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."
Nobody makes a living writing textbooks. Few textbooks ever pay out royalties beyond the initial advance. Piracy has not changed this.
(1) get another job, (2) sue people, or (3) invent some magic spell?
directly to understanding:
I don't think that people are out to screw me personally.
The temptation to save a few dollars by grabbing a free copy of the textbook is very understandable to me.
?
I think there's just something plain broken about the search engine results.
Ok, I was going to see if you have metadata tags for search engines but .... I can't find your book on your publishers site even. When I search for it nothing matching your description comes up. How can you expect Google and Yahoo! to index your pages when your publisher can't? I'm not attacking you but I just spent five minutes trying to find your book by going to your publisher and going to Amazon but since you're not the main author, I'm having a really really hard time!
My work here is dung.
Amazon does a much better job selling printed versions. You can find used copies there.
Amazon
Okay, maybe they're not perfect, but for the record I searched out the guy who complained about the errors on Amazon. Then I asked him to help me correct the errors. All of the errors that I've heard about are right here .
While I think everyone has a right to an opinion, I was very disappointed that the guy couldn't point out something really boneheaded given the tone of his comment.
I continue to offer financial rewards to the first person to report errors in my book. There's a printed offer in the front of each book. I circulate new rewards before I print new versions. I pay them and I haven't had to pay very many.
Could not agree more. The people in this thread are hitting it right on the head. I wish we could tag this question as "troll".