelf in e form without paying for all my book again. Any ideas??
Hi Chris, thanks for stopping by. It’s certainly difficult to get the DRM balance right, so it’ll be interesting to see what you come up with on that front.
I arrived here via Winterbourne Pub. In regards to DRM its almost pointless, with calibre and a plugin I can purchase from Amazon and convert to epub for my sony. I have got around geo restrictions but Amazon are patrolling their policy now.
There’s no excuse for piracy though, I have heard people excuse themselves on the grounds that they can’t get it in the format they want, or that it has drm.
It takes about as much time to setup calibre and the plugins as it does to work out a bit-torrent site. And if these people were truly trying being ethical they would download the torrent and still buy an item from the store.
The ease of circumventing DRM was one of the reasons we at Winterbourne decided not to put DRM on our files — the other one being that we didn’t want to treat our customers like criminals when most people want to do the right thing. As far as I’m concerned DRM just punishes the innocent while not doing a thing to stop the pirates.
Wendy,
I did stumble upon your site regarding ebook piracy because I did indeed do a search for ‘free ebook’ along with the name of an author. Since I could not help but feel that your commentary was directed at me, I would like to outline the reasons why, for what its worth, I have looked and currently continue to look for free ebooks. Perhaps, the illustration of my plight will make sense to you. Most likely, I’ll still be viewed as an ‘arsehole’.
In a few short months I will be heading to Afghanistan for roughly a year. I will be dragging across the world a requisite amount of issued equipment that will tally, literary, in the hundreds of pounds. My Bachelor’s degree is in English, so, unsurprisingly, I have hundreds of books in my house. I even have a bookcase dedicated solely to books that I want to read right now, at this moment (however, clearly that is not a feasible option, so I must painfully and artfully choose each successive book to read).
So when I deploy, I want to bring these books with me, books that I already own, downrange. But understandably I do not want to add unnecessary weight to the caravan of equipment and stuff that I am already bringing if it can be helped.
I am new to the ebook world and as of yet I do not even own an e-reader. However, I have begun toying with the idea of rather than dragging 20 books halfway across the world, perhaps I could simply bring one singular device that could hold those same books, thus saving space and weight. Yet here is the crux of the issue: When I have dozens of books I already own that are in queue to be read, why spend additional money on ‘other’ titles. (stay with me) Moreover, (and most importantly for this discussion) why do I have to buy the same book twice, simply because I am trying to acquire the said book in a different format? If I have legitimately purchased the book, paid dues to the author, publishing houses, etc once, why must I be required to expend my money a second time to receive something I already own?
I feel like there should be some kind of ‘authority’ in which I can go to and prove that I own these books (I don’t know what ‘proving’ would entail or how it would be accomplished — perhaps some kind of national ISBN tracking program).
I’ve looked into my local library system, because, clearly, a borrow/return system would work the best in my case. However our local library has only a little over a thousand ebook titles. Which seems like a lot, but once one removes the romances, the mysteries, the westerns — in short, all the books I have no interest in, there remains little or none from my list (I think I found one).
Perhaps, in the end, I do not fully understand all the implications and underpinnings that accompany this issue. Maybe ebook piracy (along with other forms of media piracy) centers on COPIES rather than CONTENT. My angle, in retrospect, is on content. I feel that I should only have to pay once for content. Maybe copies of media is actually the central issue.
“why do I have to buy the same book twice, simply because I am trying to acquire the said book in a different format? If I have legitimately purchased the book, paid dues to the author, publishing houses, etc once, why must I be required to expend my money a second time to receive something I already own?”
If you had bought a book in hardback but now find the weight and size inconvenient, would you just walk into a bookstore and help yourself to the paperback version? If you had bought the paperback, would you think it was OK to take more copies of the same paperback just because you had already legitimately purchased it once?
Authors get paid per copy, regardless of format. If you want to go the ebook route, put your paper books in storage to read later and buy some new ebooks to take with you.
But I imagine Jesse is also going to be taking an ipod or mp3 player on which he will have music ripped from the CDs that he already owns. There is no suggestion that he should re-buy those albums in download format instead. Indeed, the growth of the ipod/mp3 player market has been based to a large extent upon the idea of individuals reformatting their CD music collections into a more convenient form.
Jesse is raising an important point that highlights a contradiction within media consumption. It is acceptable, legally and socially, to see digital art as transferable between formats. We can rip CDs or DVDs to play on portable devices or to manage better on harddrive home entertainment systems, and we can equally manipulate our digital photos and videos as we require. There is also a minor industry providing specialised turntables that allow vinyl to be transferred to mp3, whilst the home scanner for digitising our old photos has been around for many years. So why is the book to be treated differently?
The answer, I believe, lies in the economics of the available technology and of the book trade. It suits the book industry that Individuals don’t have access to technology to digitise their own books, as it requires them, as you say, to purchase the books again. When profit can be made from creating and selling home digitising technology, however, I expect the legally and social opposition will magically disappear. It is about money, but not I fear about the author’s earnings.
This is a good point. Indeed what is legally and socially acceptable changes over time and cohort. When we moved from video tapes to DVDs (then to Blu-Ray), and from cassettes to CDs, it was expected we’d lay out money to replace our collections, and mostly people did, because there was an element of upgrade in quality to it. Moving from a physical format to digital doesn’t have the same attraction of getting a better quality product (in fact, the digital version is somewhat stigmatised).
It is, however, a more convenient product, as you could say about a paperback vs a hardback, and again, no one thinks you can help yourself to the paperback for free once you’ve bought the hardback. No one thinks you can get the paperback for free once you’ve bought the ebook. No one thinks that once you’ve paid to see a movie at the cinema you should get the DVD version for free…well, maybe they do
.
Legally…digitising your home photos should not even be raised in this context (they’re yours to do as you wish barring privacy issues perhaps), and whether ripping a CD or DVD is legal or not depends on jurisdiction. Ripping a CD is broadly acceptable for personal use; not sure about DVDs, wouldn’t the movie industry scream as loudly about that as the publishers do about book scanning?
People can already digitise their own book collections cheaply — with a scanner with an automatic document feeder, and the willingness to disembowel their books. Perhaps publishers would find that acceptable, the literal replacement of one copy with another?
Probably not. At the moment, the copyright guarding the written word — guarding the rights of the author — specifies that “no part of this work may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior written permission from the publisher.” or similar wording. It’s the dissemination that worries them.
Either way, for me, it IS about the author. I’m not sure that piracy is a huge issue — the people who steal are the people who wouldn’t have paid for a book anyway. People in Jesse’s position…it’d be nice if they supported an author they like by not pirating. I understand where they’re coming from, however. The original post was not aimed at them.
I can also envision the day when you get a free copy of the digital version with the purchase of a paperback (or vice versa perhaps). The point will then be conceded, that all formats are not equal and separate. But until then…piracy of ebooks hurts the author.
There is no loss of revenue for the publisher or the author, only lower projected revenues, which is a big difference. When I buy a book, I literally have my own book, if someone else wants to read the same book, they have to get their own copy, which must be physically printed, which costs money. A single ebook it created and then provided to the world for purchase, so essentially, you are sharing the one created ebook copy with whoever chooses to purchase it as well, yet I don’t see you paying an equally divided portion of the cost based on how many people bought it.
Your argument that you would’t steal a paperback after you bought the hardcover doesn’t hold water at all. A physical copy of a book cost money to make, so therefore, stealing it would result in a loss of money. If however, a non physical copy was provided for free, costing nothing to make, with the individual providing it not making any type of profit, nothing is lost. Nothing is gained by the publisher/author, but nothing is lost either. This is only true however if the individual downloading the copy actually owns the book.
And for the record, authors get paid peanuts compared to what the publishers make, even for publishing a non physical copy such as an ebook which has no production costs whatsoever(other than editing). I can see them getting a bit more for a paper copy, as it requires actually making something.
Bottom line is if you want to see the authors making more money, start lobbying the publishers to increase the authors royalties instead of slamming people for downloading something they already own.
Yes, publishers should pay their authors a bigger cut of the royalties.
No, the ebook copy is not free of cost; the distributor (ie the bookstore) takes its cut.
Yes, it does hurt the author if their sales are lower than were projected. Aside from the lose of revenue, the publisher will not take on their next book.
Yes, it would be nice if you were given a copy of the ebook with the physical book. That is not yet the world we live in. It might be one day. For now, buying the physical version of the book does not give you the right to the ebook version.
Why do you want the ebook version of a book if you’ve already got the physical version? For eg convenience while travelling? Then you’re paying for the convenience, not for the format.
Just a thought. Maybe books should follow more the path where if you buy the hard copy, you have a chance to redeem a digital copy of the book. Much like Blueray & Digital Copy bundles. Don’t see it happening soon, but it would help solve much of these issues. P.S. Found the site with the search “can i get free ebooks for books I already own?”. No pirating here lol.
Hello Wendy,
I landed here searching for “facts on online ebook piracy” for my research topic. You should better change the intro lines of your article as it directly or indirectly offending your readers.
Last but not the least, I AM NOT AN ARSEHOLE X-( .
You better bridle your tongue.
Hi Sahilsk. Why would you think you are being called an arsehole if you are not pirating ebooks? I’m pretty clear there: IF you are deliberately seeking illegal copies THEN you are an arsehole. If not, happy days.
And speaking of “directly or indirectly offending your readers”, take a look at the etymology of “bridle your tongue” please.
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