Pirates, You Be Bleedin' Me Dry. Please Stop.

Ok, so I've now lost count of the number of piracy sites that have my books up for illegal download as bit torrents or as pdfs or as so called 'e-books'  The general advice in these cases, is to go to each site and 'politely ask them to take your book down'.  Apparently, 'they never refuse'. Yeah. So I'm being asked to trawl the net on a daily basis hunting down and finding these sites, then 'politely asking' them not to steal my work?

Believe it or not, I have neither the patience nor the time.

Pirates and pirate-site users, I'm not going to give you the 'I have a family to support and these books are my lively hood' speech. I'm not going to give you the 'musicians, artists and writers are the only folks in the world who have to justify getting paid for their work' speech, I'm not even going to point out that 'if my sales are low my publishers will think twice about publishing another of my books.'

To do that would be to assume that you are too stupid to know any of that for yourselves.

I'm just going to ask you to stop. Ok? Stop stealing money from my pocket, sales from my reputation, and business from the legit booksellers and sites who legally support me and others like me. If you can't afford to buy my work then, please, go to the library - at least they keep track of how many times the books are checked out - and those reports go back to my publishers, and believe it or not, that's important.