Martine77

@mgcrow · 27 Apr 2023

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The cost of illegal Ebooks

People sometimes ask me why I saved the price of my latest Ebook.
The truth is that I couldn't help, because the platform through which I spent had driven up prices and I had no other choice, I wanted to get something back from my investment.

I already told you about the cost of books. An eBook does not need to be printed and can be distributed digitally. As a result, you would say that it can be cheaper, because the material costs, the transport costs and so on are lost.

So this is where the problem lies. Just because it is so easy to distribute, it is also easily distributed illegally.

Search and you will find. I looked up my latest novel in Google and found the Ebook free to download from a document sharing site.
I noticed that the book already had a lot of downloads, even though I barely sell books.
For me, as a small self-pub shrimp, the bottom line is that for every Ebook sold legally, 12 copies were illegally removed from that site for free.

So this not only costs me money, but also the publishing platform, which must therefore charge those extra costs for security and lost income. So that's why I had to store my Ebooks with pain in my heart.

And that's why I'm really mad right now. I've already lost hundreds of euros in royalties myself. I hate that, because I'm never going to get my investment back, but I think it's even worse for readers, who now have to pay more.

Piracy costs a lot of money. People think it's fun to download a book for free. Nothing could be further from the truth. These pirates are not Robin Hoods, but real criminals, who often steal from people who have even less than them.
Many authors are not rich. The people who download their work for free are not the poor student, the social assistance mother, etc. They usually still have the decency to save with their limited resources, because they know what theft means.
The people who practice these practices are usually people who can buy books but never have enough and who thus drive honest people further into poverty.

Theft is a major source of inflation. We can call our governments thieves, but we can also look at ourselves.

Would you like to read a lot? A Kobo Plus subscription doesn't cost much and you can usually read the books you'd otherwise steal, except that it's also useful to the rights holders.

Greed and greed are the reasons for criminal behavior here, with the exception of stupidity.

So if you've ever purchased such a free Ebook from a site where the bookstore charges money, you have an illegal copy in your possession. I would then delete it as soon as possible.

“Share” Ebooks is also not allowed, because you copy an Ebook that you forward. That is against the law.
A paper book that you lend does not multiply. That's okay. An Ebook is therefore not allowed.
In principle, if you do hand over an Ebook, you should delete your own copy to sit in the twilight zone.

It is because of this that sites such as Tom Kabinet, which wanted to offer second-hand Ebooks, have also been removed from the ether. That's why websites close every day.

So do you see a link to download a free Ebook somewhere? Then check it out. There are authors who make works available free of charge. If it's free on an official distribution site such as Kobo or Smashwords, it's legal.
If it is on a site that is not registered as a bookstore and does cost money at the bookstore, it is illegal.
Will you come across a site like this? Report it to the publisher of the books on it or to the BREIN Foundation in the Netherlands.

This is the only way we can keep bookland affordable for everyone. Sharing this post to inform people is also much appreciated.

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