A few months ago, a group of my friends started a group on GoodReads called A.W.A.Y. (authors without a yacht) because we are appalled by some of the fibs that some of the worst e-book "pirates" tell, and get away with.

For instance, one pirate was selling collections of over 12,000 different authors' e-books by email. She had all 34 novels by one author, and sold the entire collection for about $9.00 a time. (To dozens of people who assumed she was a legitimate bookseller and paid the publishers.)

When challenged, this pirate's excuse was that she'd downloaded all the books she was selling from a pirate site, and because they were on a "public" site, she thought the books were in the Public Domain.

Do you think that a novel becomes "public domain" on the day it goes on sale in bookstores or on Kindle?

Come ask questions, rant if you like. Find out where the legal sources are for ebooks, and who is legitimately giving away free reads.

Right now, as long as my private budget lasts, I'm paying for an advert on Goodreads to draw readers' attention to the A.W.A.Y. group.

If you know about the group, please don't click on my advert.

Click this, instead
http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/3...

Conversely, if you are one of my author friends and have a piracy success/horror story or warning or news event or blog of your own on the topic that you'd like to share (without revealing names of pirate sites), this would be a good time to add it to the group.

We have topics on fair use, DMCA, DRM, copyright, sharing, where to find the best legal price, where to find legal free reads, ebook publishers we recommend, and much, much more.