09:31 – Barbara emailed the author Stephen Booth to report a slight problem with one of his ebooks that she’d just read on her Kindle. The copyright page credited the book to Alexander McCall Smith rather than Booth. She got a nice reply from Booth, asking her how she’d managed to get that book for the Kindle since it hadn’t been published in the US. (Steve is a popular mystery author in the UK, but has had trouble getting a US publisher.) Barbara was horrified last night when I told her I’d grabbed it off a torrent site.
So, this morning, I replied to Mr. Booth, explaining that we’d purchased his books when we could, including (in the past) ordering them from UK booksellers, waiting weeks for them to arrive, and often paying more in shipping costs than the cost of the books themselves. I told him that Barbara had asked me to get some of his newer titles as Christmas gifts and that I’d tried hard to buy them. Amazon didn’t have the ebook version, nor even any used copies for sale, let alone new copies. So I grabbed them off a torrent site. I also mentioned that if he still owns the US rights to his titles, he should seriously consider self-pubbing them on Amazon.