Theft OF Fiction, Not Theft IN Fiction

This posting is for everyone who steals books.  You fit into this category if you:

a) actively seek "review" copies that you have no intention of reviewing and every intention of reselling on Amazon marketplace or eBay immediately upon receipt;

b) you have a so-called "review service" in which you charge unsuspecting authors for a poorly written review that makes it clear that you've never read the book - and then turn around and sell the book you've been paid to review;

c) you POST or DOWNLOAD PDF files of any copyrighted work.

You are thieves and liars. You are immoral. You are robbing hardworking people (editors, typesetters, book designers, artists) of their livelihood and stealing royalties from writers who have worked, sometimes for years, to bring their manuscript to publication.

I am feeling particularly outraged by these so-called "book lovers" who somehow manage to convert a legally purchased book from Nook or Kindle into PDF files of the entire work on filesharing Websites, which we all know exist to infringe copyright.  Please tell me: What motivates you in this regard? Is it your desire to share a good book with the world? You can do that by posting a review in any one of dozens, even hundreds, of public forums for book lovers.  

Or do you have the idea that somehow you are sticking it to The Man, those greedy publishers who make millions of dollars per book sold?  Maybe you'd be interested to know that 90% of the books published each year sell fewer than 1,000 copies.  OK, so you want us greedy bastards to go out of business.  Fine. What about the writers?  Don't they deserve something, or do they too deserve to have their work stolen because they've had the audacity to want it published?

Could it be that you just don't know better?  Somehow I doubt that, not with all the widely publicized stories about illegal downloading, particularly in the music industry. (And I am an unabashed supporter of the music industry.  I'm forever going on about the value of books - of how many hours of reading pleasure a $10 book brings - but that's nothing compared to the hundreds of times people will listen to a favorite CD for which they've paid $10.  If I had to pay each of my favorite artists just a dime for each time I've listened to a song they recorded, I'd owe them literally tens of thousands of dollars each. So shelling out 10 bucks for a CD doesn't seem to me unjust in the least.)

Listen. There are hundreds, even thousands of people who are willing to put their work out there for free. Upload it and download it to your heart's content - that's exactly what they want. But our books aren't free. A lot - and I do mean A LOT - of effort has gone in to every single one of them, and they're worth something.  They're less than 10 bucks on Kindle and Nook and worth every penny.  So STOP treating them as if you can do whatever you want with something that doesn't belong to you.  STOP cheating and lying to people. And STOP STEALING MY BOOKS!

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[Jersey Jack]

Not much different than looting, really. Unprotected equals stolen in this world.