You know, look. I used to think web piracy was a joke and supported The Pirate Bay and agreed with Cory Doctorow. I would look at an album that I’ve purchased on Vinyl and then purchased again on iTunes but had reached my sharing limit because I have it on my work and several home computers and wouldn’t think twice about finding a pirated copy of it online to copy over to my netbook for a trip. I know it’s illegal but I didn’t care because it was far removed from me, I never saw the effects of this kind of activity first hand. But those days are in the past.

Loyal readers might recall that Morgen and I just published a free ebook. Actually my publishing company used lulu.com to publish the free ebook, but you get the idea. (It’s available as a free download from this link but in case you want another opinion before downloading it for free here’s a review of it. That I wrote.) This free ebook has been available for a few days and we’ve been basking in the glory of post-self publishing bliss enjoying reading and rereading the sevens of positive posts to twitter about the book. The review itself even received positive reviews from the critics.

This was all well and good until I saw this:

pir

Can you fucking believe that? I never thought this could happen to me, but there you go.

Look, I mean, I guess I should be flattered that someone thought so much of my free ebook to pass it on to their friends, but I’m not some running some charity organization over here. Do you know how much I make off it when someone emails my free ebook to someone else? NOT A GOD DAMN CENT that’s how much. Sorry for that out burst but do you know how much it costs me to live what with rent and food and a pregnant wife? Well let me tell you it’s a lot more than nothing that’s for sure. Do you see the problem here?

And poor Morgen, that guy barely understands how email works in the first place to trying to explain to him how he’s getting 50% of nothing since some dick thought it would be a barrel of laughs to email our free ebook to everyone in his address book is no party.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that my eyes have been opened to a whole other side of this argument and some things I’ve said in the past might have worked against me. But I’m trying to correct that now, and I’d like to ask that please, if you’d like to read a copy of ‘Hi Hollywood’ you just do the stand up thing and download it for free yourself rather than sneaking around and stabbing me in the back.

Thanks.