Author Walter Jon Williams Asks For Fans To Help Him 'Pirate' His Own Works Better

from the piratesourcing?-crowdpirating? dept

Consumerist points us to a blog post from author Walter Jon Williams, where he discusses his disgust with pirate copies of his books -- but not for the reasons you might expect. It seems he's upset about the quality of the scanned copies and is asking his fans to help by creating better scans:

I embarked upon a Cunning Plan. I discovered that my work had been pirated, and was available for free on BitTorrent sites located in the many outlaw server dens of former Marxist countries. So I downloaded my own work from thence with the intention of saving the work of scanning my books-- I figured I'd let the pirates do the work, and steal from them. While this seemed karmically sound, there proved a couple problems.

First, the scans were truly dreadful and full of errors. (Even if you're desperate for my work, I can't really recommend them.) A lot of time has been spent copy-editing, both by me and by Kathy-- which isn't really so bad, because this would have to be d0ne anyway.

But second, apparently a few of my books were so obscure that they flew under the radar of even the pirates! You can't imagine how astounded I was when I discovered this.

I could really use some decent scans of some of my books, and I figure some among you must have better scanners and OCR than the piece of crap that's currently sitting on my shelf.

Not only that, but he's offering rewards to those who help him, saying he'll send them signed (physical) copies of certain books, and also put their name on the scan.

Filed Under: piracy, scans, walter jon williams