There are a number of nasty little web firms, some not so little, who claim to offer my books as free PDF downloads. A couple of them were operating via Wordpress, but those worthy people have terminated their registrations with extreme prejudice.

Thank you, Wordpress!

Larger firms are operating under a very wide set of web names, many of which look as if they are hacked from other people, but they mostly come back to an organisation called 'Lilplay', whose contact details are a UK phone number that operates on USA Eastern Standard Time and connects to an operator who sounds Chinese. Looking them up, they seem to operate from or via the USA and are the subject of several warnings about harvesting e-mail addresses. They have the cheekiest little page: please enter all your credit card details so we can check if you are in a region where they can legally operate. And I can get yo an excellent price for a large column in Trafalgar Square.

I found one thing that did actualy surprise me, though, and that was the harvesting not of my books but of my Goodreads reviews of books by other authors. One was by an Irish psychology website (Andre Norton's Janus books; I can see the relevance), many were by Google books, but the bulk were by other copyright theft sites.

The height of chhek: not only do they steal or claim to steal authors' hard work, they promote it by stealing our reviews!