The Digital Reader

If you’re from the ebooks-promote-piracy school of nonsense, remember that piracy existed way before ebooks, and is alive and well in the world of paper publishing too.

In response to my post about being thankful for piracy, Australian author and Bookbee reader Sue Woolfe yesterday told of discovered a pirated copy of her debut novel during a 1994 writing residency in the US, (new ed, pictured) even though she wasn’t published there:

A copy of my first novel, Painted Woman turned up in the catalogue of one, perhaps many US libraries, a profitable market! I found this out by the pure chance of being a writer-in-residence in a US university, and when requested to do a reading from it, I had to apologize for not travelling with it, and was told by the university that it was fine, that they had a copy. I have to say the edition had an awful cover, and was on cheap paper, and when traced, the publisher had gone bankrupt!. What’s so safe about traditional books?

What indeed? The moral of the story is: good stories find their way to eyeballs no matter what – and you can be part of that process (and profit from it), or not. The cheaper and more accessible the content, the less piracy there will be.

reposted with permission from Bookbee.net