Changes to see in the publishing world

This week on Open Book we’re chatting about things we’d like to see change in the publishing industry.  

The first and most important change I’d like to see is the elimination of pirates. Authors and publishers have been besieged with pirates stealing our work, probably forever, but for certain in recent years with the advent of indie publishing.  I barely go a month when in one of my author groups someone is posting that they’ve found another pirate site. We all scramble to send take down notices, usually to find that we have to jump through dozens of hoops.  Our work is being stolen folks, it’s criminal and it needs to stop.

The second thing I’d like to see change is the click farms that are prevalent on Amazon.  Read this post by David Gaughran in which he talks about the click farm industry.  He has another post, found here, in which he goes into a bit more detail about the fake book industry which is also something that Amazon is aware of, but fails to take action on. 

What are some of the things you’d like to see change in the publishing industry?  Let’s go see what my fellow bloggers would like to see.

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8 thoughts on “Changes to see in the publishing world”

  1. I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of pirates. I once read that we have to look on the positive side and see it as extra publicity. Hmm…

    • Hmmm, it’s hard to get past the violation of having something stolen from me to get to the positive side. If someone is downloading from a pirate site, they aren’t paying for my books. So, they aren’t going to go to the vendors I upload to to pay. Where’s the positive.

  2. I suppose, if we were rich, or we had a generous relative who was a copyright attorney, we could do something about pirates, but probably not even then because pirates often aren’t even based in the United States and I’m not sure we can bring a lawsuit in New Delhi.

    It irritates me to see my books offered for free when I know I didn’t authorize it and I do try to address it when I see it, but some big name authors like Paulo Coelho say our biggest problem as unknown indie authors is obscurity and the pirates act like free advertising. That feels counter-intuitive, but there’s enough logic to it that I kind of agree with it.

    And, yeah, it does feel like a burglar went through my underwear drawer and it does anger me that people think it’s okay to steal my book outright. But since I can’t make them all stop, I prefer to look at it as free advertising. Occasionally, my author rank on Amazon will spike without any sales or reads and I’ll wonder why. I suspect it’s pirates.

    Or Amazon has hiccups.

    • Yep. I heard not long ago that rather than sending the pirate site a take down notice, we should be focusing on the Webhost. The host doesn’t want to be shut down and has the power to shut down the pirate site if they violate TOS. That doesn’t stop them from going to another host, but that usually costs money, so it does slow them down a bit.

  3. Of course, the prevalence of people giving away books for free doesn’t help. There’s a small group of readers who feel entitled to read everything for free ( and don’t go to the library!) and that’s where the piracy starts.

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