The Week That Changed Indie Publishing

wasn't me i haven't figured out how to punch people through cameras yet because if i did i would be in jail all right so with our first publishing story the pirates have struck again The short version is that the fight exploded online after a major piracy site experienced downtime or appeared to be under legal pressure, which caused a wave of readers on X threads, Instagram and other social media to openly start defending their book piracy.

Then authors, especially indie authors, pushed back hard, turning it into one of the biggest publishing arguments of the past week.

So first there was phase one, okay? And Brian, I'm going to have you chime in after each phase, okay? And we'll kind of discuss your take on book piracy as we do that.

First, phase one, piracy isn't hurting anyone.

I don't know if you guys can tell my opinion on piracy based on the voices that I choose.

The pro-piracy crowd argued books are too expensive.

Libraries have long wait lists.

Some books aren't available in certain countries.

Lard publishers make plenty of money.

Piracy helps readers discover authors they'll later support.

information and art should be freely accessible and then they also framed piracy as a response to economic hardship rather than a moral issue brian what are your thoughts on that

yeah these essentially it's just whining right and and to a certain degree you don't really care too much about what the what the whiners are saying but um it it is interesting to see what the author uh you know pushback is on these kinds of things because it

We're part of the author community.

We want to know

kind of what authors are thinking about the debates that are raging.

But bottom line, it's illegal, right? So if you

want

it

to be

different, then fight it out in the courts and get them to change the laws or something like that.

But you can have your opinions about what should be in the public domain and what should not.

But it's still illegal.

Yeah, so one thing that I saw is that people just didn't understand licensing.

When you purchase a book, you're purchasing a license to read the book, right? And then you can give the book away or you can give it to a thrift store and it can be resold or whatever.

But what you can't do is copy it.