License Statements

As I'm sure a few of you may know, ebooks have licensing statements attached to them, as well as copyright statements. For many years I've used the Smashwords licensing statement, because it was required for you to use it, if you wanted to publish on Smashwords. The reason for the license, at least as I always saw it, was because anyone could quite easily copy your ebook and send it far and wide to everyone. And of course, there are quite a few people who do this. The idea behind the statement is to try and stop that behavior.

Now some will argue that you can take a book and send it around to everyone you know, and that's true, you can. However, you can only send that book to one person at a time. Oh you could try to photocopy it, which is illegal, but that would cost you more than just buying another copy. Also that book will wear out with time. Ebooks don't wear out.

Amazon does have a method by which you can loan ebooks to your friends, one at a time, and it takes it away from you while it does so. Preserving the 'single' identity of each copy. Also, this is part of why ebooks are (at least from me) significantly cheaper than paperbacks. That whole lack of paper that must be bought, printed on, assembled, warehoused, and delivered.

Now, every once in a while I consider re-writing that license statement in my ebooks, I haven't yet because most people don't really pay any attention to it, it's just a legal necessity that I have to follow, and without a lawyer's help, which is expensive, I don't want to screw myself over by changing it. However lately I'm considering making it a little bit clearer. When you buy a copy of one of my ebooks, as far as I'm concerned, you have the ownership of that copy for life (unless you return it of course).

Will I give you the license to pass that right on to others? Sorry, not for 3 or 4 bucks I won't. If you want it to last for that long, buy the paperback. It's printed on high quality paper and odds are it will last a hundred years (maybe more, I don't know) if taken care of. If you look, you'll see my paperbacks are priced lower than comparable paperbacks in the bookstores, and I use better paper.

If you want to loan that book to someone else to read, well Amazon has a process for that and you might want to look at it. Of course if you want to hand your kindle (or whatever you read it on) to someone else, hey I'm fine with that. But if you want to make a -copy- and give or loan that to someone else? That's illegal, and no, I'm not going to give you the right to do that. Again, if you want to pass the book around, spend the couple of extra bucks and buy the paperback. Then you can treat it like a paperback.

Now I realize that there are people who will think I'm being unreasonable over this. I suspect those people also make more money an hour than I do :-P  But you also have to understand that Amazon also has a licensing agreement that you agree to when you purchase an ebook. As far as I know, mine isn't any different than theirs is, and in fact may be a little more liberal.

As for why I'm writing this? Well someone got upset with my licensing agreement. I think they figured that once they bought it, they could give it to whomever they wanted to, I'm not sure. I pointed out the Amazon sharing program, but I haven't heard anything back. Also I'm a bit suspect, because honestly, who reads the copyright and licensing statements in a book? I don't, do you?

Anyways, back to work!