Reading Ranting – On the High Seas of Piracy

Honestly, this is one Hell of a rant today because I’m just furious over people’s ignorance and blatant disregard for others when it comes to piracy.

Imagine you’ve worked for months on an important university project. It counts for half your final results and without it, you’d have to repeat the year. You spent hours in the library, so you saved your project on a cloud so you could access it wherever.

Now imagine your professor calls you in to say someone else has the exact same project, and until you can prove it’s yours, you can’t submit the project. The other person clearly accessed your files through the university’s computers, but the university claim that’s not their problem because they were your files.

By the time it gets resolved, the submission date has passed, and you’ve lost half your grade.

Do you see my point?

One of my favourite series, The Plated Prisoner, by Raven Kennedy got taken of Kindle a few weeks ago along with some other authors because their books were found on piracy sites. I didn’t know all the authors, but many people I follow on social media did and spoke out on their behalf. We were all shocked and appalled, partly at Amazon for their lack of security, and at people who support pirating sites and claim it’s “not their problem”. They either use the excuse that they only use pirating sites for textbooks (hence my opening example being about a student), or they say that they can’t afford books and how else are they supposed to get them?

I’m sorry for the situations that people are in where they can’t afford textbooks for their studies or can’t enjoy the amazing stories that many of us take for granted even if it’s a 9.99 Kinde Unlimited subscription. But that still doesn’t give them the right to risk the livelihood of hardworking authors because they feel they deserve those books.

Nobody is entitled to free books at the expense of authors losing the ability to sell their books. Not only do books get taken off Amazon, but the authors are at risk of losing their accounts because of repeated piracy.

And rather than do something about their access to free books, people complain on social media, essentially admitting to obtaining books illegally. I have no words for that.

Instead of arguing…

Meet with your local library to discuss raising more money for more books and have specific copies to stay in the library so they’re always available.
Ask the school/university to create a book renting system where you pay a deposit but get the money back when you return the book.
Create a book sharing group where you buy 1 book each or 1 book for each subject, then you share them.

These are what I came up with in 5 minutes. If you really need textbooks, there are ways to get them legally. If people spent more time doing something and less time arguing over how hard it is, then imagine what we’d achieve.