Did you know that your book can be stolen from Amazon? Because you own the copyright they cannot assist with the theft. I was shocked when several of my books began surfacing on sites that will allow people to pay a monthly fee to a vendor and then read books for free. I thought that because my books were marked with digital rights management protection that it meant something. I use Google Alerts to track what people do with my books online and that’s how I began to see that they had been unlawfully taken. So I contacted Amazon’s copyright infringement department and was basically told there is nothing that we can do for you since the group that stole the books were not members of Amazon and that since I own the copyright they couldn’t help legally. Amazon did send me a link on DRM and suggested contacting the culprits directly advising them that they were in violation of the DRM, and of course I did that. The culprits however, continued to use my work unauthorized.
Every author needs to be aware that your book can be stolen from Amazon. Independent authors have a very difficult road in selling books. It is so unfair that unscrupulous people create systems that they can mine book data, pull in the best books that they find and get paid monthly fees by book lovers while the author is out in the cold not receiving even a dime from their work. The irony of it is that my books in their systems are top reads with 4.5 averages on a 5 point scale. When I visited their site recently I saw that over 2,000 people had read the last book of mine that they stolen. What are your options if your book is stolen? It’s very limited, you can write a cease letter, which I did and it was ignored. Or you can get a lawyer involved which will probably be more expensive than all the money that you’ve earned on the books in a year. What I eventually did was to remove the books from Amazon and am using another distributor. It may not solve the problem, but at least the people that stole the book will not be able to data-mine updates from those books.
