Authors fight free books site Scribd for ‘pirating’ their work

Carol

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article5998918.ece

Randomguy

A quote at the bottom was sad:

" Last summer the American author Stephanie Meyer said she would not continue with her latest novel in the Twilight series after an unfinished draft of the book, Midnight Sun, was leaked on to the internet. She said the project was on hold indefinitely "

I can imagine her pain. The project is mid way through development, then woosh it is out there with no chance to fine tune or move stuff around. Soul destroying! I'd be livid!

Tessadragon

I'd be furious if my work was put there like that. Thanks for that, Carol. Id make sure to check the site every day after my books are published. (No i haven't got a publishing deal, still it's the principle.) It's stealing outright...they should pay the PLR rate the same way libraries do if people are reading online as they are essentially borrowing the book, and pay royalties for every book downloaded.

Jay Mandal

Perhaps authors should band together and present Scribd, their readers, and their advertisers with a claim for the unauthorised copying of books. Or we could threaten not to publish anything until the matter is satisfactorily resolved.

Tessadragon

Well, i just ran a couple of popular authors through the search engine...i have just been able to access the full novels by Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson series), full novels by Tamora Pierce, Laurell K Hamilton, Kelley Armstrong, Stephen King. I idly ran Gordon Brown through its search engine and its first hit was Gordon Brown: an intellectual in power. That really made me laugh.

RichardS

I think you'll find that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are numourous sites out there where you can pickup free PDF copies of relatively new novels. I'm astonished that it's not been mentioned much before now. If the publishers think that by stopping just one site they've resolved the problem, they have another thing coming.

It's one thing having PD works on sites such as Gutenberg, another thing entirely to have new books available all over the place for free.

Carol

Brief follow up here, but do read the comments by Susan Hill- they sum up the difficulties.


http://www.thebookseller.com/news/81316-page.html#Comment

RichardS

She's spot on, as she usually is on things such as this.

It's quite un-nerving when you read the sort of comments that she comes up against.

Carol

So many people don't realise how little writers do get from book sales.

They hear about these million pound contacts that top authors get and assume all writers get large fees. They don't understand that the money is spaced out over a number of books, and assume it is up front- and celebrity bios have a lot to do with that.
Not enough publicity is given to the figures about how many writers earn less than the national average wage.

Jenny

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6316434.ece

josiehenley

I'm on scribD and upload my own work, extracts from books, blogs, essays etc. Only my own work of course, as a way of getting it out there. You have to agree that what you upload is your own copyright, like with youtube. but then there are always going to be those who abuse that.