……to a barrage of reader reviews and complaints. Thank you all. Thank you, Adhunfai, for reporting it. Thank you, John Scalzi, for putting up an FB post. Thank every one of you whose eloquence turned up the heat on Amazon.
Stay alert for this hydra to grow a new head and let us know if it happens. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Huzzah!
This entire travesty allowed your readers to demonstrate yet once again their loyalty and integrity. <3
On a side-note, I read several dozen Amazon reviews of the various books affected until the e links were removed. Unlike many reviews and comments typically seen elsewhere — for example, on news stories or other Amazon products — each comment was articulate, with correct use of grammar and punctuation. THAT says something too.
Please forgive my typo(s). My eyes aren’t the best, and despite diligent proof-reading I often don’t see them until it is too late.
Cross-posting from Facebook:
It is amazing that that educators can run submissions through anti-plagiarism software, yet Amazon can’t/won’t. I understand that Amazon only runs the title through. This thief(s) changed the titles only very subtly in some cases, to subvert that. For example, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND was corrupted to *A* STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. MISSION MONGOLIA became MISSION *TO* MONGOLIA.
Yaaaaaaaaaaay! Not only yours, but they pulled ALL the stuff this creep put up. Nice to know stomping one’s feet and yelling DOES actually work sometimes no matter what we all learned as children!
As an aside, indications are this chap has multiple sites across the web; he is a university student at Rajshahi in Pakistan according to his own posting, but he took the name of a noted Islamic scholar, 9th century cosmologist, author, and musician Al-Farabi, who, the way Amazon proceeds, may accidentally get pulled from the shelves right along with this young jerk. We are not at all sure that this guy is a descendant or in any wise related—one would hate to think so. And our Farabi is, get this, on several US dating sites—good hunting, gals. He’s a grifter with all sorts of angles, huge number of websites, probably wants to give you immense inheritances from uncles in Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi, and help this English family get a litter of puppies out of Nigeria.
Shawn Merrow on Facebook’s Radcon page posts:
“Authors might also want to keep an eye on http://www.scribd.com/ as I have seen books illegally uploaded there too.”
Scribd
http://www.scribd.com
Well, dang I missed all the fun and a spiffy opportunity to drip viterol.
Dear user,
Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
As you know, Lulu is a do-it-yourself, open-publishing company that empowers literally anyone to publish and share their ideas freely to readers all over the world. Our member agreement states that by uploading or posting Content to our site, user warrant that the Content does not violate any copyright, trademark, trade secret or other intellectual property right of any third party.
http://www.lulu.com/about/member_agreement.php#content
Lulu abides by the DMCA and will “promptly block access to allegedly infringing material (…) if (we) receive a notification claiming infringement from a copyright holder or the copyright holder’s agent.”
Per your request, we have removed the content from our website. Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.
Regards,
Questionable Content Team, Lulu.com
And the work is all on the publishers and writers to tell them to stop the pirates. That’s very convenient for them. I think if there were a law stating that they were liable to pay publishers the money received by pirates they’d get a little crankier. As it is, I fear that money just slips right down into the ‘we don’t know’ fund and gets processed as Miscellaneous Income.
Thanks, evertype. We just have to keep after the blighters. Thank goodness for readers who care!