Today, Peter follows up on the major story we broke on Friday’s LITOPIA AFTER DARK – the website Scribd is a repository for stolen books: a “Pirate Bay” of the publishing business. Of the top five bestselling authors on this week’s New York Times hardcover fiction list, all of them have complete manuscripts scanned and freely available online.
In today’s Write Report, Donna reports on on of the funniest blog posts ever – fifty reasons why they don’t want to publish your book. All too true. And a new survey reveals that women know how to read properly… and many men don’t…
In Eve’s Salmagundi Club, she finds a site that’s a cunningly-disguised promotion for a new book.
Links: The Write Report, My Working Space
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Go for them, Peter! Attack! Attack! It's appalling that they're getting away with this and claiming innocence. At the very least, you ought be encouraging every author to search for their own titles and complain if they're up there.
The only person I know who I've spotted has his book up there knows about it already because his publisher did it without his permission, and he's furious about it.
It’s an open (but very dirty) secret that Scribd’s massive traffic and consequently huge valuation is based on creating a system that enables users to steal authors’ copyright. Check out many of the (rather cynical) comments on tech sites, investor sites, etc and you’ll see that the wider community is very leery of Scribd’s “business model”:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/04/scribd-banks...
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5069274/startup-guru-...
etc
And yet – publishers can’t wait to get into bed with them.
This is wholesale madness.
Why is the Author's Guild in the US not all over Scribd like a rash? How come Amazon can draw their ire, but wholesale copyright theft doesn't?
Very good question. SFWA did, apparently, try to do something – and immediately drew the ire of Cory Doctorow – and withdrew.
http://boingboing.net/2007/08/30/science-fiction-...