Authors Without A Yacht (AWaY) discussion

For one month, J A Konrath (a master of the art of promotion) is challenging pirates and honest readers alike to "steal" his book.

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/05...

It's not stealing, because he invites everyone to do so. This link is to the page on his blog where he offers the freebie.

I think it's brilliant promo. He gets people talking about and reading his books.

Here's one enthusiastic honest pirate who admits that he is buying fewer books since discovering piracy.

Jason said...

I couldn't agree more. There are quite a few excellent pirate sites out there, and they've saved me hundreds of dollars since I bought my kindle last year. I went from buying 40+ books a year to buying 2 or 3 books a year at the most.

I've downloaded close to 200 pirated ebooks since last June including the entire Stephen King library, and it was all free! I also found several out of print titles that would've cost me a fortune to track down through used bookstores.

It's the same with audio books. You can find almost everything you'd want online. It's crazy! I used to spend so much money on audio books because I travel a lot for work and it's nice to have a good book to listen to, but now I've got a backlog of books to listen to, and I didn't have to pay for a single one of them.

Thank God for the internet and for open minded authors like Joe for spearheading the free content movement. You rock, man! I'm going to download every book of yours I can find in the future, hopefully the audio version.

Based on the last sentence of that reader's comment, it makes one wonder if after Joe's experiment is over, how many people will just keep taking his stuff for free even though he is no longer allowing it. By doing this, has he enforced a perception that his content really isn't worth anything?

And Rowena, you're right - when set a price to free no one is stealing it, instead you're giving it to them. He's just playing with semantics.

I am very concerned about the legal implications of what Joe is doing. If copyright depends upon "Defend It Or Lose It" and if copyright means reserving to the copyright owner the right to reproduce and distribute, well, Joe has given away his copyright.

He has invited other people to freely reproduce and distribute his work.

It also appears to me that he may be in breach of his contract with Amazon not to "undersell" them.

Amazon counts ebooks sold for $0.00 as sales for the purpose of Kindle rankings. How will they count what Joe is doing?

My comment to "Stitch" who seems to think that file sharing is a legitimate measure of how good an author is.

Stitch,

Of course one book is not enough to make a living. Five books isn't either!

Perhaps you missed the point I was trying to make about the situation for debut authors.

I was not suggesting that anyone has a god-given right to be supported for the rest of their lives because they got one book published!

Pirates don't have a "god-given" right to destroy other people's chance at a livelihood, either. There is a saying in the publishing industry "Don't break someone else's rice bowl."

At least one pirate shared at least one novel before she even READ it herself.

How can it be about how good an author is, when pirates share books they haven't read?


If one particular pirate had read one of the books before sharing it, she would have realized that her real name and IP number was embedded in the file... and she wouldn't have had to ask all her pirate friends on Astatalk to delete their copies of the version that had been all over the internet for 24 hours.

I wrote an article about this experiment on my web site last night. Way more there than what is appropriate for me to post in a forum. Here's the link: http://bit.ly/bfjbfr

Hey, William,

Is that the blog that I posted in the Blogs About Copyright discussion?

Way to go, anyway.

Rowena, what blog?

EDIT: Never mind, I found what you were referring to. Different article, same site though. Just used a URL shortener when I posted the link to the article here.

William,

Does bit.ly allow you to create custom URLs? I really like tinyurl.com for that because I tend to forget what a streamer of alphanumeric characters means. I've looked at snipurl.com as well.

Yes they do allow custom URLs. I use bit.ly mostly because it's the default in TweetDeck, which is my primary twitter client. So I therefore use it for everything else so my tracking is all in one place.

Having given careful thought to what Joe is doing, I think that one might do the same sort of thing in a backhanded way by publishing take down notices with live links.

Sort of the "Oh, Sir Jasper..." approach.

Anyway, it amuses me to see what would happen.