The digital revolution has made book piracy criminally easy. I won't go into my own battles with piracy of my novels, or why I eventually decided to ignore the pirates and to stop sending DMCA take-down letters to the sites that host and enable them. Today I'm concerned about a much more recent travesty, and it concerns a book by none other than a former US president.
I woke on November 16 to find a WhatsApp message from a friend—a writer at that—that contained an attachment that floored me: it was a PDF of Barack Obama's brand new presidential memoir, A Promised Land. My first thought was that I had somehow missed the launch so I did a quick Amazon search and found that the book had not even been released. Yet there it was, complete and intact, on my phone, a full day before the release date.
The horror came fast. I started shooting questions at my friend: Where did he get it? Who sent it? Was he aware that he was facilitating theft of a US president's not-yet-released book? Etc, etc. I asked my friend if he thought that sharing that PDF was any different from stealing the book from a bookstore or a library.
To many, even the supposedly righteous among us, digital theft is "no big thing". It baffles me. I told my friend that I hope the people responsible for this piracy lose their jobs, at the very least, and that I was deleting the book. I'd like to think that people who would be a part of this theft would not have bought the book anyway and sales won't be significantly impacted. It was thus gratifying to see, as the release date dawned and time passed, that A Promised Land is selling extremely well and breaking records, putting it on track to be the best-selling presidential memoir...ever.
Congratulations, Mr. Obama. I will read your book the right way, either by buying it or, as with your wife's book, receiving it as a gift. Or I might borrow it from the library.
As for the thieves who, I heard, hoped that their actions would cause the book to flop, I have just one word: FAIL.
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