I’ve been doing a bit of research into ebook piracy, and I have concluded that any author who is worried about their book being pirated should worry about something they can actually do something about. Almost every published ebook seems to be pirated on multiple sites right now. Spending time trying to track down all those illegal download avenues will just waste an author’s time. An author might have success having their book taken down from one website, just as it pops up for free on another website.

Warning on Google+

My initial research into this topic was prompted by a post I saw on Google+. The post had a link to a website and said something along the lines, “My ebook is illegally posted here for free, check if yours is”. I have not published any ebooks, but I was curious, so I went to the site and searched for books from a few local authors who have yet to become big names. In all cases, the search provided links to free copies of their books.

I thought I would do the right thing and message the authors in case they were unaware. Which I started to do, but then thought maybe I should add a link to the pages concerning their books. When I went back to the site, their books no longer came up in a search, so maybe the initial post on Google+ had resulted in so many takedown notices that the site had removed. Or maybe Amazon threatened them.

General ebooks

I did not copy down the site’s name, but since then, my research has come across similar sites such as general.ebooks. Once again, I found many of those yet to become household name authors’ books for free on them, including a book written by a friend that I helped edit. General ebooks are clever in the way they are presented because they have links to paying and legal downloads of the books, but then, down the bottom, they have a big GET BOOK icon, which links to one of at least three illegal download sites. The General ebook page for each book even has a big red Report Copyright Violation tag on the page in an attempt to make General ebooks look like a legitimate site.

One of the sites linked to General ebooks is download-genuis.com. There, I found three files for one author’s books. I did not download them because I was unsure of their safety. Another of the sites that general.ebooks linked to was www.fat-game.com. Before accessing the ebook, registration is required. It says registration is free but a credit card number is needed to ensure the user is from an acceptable country. I did not register because if a company is involved in illegal downloads who knows what use my credit card details might be put to.

Authors like Molly Greene have had success getting General ebooks to remove their copyrighted work. But how many other sites link to sites like fat-games? Probably hundreds, maybe thousands, and how many sites contain the actual illegal downloads? Again probably hundreds. There are enough such sites for companies like MUSO to be operating. They are hired by publishing companies to track down copyright violating websites.

Peer-to-peer

And then there is pirating from peer-to-peer networks. Rightscorp is a big anti-piracy company in the US and it estimates 500 million ebooks were distributed by peer-to-peer networks in 2013. In an attempt to fight back publishers are now watermarking their ebooks to track illegal downloads.

At the moment the publishing industry says it is not concerned with ebook piracy. Companies like HarperCollins and Hachette says that piracy doesn’t hamper sales to any discernible degree, so maybe individual authors should not worry either, at least for the moment.