Steal This Book, 2024 Style
Abby Hoffman’s book, titled “Steal This Book,” has sold over 200,000 copies, according to Wikipedia. I haven’t read it, and I probably won’t. My best-selling book has sold under 10,000 copies. My worst-selling book has sold under 200 copies.
I appreciate the sentiment behind Hoffman’s title. In Hoffman’s day, stealing a book meant walking into a bookstore and walking out with the book without paying for it. This took some gumption and showed how much you valued or wanted the book. Today, it’s a quick visit to The Pirate Bay and a totally anonymous ten-second download.
I found out today that my latest book, Coding with AI For Dummies, is the 8th most downloaded book on The Pirate Bay. For those of you who don’t know what The Pirate Bay is, it’s a website where theft of music, movies, and books is okay because you’re downloading from other people’s computers and not from The Pirate Bay. For those of us who built our music libraries twenty years ago by using Napster, it’s the same thing.
Musicians and writers don’t make much money from selling books or music. We make nothing from The Pirate Bay (of course).
My non-fiction books are published by a large publisher. Wiley (publisher of “For Dummies” books) puts out a lot of books. Is stealing from Wiley okay? As far as I can tell, a few For Dummies books do well and pay for the publication of the ones that don’t do well. Publishing books is an increasingly bad idea, it seems to me, for publishers.
For authors, it’s far worse. Writing a book doesn’t make any kind of sense at all unless you’re writing the book for some other reason. My average hourly wage for writing books is below what I made working as a dishwasher in the early 1990s.
But, even though my plan to write as many books as possible and live off the royalties is completely unrealistic, I keep doing it. I love writing books because I love the challenge and figuring out how to communicate things better. I get excited when people tell me they’ve learned something from one of my books.
Knowing that so many people (maybe thousands at this point) who could afford to buy it have chosen instead just to download it illegally makes me furious.
So, what’s my point? I’m generally a pretty laid-back author. If you can’t afford to buy a book of mine that you’re interested in reading, write to me, and I’ll buy a copy and send it to you. Most authors won’t do that. Hell, I’ll read the book to you if you ask nicely.
But please don’t support pirating my books. That’s just not cool. If you’ve already done it, you have an obligation to write a review of the book and explain to me why you stole it. If you have a good reason, I’m fine with that. But if you’re just stealing my book because you can, that’s despicable.
Finally, if you can’t buy one of my books and you don’t want to ask me to send you a copy, I know of a way to get to read it for free and completely legally — borrow it from your local library.