Richard

The bit I just loved is where the Fopp's representative commented 'Our chain is profitable'

Er yes, sure, selling £7.99 Penguin books like 'Catcher in the Rye' at a mere £3 then Fopp must have been profitable.

Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity.

I apologize for attempting to contact you in a blog comment, but there doesn't seem to be another mechanism, and it's apparent that you do read these.

I've just found yet another blog on the Google owned Blogger network which houses literally hundreds of stolen books. This really bothers me, not only on principle but because I write video games for a living, meaning that I can empathize better than most.

I'm coming to you for help because I've got a list of these blogs and similar pages that I've kept over the years. I contact Google fairly regularly about these pages, only to be soundly ignored, and if one is willing to assume that a Zipf distribution is correct, I can make the strong mathematical case for more than a hundred thousand stolen SKU per *month* for this recent site alone.

I house a legal eBook community for the Nintendo DS community, using out-of-copyright material, called "MoonBooks." I have a clearer picture than most of the kind of traffic that one of these sites generates, and whereas I'm no Project Gutenberg, I do have the math background to extrapolate an estimate, rather than to guess.

The reason I think you're a good person to talk to should be transparent; you're obviously both aware of Google's certainly aggressive stance on rights from the public context and a person with both the influence and willingness to take them on; this is exceptionally rare.

I would like for you to consider the possibility that they might be engaging willingly in a much larger and far less arguable process of intellectual property theft. There's one thing you can note about all of these eBook theft sites: they're all absolutely covered in Google ads.

That's right - they're not just allowing people to steal your material. They're profiting from it, and paying the thieves for the privilege.

Are you able to change the nature of things? I would be happy to provide you with the locations of these sites, but I don't intend to post them here, because I don't want to drive traffic to them.

Thank you for any time you might be able to spend considering the matter.

Clive

I prefer 'If all your sales are incremental, your profits will be excremental.'

John

I'm not sure I can help. My influence is extremely limited.

Richard