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Please, For Your Own Good, Don’t Pirate Ebooks
I get it. You have a book habit you can’t afford, and the book you want to read is available on, oh, some site on the internet in PDF.
And I’m an author, and you are probably thinking this is about begging you to actually buy my books. Of course I want you to buy my books. In fact, I need you to. Contrary to popular belief, ebooks do cost money to produce, not to mention my time.
But I’m not exactly talking about that.
I found at least one of my books on a Russian-based pirate site last night. Yes, it’s really there and you can read it there.
I’m not linking the site for obvious reasons, but here’s some things to think about.
The Site was a Cesspit of Malicious Advertising
I run a good adblocker. Despite that, with a good adblocker in place the second I went to this site I got a full screen popunder informing me my Mac had malware on it and I should download their tool to fix it. (Btw, their tool is the malware).
I closed it, verified that they had my book, and checked their DMCA policy page.
On their DMCA policy page (which begged me not to contact their ISP, so at some point today or tomorrow, guess what I’m doing) was a bunch of ads, also not blocked…