Piracy

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." It is one of the most memorable literary payoffs in history, the end of F Scott Fitzgerald's defining novel of the 20th century, The Great Gatsby.

A group of best-selling authors is teaming up with Amazon in a lawsuit that aims to bring down an alleged counterfeit e-book publishing site described as "the biggest pirate book site the world has ever seen."  Read more

One day not long ago in a college class I was teaching, some of my students couldn't find the page I was talking about in the reading. And it dawned on me: There was only one required text in the class, an anthology of writing about the natural world called "American Earth." And they were reading pirated copies - versions downloaded free from some dubious "provider" on the internet.

American authors are hurting. Surveys done by the Authors Guild show that the median income of authors from writing has declined 42% in the last 10 years. Well over half of full-time, published authors now earn below the individual poverty level from their writing.

Abena, who is 18, recently read Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, and thought it was wonderful. She does feel a bit bad about downloading it illegally, she says, but her mother is a single parent who can't afford to feed her voracious love of books. She has also enjoyed the entire Percy Jackson series without paying its author, Rick Riordan, a penny.  Read more