Thanks for all the work you put into this!

Anyway, another (admittedly, less important) aspect of e-piracy which affects readers and authors (readers especially) is the *suspicion*. When some authors get a new rating or review on Goodreads or receives a fan-mail or a new follower on his/her blog, I’m thinking they might wonder how the person has heard of them, if the person is coming from these pirate-websites, if s/he has really purchased the book or just downloaded it ‘for free’. As a reader, knowing that there might be this doubt, this suspicion, is a bit frustrating when you sit down and think about it (I want to tell them, I bought it, I really did! Trust me! …Yeah, right. Wouldn’t work, would it?), and I would think that for authors it might make interacting with readers weird as well.

Thank you again.
Raine Delight

It is true that ebooks, and even most e-readers, arent available outside of the US at a legal outlet or website. In that case, the only way for someone who wants to read the book to acquire it is to download it from a torrent site.

Talk about foreign rights makes my head go splodey, but if books aren’t being legitimately offered online for purchase, how else do you expect people to get them? That said, I doubt Egyptian sheepherders make up the large majority of torrent users or own pirating sites.

Kirby: I’m glad you elaborated more on your quote. I’d never considered that side before you talked about it and I share your sympathy. I wish we could find a different way of getting our books to them without them resorting to pirating.

Great article! But I wish my quotes had been elaborated to more clearly reflect the situation of that instance of e-piracy mentioned herein. The foreign fans who emailed me privately to express their sadness at my anger towards them let me know that my books were not available for sale in their countries at any price, and – in some instances- they were taking very real risks with their own safety even owning them. One downloader begged me not to turn her in to her fundamentalist government, which I had no intention of doing anyway. I wound up feeling sympathetic for readers of homoerotic material in countries where owning such material is punishable. Who wouldn’t?

It might read better as:

Because of that, I can’t be sorry I blew up in public about it, but I wish I’d handled it better because I had fans in places like Peru and Iran (where my books are not available for purchase legally) who wound up feeling hurt by my anger. That wasn’t what I was after.”

I want to make it plain that I do not have sympathy for e-pirates. I do not want my work stolen. No author does. But in the cases of some where the logistics of international payment paired with the illegality of homosexual material in their countries make it difficult (if not impossible) for me to earn money from my novels there, I would rather they had the chance to read it than not.

Thanks.

-Kirby

Still waiting.