Stop Pirating Ebooks

When it comes to piracy, all of us think about pirated movies and I believe there is enough awareness among movie viewers. What I am talking about is pirated books. When it comes to books, consumers think once it is published, then it is free for distribution in all possible ways. One can easily understand the current state by the number of books you get when you search for 'free books' in google. Unfortunately, lots of readers are reading those books too.

First point I would like to highlight is, books are the intellectual property of authors. I don't see any problem in spending a small amount to buy the book instead of reading those pirated books. It is completely unfair to the authors. Author gets benefitted when we buy books. I do agree that authors feel happy about their books reaching more people, but that does not mean that we can scan a book and distribute it for free to the world.

Like in any other issue, there are two sides to this problem. One is people who upload such books and distribute to the world. Other one is people who read those books. When I spoke to few people who upload such books, one main reason among so many other reasons is that they upload to share it with their friends or family who are living abroad. And this reason is acceptable as long as you do not share it with the world like distributing through discussion forums, torrents etc. 95% of people who upload books are not aware of the fact that the book is the intellectual property of author and uploading such documents is legally punishable.

I also found that people who reads such books, are reading mainly because of the non-availability of those books in their place. I do completely agree with the second point - it is very difficult to get hold of good Tamil books or Telugu books in Bangalore being a neighbouring city of Tamil Nadu/Andhra. Then I can imagine how difficult it would be for people living in Mumbai/Delhi or in other countries like US/Australia etc. Every single person we spoke to agrees that it is very painful to read pirated scanned books and they will definitely stop such books reading if there was a better alternative.

I strongly believe that ebooks is the only way to address all these issues. I request people, who scan and uploads books, to please stop doing so and stop distributing books. In the name of helping your friends/families you are actually hurting authors. I also request people who read such books, to please not read and thus encourage others to upload more books. Thankfully, piracy with respect to books is at an early stage and people do not mind paying a small amount to buy.

Let us Stop Piracy Now!!!