Another Warning for Authors and Readers

[Roxanna]

I recently discovered my book being sold on a site called Booksfab:

http://booksfab.loomhost.com/download...

That is the link to my book. My publisher looked into it and found it is a scam site. They charge people $199 for membership to get all the free books and movies, but once they have the money and all their personal information they give them a link to the "look inside" on Amazon. There are already complaints being filed.

How they scam authors is they say in order to take down your book you must supply them with all your personal information. So they can prove you own the rights.

Do not give them your information. Apparently all they have done is copy and paste info from Amazon.

[R.A.]

Glorious

[Storm]

Good grief. Who THINKS of these things? Thanks for the heads-up.

[Emeline]

It is so very important to know what you are getting into by making sure that you own the ISBN, and that you are the Imprint Publisher. To do this you must publish your work under a 'Private Label' and do not allow anyone to persuade you to use their ISBN. "Ye who owns the ISBN owns the freedom to dictate the production of your book/work." When you are ready to publish, have your own ISBN and copyright registration number, and use these as your ticket to try and prevent scram artists from infringing on your intellectual rights.

[Grampy]

You know, there are so many scum-sucking maggots out to steal from the rest of us, and they come up with so many creative ways to do it, that you'd think they'd realize they could get a REAL job with their talent and abilities, and quit trying to rip-off the world with their scams. With as much effort as it must take to come up with all these scams, they could probably make good money in a legitimate business! But I guess if you're born a maggot, you will always be a maggot.

[Roxanna]

I don't know whether I can feel sorry for the people that lost their membership money. If they suspected that the books and movies were pirated when they purchased their memberships to get the free downloads then they deserved to be scammed. But it could have been bad for any author that tried to have their book removed from the site, if they had given all their information to these cons.

[R.A.]

R. wrote: "I don't know whether I can feel sorry for the people that lost their membership money. If they suspected that the books and movies were pirated when they purchased their memberships to get the free..."

i hear you. So many people have absolutely no qualms about pirating, but most of them wouldn't steal a book from the store. They would both hurt my pocket!

[Roxanna]

Exactly.

[[deleted user]]

I contacted the hosting company for the site, made them aware of what the specific site was doing, and they have removed the site completely.

[R.A.]

Huh, who woulda thought? Good job, Spider.

[[deleted user]]

R.A. wrote: "Huh, who woulda thought? Good job, Spider."

It's actually a time tested practice for the small(er) sites. Most web hosting companies don't want any kind of piracy related site on their servers, and most have that set out in their T&C for using their service. If you find a site engaging in piracy and it's not a big one like PirateBay then do the following:

-Find out who their host is (a simple WhoIs search will tell you)
-Find their T&C, reading their rules about piracy specifically
-Use their contact form to let them know about the offending site

Most hosts will take the site down and permanently suspend the account within 24 hours.

Yes, the person will find another host and start up again but one small victory still helps. And if anything it makes it harder on the person who created the site: they lose all their search engine rankings.

[R.A.]

Well, I'm glad there are 'savy' peopel like you around to keep things on the up and up. I struggle with facebook sometimes, and I wonder if formatting my problematic cover for createspace might have done lasting psychological damage.