Sunday 2 October 2011

One of those Good News/Bad News posts

First of all, the Good News. Chris's ALOES has been favourably reviewed at the ARe cafe, which is the review area of the AllRomance website. The reviewer, Val, concluded by describing it as 'an absorbing, unusual read'.

Alas, the Bad News is really rather annoying. This morning we've had to file three separate Takedown/DMCA requests - with BergFiles (DEAR MISTER PRESIDENT/FOOL'S ERRAND), Demonoid (END OF THE TRAIL/THE DEFINITIVE ALBERT J. STERNE) and Bitsnoop (END OF THE TRAIL, DEAR MISTER PRESIDENT). We were unable to tell how many copies had been downloaded in every case, but there had been a total of 25 downloads from the Bergfiles site which if they had been sales would have represented much-needed revenue of approximately £85.00/$132.00. One person on Bitsnoop had made almost 2,000 m/m ebooks available for download; another on Demonoid was bundling ebooks by the dozen.

Whichever way you dress this up it's stealing, and in our case could make all the difference between survival and catastrophe. Nobody here is making a fortune; in fact nobody is doing much more than covering their costs. In robbing us, the thieves are not striking a liberating blow at The Man; they are undermining the existence of a small, independent publisher attempting to make a modest income in a challenging world. We really don't believe that these people can't afford the occasional £3.75/$6.50 for a few hours of quality reading material. In short, this is a mean theft and our opinion of the people involved in perpetrating it is probably best left unexpressed for the sake of our sanity.

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