Ebook piracy

In "Can e-Publishing Overcome Copyright Concerns?," David Pogue of the New York Times talks about why he doesn't make electronic versions of his books available, supporting his position as ebook nay-sayer with a blog post by an author whose voluntary payment experiment for the digital release of an outdated book was a dismal failure.

Apparently, Pogue has twice sent PDF versions of a book to someone claiming to be blind and each time, he claims, the book was all over the "piracy sites" within 48 hours. In a subsequent post, Pogue relayed and responded to reader comments, which spanned the gamut of opinions.

I normally appreciate what Pogue has to say in his print and email columns due to the way his technology sensibilities have been honed by years of being a Mac user. But in this situation, and I say this with all respect due to a fellow author with whom I've written a book, I disagree with him pretty much completely. I'm not just spouting off like some of the people commenting on his blog posts - my point of view comes as the result of selling over 150,000 ebooks with virtually no copies being shared widely.

(Ironically, despite Pogue saying that he doesn't make electronic versions of his Missing Manuals available, a quick scan of O'Reilly Media's Web site showed that 5 of his 24 books are in fact for sale in PDF format. When I asked him about this, he admitted that he knew that "iPhone: The Missing Manual" had been released in PDF to get it to market faster last year. Three of the others were older books, and he was surprised to learn that "Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual, Second Edition" was available in PDF. This lack of awareness is understandable: the royalty statements for a print-book author as prolific as Pogue are undoubtedly voluminous and may be quasi-incomprehensible.)

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -