Is It Worth the Piracy Risk to Send Epub Files of Books to Reviewers
A bena, who is eighteen, recently read Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, and idea it was wonderful. She does feel a flake bad about downloading it illegally, she says, but her female parent is a single parent who can't afford to feed her voracious dear of books. She has also enjoyed the entire Percy Jackson series without paying its author, Rick Riordan, a penny. She'south not a thief, though, she says: "I wouldn't take food or clothes without paying the people who made them, because they're physical things. I believe real life and the internet differ."
Abena (non her existent name) is one of millions of people who use volume-piracy websites to illegally download piece of work by authors they love. The UK government'due south Intellectual Property Office estimates that 17% of ebooks are consumed illegally. Mostly, pirates tend to be from amend-off socioeconomic groups, and aged between 30 and threescore. Many use social media to ask for tips when their regular piracy website is shut downwardly; when I contacted some, those who responded always justified it by claiming they were too poor to buy books – then tell me they read them on their e-readers, smartphones or computer screens - or that their areas lacked libraries, or they institute information technology difficult to locate books in the countries where they lived. Some felt embarrassed. Others blamed greedy authors for trying to stop them.
When nosotros asked Guardian readers to tell us about their experiences with piracy, we had more than 130 responses from readers aged between 20 and lxx. Most regularly downloaded books illegally and while some felt guilty – more than 1 said they but pirated "big names" and when "the author isn't on the breadline, think Lee Child" – the majority saw nothing wrong in the practice. "Reading an author'due south work is a greater compliment than ignoring it," said i, while others claimed it was role of a greater ethos of equality, that "culture should exist gratuitous to all".
Many reported starting to pirate books during university, when faced with bills for expensive textbooks – "I want to spend my express funds on going out, honestly," said 1 21-year-old University of Warwick educatee – while others on limited incomes said their disabilities and mental health made library visits a challenge. 1 disabled and unemployed reader who asked to remain anonymous said: "I don't recall it's morally wrong to pirate a book if you genuinely tin't afford information technology. I simply become £80 a calendar week. I usually tin can't afford to spend £10+ on a new volume, simply I dearest reading … Information technology'southward not much different from buying from a secondhand bookstore, right? Either manner, the writer gets no money."
Just overwhelmingly, virtually respondents endemic up to pirating books not considering of cost, but ease. Doctors, accountants and professionals described themselves likewise-off, simply said they pirated books to "pre-read" them, because they often felt dissatisfied with a book after buy. "I have paid for some truly terrible books and regretted it – thanks to piracy, I tin read beginning. I'll purchase if it was expert plenty that I kept reading it," said one. Another said he'd pirated around 100,000 books in "a few hours" and donated all his concrete books to charity shops: "Apparently, I will never read about of those pirated ebooks. Over a lifetime, I doubt I'll get through even a fifth of my electric current collection."
One operator of a piracy website contacted the Guardian to particular how they did it. "I upload anything from science fiction to ridiculously priced academy textbooks. I tin get any novel that I want in about 30 seconds. If I can't, I know people in my dark little corner of the internet that can find ANYTHING that is asked for. Information technology's incredible really."
Very few reported existence negatively affected past it. (Though 3 readers reported attempting to pirate Harry Potter books, only to stop up with erotic fanfiction.) A 42-year-old It worker in Glasgow complained, "I have a wealthy retired relative who prides himself on pirating books which makes me want to vomit. I don't recollect he reads one-half of them, just hoards them. He can absolutely afford to buy books. I don't understand people who can spend hours and hours engaging with writing knowing they take ripped the writer off."
And authors are existence ripped off. This week, with the resurgence of a detail piracy site (the Guardian is choosing non to name whatever of them), novelist Joanne Harris asked publishers to exist more "muscular", to have pirates to court and close downward entire sites instead of arguing over individual titles. But though the problem is costing publishers "billions of dollars annually" according to the International Publishers Association, there is no simple fix.
It is as well hard to quantify how bad the trouble is, when so few publishers are willing to talk openly about it. One piracy proficient at a UK publisher kindly provided some background information for this commodity off the record; the rest refused to speak to me - though Penguin Random House and JK Rowling's publisher Pottermore offered statements to say that they take piracy very seriously.
The legal and tech aspects of book piracy prevention are complex and fast-evolving, but those in the know describe it very simply: it'due south whack-a-mole. Ane of the about persistent ebook pirate sites has been taken down multiple times, only to pop back up once more under a .com, a .net and a .org domain name. At least 120,000 take-down notices have been issued against it already, involving web crawlers, lawyers, its domain host and the Metropolitan police. But that website is dorsum regardless, complete with some intimidating legal linguistic communication of its own, addressed to anyone who plans to complain.
Asked for a annotate, an ambassador for the website replied: "Hilarious. We don't accept time to exercise something bullshit, simply permit me requite yous a list of websites where books are available to exist downloaded for free bigger than our site thousands time [sic]." And the list of sites they sent was indeed extensive, all offering books by well-loved children's authors, YA and adult bestsellers, too as some writers who are just starting out.
One of these is the Waterstones children's books prize winner Michelle Harrison, who has drawn attending to the result on Twitter. "I feel pretty despondent nearly it all," she says at present, having been called "elitist" and "not worthy of being an author" past angry pirates when she pointed out that they were stealing her work. "Information technology'south all very well publishers sending accept-downwards notices, simply we all knew information technology was simply a matter of time before the site sprang up once again under a different guise. It's fighting something we can't win.
"I'm a single working parent trying to stay adrift, and then I can't afford the time and expense it would take to continue to pursue this and brand my deadlines … I can't understand the mindset of a person who thinks it'south acceptable to harass an author for wanting to protect their rights."
There are organisations fighting hard to make the law take hold of up with applied science. The Publishers Association has a portal that can help deal with infringements, but its CEO Stephen Lotinga admits it is a Sisyphean chore. The PA believes governments, search engines and ISPs should be doing a lot more. The Order of Authors, meanwhile, believes domain providers should be fabricated to police piracy on any sites they host, and is urging its members to write to their MEPs to support the provisions of the Copyright Directive, which would make platforms accountable for anything illegal they host. The Intellectual Property Office, meanwhile, says that it is working on it, and claims that the UK has one of the all-time IP enforcement regimes in the globe, and that "if deficiencies in the current legal provision are identified, proposals will be developed to address them".
Even private companies are getting involved. Che Pinkerton is the CEO of DMCA.com, named for the Digital Millennial Copyright Act, a 20-twelvemonth-old The states police that is withal followed in many jurisdictions. DMCA.com works with lawyers and law enforcement, but it is primarily a tech company, and the way it tracks down infringers is its "hole-and-corner sauce".
Pinkerton puts the rise in piracy down to the growth of "user-generated content" – such equally blogs and personal websites – and he sees every mean solar day how the constabulary is playing take hold of-upwardly with the technology. To outcome a take-downward notice, he often has to bargain with several parties in unlike jurisdictions, and tin merely tackle infringements one at a time. Oft, the domain provider will be deluged with have-down notices, and volition remove the entire site, simply to get the stream of correspondence to stop. Simply this arroyo doesn't stop sites popping up again under a new name, with a new provider. No wonder it is hard to manage.
All this is exhausting for authors, but it could be devastating for readers, as well. Harris, a representative of the SoA who speaks passionately on behalf of authors, knows several who have lost contracts considering piracy drove down their sales to an unsustainable level. The nigh vulnerable authors are those who write serial: when book one does well, but book two is heavily pirated, book 3 could end up dead in the water. Midlist authors, and those who barely scrape a living are besides at risk. "These people mistakenly think they're sticking it to the man," Harris says. "They're not; they're sticking it to the little people, the people who are struggling … and they don't care."
Teaching, not regulation, is key, she told the Guardian: "If at that place is a solution to this, rather than go on trying to shut downward these sites, information technology is to get the reading public to understand why using them is dishonest, wrong and is killing publishing and killing diversity in publishing. When you realise that [authors] are not really different yous at all, yous see that what it boils down to is you're stealing the product of someone else'due south work."
On that note, Abena has recently had a revelation. She makes a piffling money by selling art online, and has started to remember about what would happen if art lovers began downloading that for gratis, just because they really wanted it. "It would injure and I'd be super-angry", she says, after we exchange messages for a few days. "The fact that they don't have much money doesn't make it OK and it doesn't make what I do OK either. I guess I do accept to end."
One down – just a few million to get.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/06/i-can-get-any-novel-i-want-in-30-seconds-can-book-piracy-be-stopped
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