Slashdot Mirror
What Can I Do About Book Pirates?
peterwayner writes "Six of the top ten links on a Google search for one of my books point to a pirate site when I type in 'wayner data compression textbook.' Others search strings actually locate pages that are selling legit copies including digital editions for the Kindle. I've started looking around for suggestions. Any thoughts from the Slashdot crowd? The free copies aren't boosting sales for my books. Do I (1) get another job, (2) sue people, or (3) invent some magic spell? Is society going to be able to support people who synthesize knowledge or will we need to rely on the Wikipedia for everything? I'm open to suggestions."
Just look through the comments for any story relating to MPAA or RIAA, substitute movies/albums for books. There you go.
People pirate your books because they are not good enough to pay for, because they aren't available in high quality open digital formats without DRM, you charge to much, you need to release the book as open source for free, and then make money on lectures and going on tours, and you can have a web page with a link which allows people to donate money directly to you without middlemen, and you can make money on advertisement.
There you go.
What Can I Do About Book Pirates?
Book pirates claim the partial income of several thousand authors yearly. Once book pirates get underneath the floor boards of your house, nothing gets rid of them. If you have book pirates, you'll notice tiny white dust particles near crevices and creases in your books and book shelves which are actually book pirate eggs. They will hatch and form book pirate larvae that can go weeks without books and still survive which makes extermination difficult. Once infected, a typical book enthusiast has nine to ten days before cells throughout the body are infected with the book pirate virus. You cannot cure book pirates but you can control them. There are means of prevention--a vaccine has been developed for book pirates type one and type two but there are several strains too rare and foreign to address. Book pirate build up occurs around the search engines and torrents of the internet and with them come social stigmas. Regular flossing and lawsuits will also help prevent book pirate and book related decay. If you or someone you know has book pirates or shows book pirate symptoms, get help, get tested and abstain from group readings.
My work here is dung.
Best of luck to you! It's quite a good reason to write a text book, but it looks like it may soon be the only reason to do it.
Actually the best and only reason to write a textbook is so you can win arguments by saying "I wrote the book on (insert topic of disagreement)!" and then smugly pulling the book from your shelf.
I love your post - it's so surreal if you drop the first sentence. You might consider selling it as a beat poem.
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
and then smugly pulling the book from your shelf.
Which contains only copies of your book, but which you pause to scan, for effect, before selecting at random an individual copy and exclaiming, "ah, here it is" and presenting it to your interlocutor along with an invoice.