[Link] 'Elitist': angry book pirates hit back after author campaign sinks website

by  Alison Flood

OceanofPDF was shut down last week after publishers issued hundreds of takedown notices – but authors have been left dealing with angry users

Authors have been called elitist by book pirates, after they successfully campaigned to shut down a website that offered free PDFs of thousands of in-copyright books.

OceanofPDF was closed last week after publishers including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins issued hundreds of takedown notices, with several high-profile authors including Philip Pullman and Malorie Blackman raising the issue online. Featuring free downloads of thousands of books, OceanofPDF had stated on its site that it sought to make information “free and accessible to everyone around the globe”, and that it wanted to make books available to people in “many developing countries where … they are literally out of reach to many people”.

Before the site was taken down, one of its founders told the Bookseller that it was run by a team of four who worked based on user requests: “Once we get an email from a user requesting a book that he/she cannot afford/find in the library or if he has lost it, we try to find it on their behalf and upload on our site so that someone in future might also get it.”

Michelle Harrison, who won the Waterstones children’s book prize for her debut novel The Thirteen Treasures, drew attention to OceanofPDF after receiving a Google alert about a free download of her book Unrest. She then downloaded it “in a matter of seconds”.

“I was gobsmacked when I read a statement on the site admitting that reading pirated material wasn’t good because it doesn’t earn authors any money,” Harrison said on Wednesday. “Users of the site were encouraged to ‘leave reviews’ so that the author at least got some benefit!” After she received no reply to an email request to have her books removed, she tried Twitter. “I received a brazen response along the lines of, ‘What if someone already bought the books and lost them, or is travelling and doesn’t want to carry extra weight?’” she said.

After the site was closed down, Harrison shared an email she received from one OceanofPDF user, who called her “unworthy of being an author” and “grossly elitist.”


Read the full article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/08/elitist-angry-book-pirates-ocean-of-pdf-author-campaign-website

[Link] Are cartoonists doomed to die poor and homeless while pirates dance on their graves?

By The Beat

Even as the economy shows fitful signs of flickering back to life, the comics economy, which was “too small to fail” to really take much of a hit during the Great Recession, is still puddling along, under-capitalized, under-recognized, and with even the greatest cartoonists prone to spells of belt tightening. Comics have been traditionally immune to the effects of a recession—”cheap entertainment does well in bad times!” we’ve heard time and again—but the corollary is also true: Economic boom times rarely touch comics.

During the late ’90s and the first dot.com boom, one of the greatest eras of general prosperity in American history, comics were going through their WORST slump since the end of newsstand distribution, with sales numbers so low executives were crying over them. And then, paradoxically, comics began to do better even during the mini-recession following 9/11 and the end of the dot.com bubble.

During the recent real estate bubble/stock market boom, quite a few cartoonists bought homes that would never have been available before—and some have lost them, sadly—but most comickers we know were sticking with comics instead of going into hedge funds and condo flipping. A lot of money flooded into comics in the end of the last boom, but the tide has been slowly going out.

But now it’s gone out. And people are wondering when it will come in again.

Continue reading: http://www.comicsbeat.com/2012/01/25/are-cartoonists-doomed-to-die-poor-and-homeless-while-pirates-dance-on-their-graves/