E-Reads™ is
...a trail-blazing reprinter of out-of-print genre and general fiction and nonfiction by leading authors. Our books are available in all e-book formats and paperback. Read the latest publishing news and provocative blogs by top commentators in the traditional and digital publishing fields.
Marriage Is a Bad Habit
Ruth Dickson
When Ruth Dickson released her 1967 book MARRIED MEN MAKE THE BEST LOVERS, it went off like a bombshell. Defenders of the “sanctity” of marriage rose up to dismiss her frank, innovative, thoroughly resear...
Orion's Dagger
Paula Downing King
With ORION’S DAGGER, Paula E. Downing presents the thrilling final installment of THE CLOUDSHIPS OF ORION trilogy, which Starlog magazine called “special...a thoroughly engrossing story.” The trio wa...
Fair Warning
George E. Simpson
America is set to finally end World War II with a devastating act--dropping the atomic bomb over Japan. But what if a secret mission was set in place to alter the course of history? In this fast-paced, and i...
Rogues of the Black Fury
Travis Heermann
When a band of shadowy fanatics abducts Javin Wollstone’s little sister, Bella, from his care, his only hope to bring her home is turning to a hard-bitten band of special warriors, the Black Furies, led by C...
The Sudden Star
Pamela Sargent
The appearance of a white star bathing the world in a deadly glare turns Earth into a nightmare of fear and death. Rape and murder are as common as suicide. Medical help is allowed only for certain diseases, a...
The Man in the Moon Must Die
Jeff Bredenberg
What do a cunning old man, a code-slopper gone rogue, a pair of lowlife tech-runners, a sexually frustrated AI, and a hermaphrodite underworld boss have in common? They're all out to get Benito Funcitti, ow...
The Woman Who Loved the Moon
Elizabeth A. Lynn
Elizabeth A. Lynn stands as a ground-breaking author of fantasy and science fiction. Her stories weave richly-drawn characters and complex scenes of daily life into the intricate tapestry of speculative ficti...
Taking Hawaii: How Thirteen Honolulu Businessmen Overthrew the Queen of Hawaii in 1893, With a Bluff
Stephen Dando-Collins
On a January afternoon in 1893, men hunkered down behind sandbagged emplacements in the streets of Honolulu, with rifles, machineguns and cannon ready to open fire. Troops and police loyal to the queen of th...
Shadowdance
Robin W. Bailey
Paralyzed since birth, a young man named Innowen happens upon a sorceress along the road. She grants him the ability to walk, but there are two conditions—he can only walk between dusk and dawn and, to kee...
Ratha's Challenge
Clare Bell
Twenty-five million years in the past, a clan of sentient, prehistoric big cats called “the Named” have their own language, traditions, and law. Ratha, a female Named, has brought fire to the clan and ...
FEATURED TITLES
Bodyguard
William C. Dietz
Max Maxon is an ex-marine who makes his living with a gun. Sasha Casad is a rich teenager trying to catch the next spaceship home. Max's job is to get her there alive. Somebody's trying to stop them--somebod...
Swords and Deviltry
Fritz Leiber
Swords and Deviltry, the first book of Leiber's landmark series, introduces us to a strange world where our two strangers find the familiar in themselves and discover the icy power of female magic. Three ...
The Stoned Apocalypse
Marco Vassi
Marco Vassi was possibly the greatest erotic writer of his generation. His first publisher at Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, compares his talent for prose to Henry Miller’s writing. His sexual explorat...
Mistress of the Morning Star
Elizabeth Lane
Born to an Indian chieftain and then sold as a slave by her mother, the pagan princess Marina becomes the fierce Conqueror Cortes' concubine. Of course this is to the displeasure of the jealous yet gentle sol...
The Road to Victory
David Colley
The Red Ball Operation, the vital train of supplies improvised by American troops during the invasion of Europe, was one of the GIs' bravest exploits, without which World War II would have dragged on at a ter...
Queen of Angels
Greg Bear
In a world of wonders, wealth, and “perfect” mental health, a famous poet commits gruesome murder . . .why? That crime, that question, leads a policewoman to a jungle of torture and forgotten gods; a wr...
The Book of Kells
R.A. MacAvoy
An unusual and original work of fantasy from the acclaimed author of Tea with the Black Dragon.A contemporary man, John Thornburn (a meek, non-violent and unpredictable artist) and woman, Derval (his tough,...
Kampus
James Gunn
The college of the future has just one purpose: endless battle. Political organizations urge ruthless combat with an invisible opponent and each student is challenged to be more extreme than the rest. One ma...
This Business of Publishing
Richard Curtis
THIS BUSINESS OF PUBLISHING has been hailed by literary agent Michael Larsen as "must reading for writers, agents and anyone else who cares about the future of publishing." It reveals the unique perspective o...
Alabama - Dangerous Masquerade
Janet Dailey
Every novel in this collection is your passport to a romantic tour of the United States through time-honored favorites by America’s First Lady of romance fiction. Each of the fifty novels is set in a di...
Screw you, Google. And you, publishers. And you, authors.
That’s the underlying message in an announcement published by ClubFreebie, a website offering free books by Clive Cussler, Anne Tyler, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Janet Evanovich, Anne McCaffery, Robert Coover, Neal Stephenson and Gina Showalter. And that’s just one package. There are over two dozen of them.
Taken down by Google, ClubFreebie boasted it was back in business one hour later. “I honestly don’t know why they bother!” the club admin sneered, issuing a new URL to find the reconstituted website. A click on the URL (not provided here) takes you to “The Free Book Guide. Click Here to Collect Your Complimentary Books!” The link takes you to a page with over 25 links to audio, video and book mixes offered to members free. “Use the menu on the left to view the book collections, when you find something you like, click on the link and download it. It’s as easy as that!”
“Please note,” the message concludes, “Our pages get shut down on a regular basis (the book companies do not like us!) so join the club (form below) and you will never miss out on the latest goodies!”
Is ClubFreebie legal? Here’s its disclaimer: “Please note that we are not the ‘hosts’ of any books, neither did we upload them to any hosting provider. We simply find links to books that were freely available on the web and share our findings with our members.”
Here’s the message in full:
**************************************
CLUBFREEBIE
The Complimentary Books Site has Changed Location!
Dear Members
It would seem that Google finally took down the ‘Books’ site (due to terms of service!… which means that some book publishers complained!!). Anyway, after just an hour, the new site is ‘live again’
I honestly don’t know why they bother!
Please use the following url to find the new site as this will always point to the new Google pages as they are created
The Free Book Guide. Click Here to Collect Your Complimentary Books!
It’s always fun and games trying to get these nice ‘goodies’ to the membership!!
Regards
Club Admin
This message is being sent to you because you or the author are a member of ClubFreebie, a network created using SocialGO. If you are interested in creating your own network, please click here.
Click here to unsubscribe from future emails
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For full coverage of book piracy, click on our Pirate Central feature
Great. Now I have to worry about another pirate? And this one sounds just like the rest: they couldn’t care less.
Why do you hate libraries? If publishers would set ebook prices to reflect their reduced opportunity cost of not having to comply with right of first sale for DRMed electronic goods, piracy would not be so lucrative. There is significantly reduced value to the customer in the lack of ability to share and give away their copy of the book. The customer can’t even give it away to the local library when finished with it, and yet it costs more than a paperback book. How sad.
Not to mention the reduced material, manufacturing, and shipping costs, or the effects of stripping and dumping.
I for one am waiting for the market or other effect to settle this before moving from paper to bits.
the market is settling this.
to an intelligent business, “piracy” is market intelligence pointing to weaknesses/holes in their marketing and sales. holes one could sell to.
fighting the market is fighting your potential customers, and calling them names is certainly intelligent too.
I’m with you, b. Since an ebook is only a license to read, not the purchase of personal property, it should be much cheaper than any physical copy – for all the reasons you give. Until publishers understand that this is the mindset of many ebook readers and price their product accordingly, piracy will continue to grow. I am not a tech-savvy person, but I figured out how to strip the DRM off of my purchased ebooks. DRM did not turn me into a pirate. High prices did. And you know what surprised me? Pirating an ebook – whether from a direct download site, torrent, IRC or usenet – is much easier than stripping DRM. This holiday season will put ebook readers into the hands of many, many more people. I think sticker shock on ebooks will have a lot of them exploring download options, and once they discover how simple pirating is they may be lost as paying customers. Low prices would have kept me off the piracy track, and it’s not too late to keep millions of others from going that route. But prices have to come down, and frankly I don’t think the major publishers are willing to consider the long-term implications of their pricing strategies. They are being reactive instead of proactive, and it will cost them in the end.
Richard,
Thank you for immortalizing the “Disclaimer”. Now tell me, don’t the remarks void their OCILLA protections?
Moreover, surely by now it has occurred to some of the authors and publishing house lawyers to complain to Yahoo (it’s a Yahoo Group as well as a Social Go site) and Google (a Picasa site is involved).
Here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is what OCILLA says about when “Safe Harbor” applies, and when it does not.
OCILLA
The Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA) is United States federal law that creates a conditional safe harbor for online service providers (OSPs, including Internet service providers) and other Internet intermediaries by shielding them for their own acts of direct copyright infringement (when they make unauthorized copies) as well as shielding them from potential secondary liability for the infringing acts of others. OCILLA was passed as a part of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and is sometimes referred to as the “Safe Harbor” provision or as “DMCA 512″ because it added Section 512 to Title 17 of the United States Code. By exempting Internet intermediaries from copyright infringement liability provided they follow certain rules, OCILLA attempts to strike a balance between the competing interests of copyright owners and digital users.
…..First, the OSP must “adopt and reasonably implement a policy”[2] of addressing and terminating accounts of users who are found to be “repeat infringers.”[2] Second, the OSP must accommodate and not interfere with “standard technical measures.”[3] OSPs may qualify for one or more of the Section 512 safe harbors under § 512(a)-(d), for immunity from copyright liability stemming from: transmitting [4], caching [5], storing [6], or linking [7] to infringing material. An OSP who complies with the requirements for a given safe harbor is not liable for money damages, but may still be ordered by a court to perform specific actions such as disabling access to infringing material.
Section 512(c) applies to OSPs that store infringing material. In addition to the two general requirements that OSPs comply with standard technical measures and remove repeat infringers, § 512(c) also requires that the OSP: 1) not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, 2) not be aware of the presence of infringing material or know any facts or circumstances that would make infringing material apparent, and 3) upon receiving notice from copyright owners or their agents, act expeditiously to remove the purported infringing material.
B.
The “Free Book Guide” is no library. With a library, a patron eventually has to return the book. These alleged pirates are suggesting that “members” download (ie reproduce) copies of the e-books and “give” these illegal copies to other people as gifts.
That is not what happens with libraries!
What I do not understand is why Greg Bear and hundreds of other authors whose work is being shared by this group have not complained to Yahoo.
One of the prime homes of this piracy is a YAHOOGROUP
Subscribe to freebookclub
Powered by us.groups.yahoo.com
Only a copyright owner can complain.
When I complained about the abuse of Yahoo TOS, I was banned from membership (of the Yahoogroup).
Richard,
In the latest posting from this pirate site, they tell innocent readers “…PLUS; as a Premium Member, you can MAKE MONEY by sharing your links with friends etc!”
Unfortunately, those who take the pirates’ advice may not realize that profiting from piracy puts them into a whole new category.