Dorchester are a small to medium size publisher who have been having financial difficulties for the past year (or so). As part of a move to stave off bankruptcy, in the past couple months they’ve reduced staff, announced plans to go digital only, and they’ve dropped a number of authors.
There’s a problem with that last one. They’re still selling ebooks for a couple authors they dropped (even though Dorchester sent the appropriate paperwork to the respective agents).
Dorchester are committing PIRACY.
You can get the full story over at SBTB.
Jana DeLeon received the rights to her work from Dorchester on 15 September 2010. She even sent me a PDF of the rights reversion in case I doubted her story. She hasn’t been paid, nor has she received royalty statements in months, but now she has a bigger problem.
Over a month later, her digital books are still on sale pretty much everywhere. (Please note: links to books on sale ahoy. I’m going to do something horrible and ask you NOT to buy them. Please. Do not buy them. I have no faith that DeLeon or any Dorchester author I link to would ever see a dime.)
…
Leslie Langtry’s rights were also returned from Dorchester, and her digital books are still for sale at Amazon and other digital vendors. But Langtry finds herself in an even more uncomfortable situation: after her rights were reverted, her book Guns Will Keep Us Together was offered as a free digital download for Kindle.
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Nate, thanks for publicizing this. One of the authors quoted mentioned over at AbsoluteWrite that since the SBTP posting her agent has been notified that her books – and those of others who have had their rights reverted – have been submitted for takedown. I hope that’s true, and I hope these authors can find new homes for their works, whether they choose to publish themselves or place with a commercial house.
DeLeon’s e-books have now been taken off-sale at B&N.
Booksprung » Why DRM is a distraction // Nov 10, 2010 at 1:04 pm
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The Dorchester Piracy Continues! Join the Boycott! | The Digital Reader // Mar 24, 2011 at 11:41 pm
[...] wrote a post about Dorchester about 4 months ago, where I was joining in the protest over their ongoing piracy. Well, they’re still at [...]