AUTHOR ALERT! Your e-books are being pirated!

[Therin of Andor]

Pretty much every Trek book from the past 20 years (it seems, amusingly, bar one) has been shared all over the internet.

Every few years, well-meaning but misguided Star Trek friends try to shove an unlabeled CD into my hands.

"What is this?" I ask.

"Every Star Trek novel ever written. When I saw it on a torrent site the other day I knew you'd want it," is a typical reply.

I refuse to accept it.

I have all the books in hardcopy, and a few eBooks - and when/if I go digital I fully intend to pay and download authentic versions to support the authors and the ongoing franchise.

 

[Shikarnov]

^ I've had similar experiences, especially when I lived in Russia -- where intellectual property is something of a new concept for most people. Their version of Facebook is loaded with pirated content.

Ultimately, I think piracy is something that's just going to have to be accepted. DRM doesn't work and only punishes paying customers. And litigating every instance of piracy will cost far more than will be returned. In the end, the media industries need to treat piracy like retailers treat shrinkage. They know it's going to happen. They know they can't stop it. And so they should balance their accounts in other ways. It's not ideal, but reality rarely is.

 

[Deano2099]

Also, you could basically enlist anyone who have ever written a Trek novel in the cause, because basically every novel published before last week is available as a bootleg, apparently. Even those that have never been published in ebook form, which means somebody is very busy at the scanner bed.

There's not many that haven't been released as ebooks. At the very least, every numbered book from every series, plus all books that came out after they stopped numbering them. But outside of really obscure stuff it's all out there. Mostly bundled up so you can get the whole thing in one go if you want. But oddly enough not The Buried Age, to answer whoever was curious.

A certain high profile torrent site got shut down yesterday though, and that had a sizeable niche of Trek Lit fans on it, so that's a good sign.

 

[Ian Keldon]

Update: TUEBL was down for a couple of days, and we thought it was gone for good. The main page seems to be up again.

S&S challenged 22 of the books (there were more than that I reported) with takedown notices, and the downloads for the "free" copies seem to be gone on the couple of links I checked.

As a side note, Christopher, do you honestly think that a big publisher like S&S is going to care as much about some small press/print author who maybe sells 10 copies a month on a good month as they would about JK Rowling or Stephen King (to give two examples)?

 

[iarann]

A certain high profile torrent site got shut down yesterday though, and that had a sizeable niche of Trek Lit fans on it, so that's a good sign.

Really, the torrent sites are just the current trend, there are many other methods going back to the 80s that are still going, and more will come up. Piracy is always going to be a problem, like people stealing books at your local store, as long as you are producing material someone will try to steal it. The best way to deal with this is report it when you see it and not participate. This has been going on since before there were official ebooks, and would be going on even if Pocket had chosen to never enter the ebook market. It's just an unfortunate fact of publishing right now.

 

[JoeZhang]

Yeah - pretty much everything was pirated before torrent sites were up and running - what seems to happening now is people are consolidating and cleaning up earlier scans and OCRs to make the quality higher, new stuff they just strip the DRM out of.