Free Books: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

A scam: don't fall for it!

Let’s keep this simple.

Everyone likes to get things for free. (Whether they value them is another matter; mostly, they don’t.)

Say you want free books. There are good ways to get them. Libraries, for certain. If they don’t have the book you’re looking for, ask them to order it.

If you like e-books, there are thousands and thousands of free ones available through legitimate online vendors (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, etc.). True, a lot of them aren’t that great, but if you search, you’ll find some gems, one being the Alaska Sampler that David Marusek and I put out each year. There are also legitimate e-newsletters like BookBub that will match your reading interests with time-sensitive offers for free and discounted books.

If you’re a book blogger and/or reviewer, you can be swimming in free books, via NetGalley and/or having a following that will attract the attention of authors and publicists.

Another great way to get free books is to follow an author via her website or on Goodreads. Authors and publishers often arrange giveaways—drawings for free books. And authors sometimes seek out beta readers and early reviewers, with whom they share e-books for free. Authors who have control of their book pricing will generally be happy to let you know about sales and such—a newsletter or email alert function on the author’s website will keep you in the know.

The bad way to get free books is piracy. It used to be that authors worried (if they worried at all) about plagiarism. Now, pirates steal whole books, making money either directly or indirectly off the backs of authors who work hard and earn little, statistically speaking.

Piracy of intellectual property, like everything else in the economic realm, is fundamentally about value.

A Starbucks latte has value.

A McDonald’s Big Mac meal has value.

A novel in which I poured my soul—not to mention three years of my life—has value.

I know, we all make our choices. All I’m saying is that when you consider all the legitimate ways to get a book for free, there’s no reason to pirate it, and there are ample reasons not to.

Which brings me to the ugly. A lot of those free book download sites are straight-up scams, using books as bait to lure in the unsuspecting. They post fake conversations about the books, including review language they lift from legitimate sites and even­—get this—fake “good cop” admonitions against pirating, along with “bad cops” who offer links to the pirating sites.

When you click through to the “free download” button, you’ll be asked to input your credit card information, so the scammers will have it “on file,” in case you want to buy a book later.

Guess what’s next? Fraudulent credit card charges. Nasty malware installed from what you thought was a legitimate website. (The malware is as clever as the fake discussion boards about the book: it tries the password out on your email account and uses it to send emails to your contacts, ostensibly from you, encouraging your friend to click on the link that will load malware onto his or her device.)

Don’t risk it. Get your books the way everyone else does. Authors rarely get rich. But your small contribution to our efforts is much appreciated!

Mark your calendars: Deb has a legitimate free book offer coming up. On Feb. 26 and 27, the e-book version of What Every Author Should Know will be available for free through Amazon. Thanks to author David Marusek for research and links for this post. 

What Authors Should Know: Copyright, Piracy, and Digital Rights Management

You've worked hard on your book. Is someone going to steal it?

Even before they’ve published, new authors tend to be concerned (sometimes overly so) about copyright, to the point where some are reluctant to share anything about their book projects out of fear someone will “steal” their ideas. In general, such concerns are the mark of a novice; experienced, professional authors may choose not to talk a lot about a work-in-progress out of concern for mucking up their creative process, but they aren’t worried about theft at that point; they know that what makes a book successful isn’t so much the idea as how it’s rendered on the page, using all the talent, energy, and skill an author can muster. They also understand that as soon as their original work is “fixed” in “tangible” form, it’s covered under US copyright law, so something as simple as an email stored in a digital file is protected by copyright—there’s no registration or notice required.

You may hear of other ways to “copyright” your work, such as mailing your manuscript to yourself or showing it to friends. These were pre-digital safeguards for proving that you were the author and attaching a date to your work. If you save your files in your computer, the author and date are electronically attached automatically. Of course, if you want to pay to have your work registered with the US Copyright Office (the fee is $140), you can do so at any time, pre- or post-publication. The primary advantage to registering pre-publication is that should you need to bring a lawsuit against someone for copyright infringement, preregistered copyright entitles you to seek compensation for statutory as opposed to actual damages as well as reimbursement of legal costs. And in any event, before you can take legal action in the United States against someone for copyright infringement, you’ll need to register your copyright, but you can do this at any point during the life of your book, which for US copyright purposes (covering books published after 1978) is the life of the author plus seventy years.

Before you plunk down your money for copyright registration, consult an attorney who specializes in intellectual property and/or educate yourself on the details of copyright using an authoritative guide like The Chicago Manual of Style, a reference widely used by publishers not only for detailed explanations on matters of copyright and fair use, but also for matters of usage, grammar, punctuation, and style. There you’ll find specifics on copyright notice, which is no longer required under US law (if you’re publishing elsewhere, the laws are different) but is strongly advised as a deterrent against infringement. Copyright notice is printed on the copyright page—on the flip side of the title page in print editions, and more commonly at the end of an ebook.

Sadly, copyright protection has done little to combat the problem of piracy, which plagued the music and video industries before spreading to books. As the Google books project proved, little effort or expense is required to scan and upload a book. (For the record, Google attempted to include in their project only books for which they believed the copyright was expired or “in question"; much legal wrangling ensued with authors). 

As a deterrent to piracy, some publishers embed DRM (digital rights management) into their ebooks. If you're uploading your own ebooks with individual vendors, each will ask if you’d like to enable DRM. I don’t use DRM, because from what I understand, pirates can more or less instantly break through the DRM barrier, while DRM restricts readers to a single device for reading a book.

The truth is that pirates focus on “hot” titles, the ones from which they’re most likely to make a profit. If your book is one of those, use a service like Muso, which for a modest monthly fee will scour the internet daily for pirated versions of your books and, at your request, remove illegal files from hosting services—and you can try Muso first, for thirty days, free of charge, to see if your books are being pirated.