BARNES & NOBLE IN TROUBLE - EBAY & George R. R. Martin NOT HELPING

Today's TRENDING TOPIC ON TWITTER?

Barnes and Noble is in trouble. The kneejerk response is, "Gosh! Gee! Too bad! Will hate to see it go!"

A few have made lame suggestions: "Diversity and sell toys. I got it: sell coffee, like a Starbucks, and have space where people can lounge around and meet each other!" Except there ARE Starbucks all over the place. This is supposed to be a BOOKSTORE.

Can a BOOKSTORE survive in this digital age? Mussolini Bezos kept flogging KINDLE on the front page of AMAZON until millions of morons began buying them. Piracy of digital media doomed Tower Records and Blockbuster Video, and tossing around copyrighted material and photos (called "fair use" by ignorant bloggers) has turned newsstand magazines anorexic and shut down many newspapers. Everything from Penthouse to Christian Science Monitor is "online only, no REAL PRINT edition."

Yes, the digital age may well signal a "new paradigm" in the "trope" of the "zeitgeist," and the "underpinning" of it is that PEOPLE DON'T WANT BOOKS, DVDS or CDS anymore. What doesn't help is: PIRACY and CRAPATHY.

It shouldn't be SO appallingly simple to get a cheap bootleg book download on EBAY of all places.

What you see above is a blatant list of download-bootleg books from an EBAY seller. There are many of them.

People who wouldn't think of stealing a book out of a store, are led to believe EBAY pirates are legit. Why? Because they are on EBAY and one ASSUMES that they wouldn't be there if they were illegal. No, EBAY proudly says "we're just a venue," and are under NO obligation to ask sellers to prove the have written contracts to copy copyrighted work.

Anyone typing in "GEORGE R.R. MARTIN" or "E.L. JAMES" *to mention two well-fed apathetic authors) will instantly notice "EBOOK" or "E Book" or "KINDLE" or "EPUB" next to one of their book titles. Happy to get a download for as low as 80% off the Amazon or iTunes price, and thinking the authors and publishers get royalties, EBAY PATRONS BUY. Only EBAY and the parasites who offer the bootlegs make money. You see why EBAY isn't so dedicated to honesty?

Sadly, CRAPATHETIC book publishers such as Random House-Doubleday-Dell-Penguin aren't asking some low-paid intern to file DMCA's. It takes less than a minute. I do it all the time for myself and various authors and celebrities I know. I can tell you that when enough complaints come in, the seller IS suspended and DOES NOT COME BACK. But...

...the fat cats at the publishing houses, which are owned by diverse corporations, figure they'll always have a job somewhere in the organization. So what if the book division fails. They can sit behind a desk and count some beans.

Book publisher lawyers and publicists etc. are often arrogant. THEY aren't going to waste their time filing DMCA's when they can take a two hour lunch, or watch Internet porn. Some bitch named Andrea, who has some important title at a big publishing house, emailed me a frosty "thanks but no thanks," when I offered to send in DMCA's or do all the work so that an intern would simply have to forward my DMCA to EBAY. Herattitude was: mind your own business. We are aware of the problem...but don't care. This, from the publishing business, which is supposedly full of intelligent, sensitive book lovers.

Fat George Martin and fatter E.L. James could easily assign a fan to be their VERO (Verified Rights Owner) rep on eBay. It doesn't require a lawyer. You can "phone a friend." All eBAY needs is for the copyright owner to write, on letterhead, a note saying "this person is my VERO rep." Then EBAY stops the auctions. But that's too much for George R.R. Martin, E.L. James, and too many other authors and book companies.

"Oh, short-sighted businessmen...nothing lasts forever," sang Joni Mitchell. But you can download that song off a blog, forum or torrent, FREEEEEEEE. And is she making new music? No, she's too pissed off to bother.

Ignorant fat cats will say, "Oh, it's whack-a-mole, it's not worth the trouble." I know they're wrong. Ebay will suspend sellers who keep on bootlegging, and since eBay does require credit cards and ID to sell, it's easy to suspend a new account should a seller try to sneak back.

An irony is that unlike GOOGLE, where YouTube and Blogspot bootleggers flourish, eBay actually has some moral rules. While it's not against GOOGLE rules to offer downloads, it's actually AGAINST eBay rules. If your ad says you are selling DOWNLOADS, the auctions can end. Heh heh...but they have to be reported. That's either by a VeRO rep or by anyone using the obscure "REPORT ITEM" link on every EBAY ad. So why is it that so many eBay sellers, like SANDRO_CAMARO, have been doing just that for years?

Because eBay "is just a venue, and we have millions of new auctions every hour," phone support will tell you. They'll also admit that some low-paid wretch in Utah, Guam or Pakistan might not have enough time to get through the workload of items reported. So, try again.

I've been told by eBay employees that "PIRACY is a LOW PRIORITY." Meaning, their staffers are more likely to quickly end auctions involving drug sales, lock-picking devices, used underwear, etc. Stealing copyrighted work? Meh. Authors should keep their day job. It's nothing to write a book. It's just typing.

Here's an ad from SANDRO_CAMERO, illegally copying a book called..."STICKY FINGERS."

Anyone looking for a new or used copy of Joe's LEGIT BOOK, sees THIS parasite's auction. "Hmm, E-Book...I didn't know you can get a download E-Book on EBAY...wow, and for 75% off what AMAZON or iTUNES charges!"

You notice, maybe, that there's a REPORT ITEM link in the corner of the ad. OK, what happens if you click that link?

You get a confusing pop-up menu to follow.

Now what? Keep going. Go to the menu, scroll down, and down, and down dozens of categories, looking for where you might report this piracy. And, no, FRAUD is not the one. COPYRIGHT? No, try again.

Now what? KEEP GOING...

There. You've gone through all the hoops, because you either don't like parasitic thieves like CAMARO, or you're a fan of the author, and you're sad that the author's book company is not doing anything, and the author is either unaware of the thievery, or busy trying to write and promote and make a living to take a minute to file a DMCA...to help himself, other authors, and BARNES AND NOBLE.

What happens next? Nothing, usually. There's a 50-50 chance the auction might actually be taken down. It depends on how BUSY the employee who received the complaint is. Ebay claims they suspend repeat offenders, but they do NOT state HOW many OFFENSES are needed. It might depend on how much money they are making off the seller, how many auctions the seller runs, or if there's some quota system and employees can't knock off TOO many creeps per week. Ebay is like Scientology...they do not like to discuss anything and their phone support number will get you a polite stooge who will say "Sorry, I can not divulge that information..." no matter what you ask.

And yes, here's MORE of the seller's items for sale...

Well, well, WHAT A SURPRISE...the seller is siphoning off money from obese George R.R. Martin, and whale-like E.L. James.

Martin and James are way too busy eating. Or being on TWITTER. Did they notice what is TRENDING ON TWITTER TODAY? The problems of Barnes & Noble? Meh. These authors are too well fed to care at this point. They surely don't care about their fellow authors either.

Raymond Chandler, in "The Maltese Falcon," had Sam Spade declare it was "BAD FOR BUSINESS" when "one of your own" gets killed. You do something. It's "BAD FOR BUSINESS" when parasites on eBay steal away sales, because when people get books cheap, they do not support the book publishers, who in turn, give even less of an advance to most authors on their list.

The fact that George R.R. Martin and E.L. James are corpulent crapathetic toad-turd traitors to the book business, to bookstores, and to their fellow-authors, is pretty damn sad. Is Rowling or Stephen King doing much either? A few best-selling authors do seem to tell their book publishers: "DO SOMETHING." But not enough.

EBAY is in the Top 5 among retail sites. It should NOT have bootlegs. It's bad enough that so many people know exactly where to go to the secret forum, the torrent, or the GOOGLE blogspot blogs, to get free ePub and Kindle books from entitled assholes who think everything should be free, and they're being Che Guevara or Robin Hood by giving it all away and screaming "Copyright is COPY WRONG" from their hiding place in mommy's basement.

It's bad enough that Google puts "report abuse" on blogs now, but if you go through the hoops, you're told that you must be a copyright owner to report a violation, that they won't bother asking a free blogger if he has permission, and that, if you actually ARE a copyright owner, you might get ignored anyway or told "we don't believe you, send us a copy of your copyright from the copyright office via a lawyer."

Meanwhile, gosh, gee, too bad, R.I.P. if Barnes and Noble goes under. Liked to go there, like I did Toys R Us. But hey, Jeff Bezos' AMAZON has what I need...and so do freebie parasites on the Internet!"

The Fire and Fury of EBAY BOOTLEGGERS

So, the surviving bookstores (Barnes and Noble in Santa Monica just went under) have had a tough time getting "Fire and Fury" in stock?

Well, that's just typical BOOK PUBLISHER stupidity and sloth.

A worse example is how many BOOTLEG DOWNLOADS have been sold on EBAY. HUNDREDS UPON THOUSANDS. Just type in the title, and add EPUB or EBOOK or E BOOK and you get a BARGAIN. Today's BARGAINS:

What does eBay do? They count up their share of the profit. Along with PAYPAL.

If Henry Holt or the AUTHOR of the book actually know enough to contact the VERO program with an email, they also know that this can take all day. Maybe two days. Meanwhile a seller can dispose of DOZENS of copies and KEEP THE MONEY.

The way EBAY operates, the seller isn't even suspended half the time. The seller can easily get another TEN accounts as well, and eBay may not catch on. It would be up to a savvy VERO (Verified Rights Owner) rep to say: "Hey, my client's book has been offered by the same pig in SRI LANKA under 10 names. Here's all the names. Now work with PAYPAL to make sure he never comes back..."

Bootlegging and Piracy are costing LIVES now. It isn't just the author who suffers...the one who got that MILLION DOLLAR advance (don't they all) and who only writes part-time and has a cushy job as a college professor. We're talking about the office workers that the book companies terminate to save money. We're talking about the clerks, the delivery people, the cashiers...the book store people who can't work at a job they LIKE, and must take ANY job in ANY store.

The book publishing world, which is supposed to be run by people smarter than fools who think there's no such thing as climate change, and don't see why there should be birth control, STILL doesn't understand the damage that PIRACY does?

PIRACY needs to be addressed. Torrents must GO. Rogue websites from Russia must be BLOCKED. Google should stop putting hoops in front of rights owners. It should NOT be so damn easy to get a bootleg on a place like EBAY.

SAPRISTI - "WeTransfer" Book Bootlegs - French Weasel is Elon Musk-rat

SAPRISTI!

It's fairly easy to translate the words of the French weasel selling mp3 files of audio books. This prick is saying, in translation, "I am a cheap French baguette, and I use a cheap free "file-sharing" service called WETRANSFER. Yes, I'm too CHEAP to even PAY for a Google Cloud. I float the files I stole off some torrent or hidden forum, and give out the link URL when people win...

"...I make MORE than the authors do in royalties. Authors get MAYBE $2 per book? Zut! Look at ME! And I didn't even WRITE IT. I just stole a copy because it's so easy to copy AUDIOBOOKS and KINDLE and NOOK files now. Magnifique! I make extra money for baguettes, and the authors? Let them eat cake!"

Ebay does not consider copyright theft to be a major issue, so anyone reporting an item like this might not see it stopped for several days, if at all.

The fastest way to handle this is for the authors and publishers to check the site once a week (minimum), type in the title, and such terms as EBOOK, MOBI, KINDLE, etc. and find this junk.

Enough CRAPATHY. The world of writers is supposed to be a smart and moral one. Learn from what happened to the record business and record shops. SAVE BOOKSTORES and LIBRARIES.

It's a LETHAL MISTAKE to think that Musk, Rowling, King, or other best selling authors can absorb piracy and "the business" will still thrive. Parasites like this Paris-site need to be SQUASHED.

Are you an author or a BLIP? On eBAY you're a BLIP and a DRIP and a FOOL'S TOOL

Here's a Brit Twit who has gathered hundreds of books into download files. That's illegal on eBay, but eBay doesn't care very much. Even a "REPORT ITEM" complaint only has a 50-50 chance of getting the auction removed.

Publishers and authors need to get into the game a little more and knock this junk off. To this worthy, an author's output is nothing but a few hundred blips for moneygrubbing some nickels and dimes.

LOVELY. LOVELY.

A lot of eBay sellers know to go to the torrents (which most normal people don't bother with), grab hundreds and hundreds of book files FREE, and then charge for them on eBay, either in compilation form like THIS, or individually.

Aside from Amazon, eBay is THE BIGGEST WEBSITE IN THE WORLD for sales. People coming to eBay to buy books...should BUY BOOKS, actual, real books, not dupes via a download, or burned onto a 25 cent DVD and mailed away.

Due to lax DMCA laws, EBAY isn't obligated to ask a seller like this, "Show us your licensing." They may pay attention to a "REPORT ITEM" complaint from a bidder, but are more likely to remove an item like this if a copyright owner complains. There's PLENTY to complain about with this scavenging swine. He tosses hundreds of books into a cloud, and in this case, lists them:

How many of those titles are still in copyright? With most sellers, at least half are. But the sellers don't give a damn.

An irony is that even if they were public domain, eBay does not permit "digital delivery" because it's so fraught with the potential for abuse.

Sellers often list what's on a disc, figuring there's little risk of authors or publishers seeing and reporting the auction. Some sellers simply declare, "there are SO many books we can't list them all," and that's fine with eBAY. It's not so fine for bookstores, which already face dwindling sales because of Kindle and Nook. It's not so fine for libraries, who are often more of an Internet cafe than a library now, with tables full of computers replacing shelves full of books.

Books are being devalued by being turned into blips that appear on a Nook or a Kindle. AUTHORS should not also be considered BLIPS, to be ignored and ripped off by petty nickel and dime greedheads. Authors are accustomed to working cheap, and to get a few dollars per book as a "royalty." Now, with eBay, those few dollars are going into the pockets of blatant thieves who do nothing but harvest pdf, ePub and mobi files, toss them into a file, and offer them for a low-priced lowdown download.

DANNY BOY - Still a Member on eBay but no longer a Bootlegging Dick

More on account of violations of PAYPAL rules, DANNY BOY is NOT selling his bootlegs.

What was particularly galling about this character, was eBay's apathetic attitude toward his blatant flaunting of their rules. Ebay phone support admitted again and again, "Yes, this is against our Terms of Service" and "Yes, we do not allow digital delivery," and "Yes, the ads all say the items will be sent via email or download, which is not allowed." And did they end the auctions? No.

The excuse? Either it was buck passing ("I will forward this to our team...") or it was a shrug: "We have MILLIONS of auctions on our site, we can't get to all of them." To eBay, piracy against authors, and the parasitic destruction of book stores and libraries doesn't mean much. Even logic doesn't seem to apply, as in: "If Danny Boy sells the ENTIRE Dan Brown collection for a few dollars, hundreds of eBay sellers CAN'T make a sale. People are going to happily get a digital download that's not even the price of ONE used book with shipping."

Another galling aspect was that this seller had a template that looked VERY professional and convincing. Did bidders understand that this guy was bootlegging? That the authors were not being paid? The ads all seemed like he MUST be some big company with licensing agreements. Or something. Fortunately, on October 26th, it finally came to an end. NO MORE of this character.

Happily for DANNY BOY, he doesn't have to return the hundreds of dollars he made. Paypal took their cut. Ebay took their cut. Google hosted the "cloud" service that let bidders download the illegal files.

DANNY BOY would've been knocked off months ago if publishers took their heads out of their asses and did the MINIMUM in protecting themselves and their authors on eBay. This would be to have an intern check eBay once a week.

EBAY is second to AMAZON as the biggest sales site on the Net. People come to eBay looking for new or used books...and should NOT see offers for bootleg downloads. The publishing world is supposedly smarter than the music world, where drugged up cokeheaded idiots allowed mp3 bootlegging to put record stores out of business and make it impossible for many artists, even established ones, to stay on a major label.

Ebay doesn't have people selling mp3 files of the new Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran albums. It's much easier to get the new Ruth Ware or Dan Brown book. Ebay doesn't have people offering every Beatles album via a download link. But Stephen King? DANNY BOY had 72 Stephen King novels available for a mere THREE DOLLARS. It's time to take Ebay bootlegging a lot more seriously. It's offensive, it's insulting and it's dangerous to the future of publishing.

DANNY BOY - A week later, and STILL BOOTLEGGING

Howwww slowwwww is eeeeeeBayyyyyyyy?

Let's not make any comparisons to turtle shit. Let's just note that Danny Boy, who has been reported over and over, and was written up again on October 10th is STILL on eBay. Ireland's favorite son continues to STEAL from authors and act like he has EVERY RIGHT TO DO IT.

It's sort of like the potato famine. Isn't it? Oh, it isn't? Well, explain to Danny Boy that authors would like to $3 or $4 he steals from them, per book, so he can have a beer and a packet of crisp while getting turned down by every woman at the bar. Or is it every man?

Of course part of the secret with my lad Danny, is he picks on morons like George R.R. Moron, who could care less about piracy, or what it does to other authors, to publishers, to Mom and Pop bookstores or to libraries.

Let's take a look at who he steals from:

Danny boy will tell the world he has a right to offer DOWNLOADS and EBOOKS sent directly to Paypal mailing addresses.

And is PAYPAL telling him not to? No, they are not. Is eBAY telling him not to? Oh, not really. According to Phone Support, they've warned him several times. But he hasn't been taking those warnings too seriously. And he's only had ONE stoppage from a VeRO rep for an author or publisher. So he keeps right on going.

Begorrah! What a fine, fine lad our DANNY BOY is, and what a FINE, FINE bunch he's hooked up with, the lads PAYPAL and EBAY, sharing in what Danny steals.

SLAP DANNY BOY'S WRIST, LIMPLY. EBAY LOVES THEIR BOOTLEGGERS

You remember DANNY BOY?

He's the potato head who keeps right on copying books and BLATANTLY saying he's offering DIGITAL DOWNLOADS and books sent via EMAIL. Illegal? Gee, it actually IS. How many reports has eBay had on him? 20? 30?

"You see," says customer support, "we may warn the seller. We may issue a restriction for a day. We may issue a restriction for a week. We may limit the amount of items the seller can offer. And..." maybe, MAYBE a suspension? NOPE.

Here's DANNY BOY's bootleg of Brandon Sanderson NO LONGER AVAILABLE:

Did greedy Danny Boy take the hint? Of course not. He wants his beer money, our Danny Boy. He doesn't give a shit how hard a writer works on a book. HE figures he's entitled to copy it. He knows that eBay is going to just keep slapping his wrist. He sure as hell knows that PAYPAL won't tell him to give back the money. He's one happy bastard.

Here he is, pushing the Brandon Sanderson stuff a few days later:

What's the lesson here? That arrogant big websites run by CEO's with golden parachutes, don't think they have to play by ANY rules. Certainly not the GOLDEN RULE. Not any of the 10 Commandments.

That's greed. That's entitlement. That's a Communistic disdain for COPYRIGHT and INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY.