Although I can imagine what you are going through I can tell you one thing - nobody is going to stop downloading e-Books for free illegally. It's just the way things are. Why pay for something when you can get it for free. But you can make things harder if you request your publisher to stop providing your books as e-Books which will make it harder (but not impossible) to distribute the books illegally.

....especially when ur talking about college kids.  College books are ridiculously expensive I remember per semester almost paying 300/semester and that was between 1997-2001.  I could only imagine that it has gone up.

I am not justifying it, but for college students thats just not an option if u can get it cheaper.

I dunno what the alternatives would be...maybe provide a "free" version with adverstisements/updates that can be downloaded (?).

One of the smartest things Microsoft did with their Visual Studio Express series is offer it for free, because now you can teach vb/C# in a college environment for FREE and u now have college educated programmers/managers that can recommend or start with MS technologies rather than Java (something they might not have known otherwise).

-- Bart

I certainly feel your pain; a few weeks ago my book must have hit its illegal download stride -- I got notification after notification, of some 20 new sites hosting it over a two day period.  On the flip side, I don't really care, for the following two reasons:  A) I look at it as a huge amount of publicity -- as I'm sure is the case with you, I'm certainly not writing for the income! B) The people who are downloading wouldn't have purchased a copy anyway.  That's why they're downloading it.  Who wants to read a 1000-page book on a monitor?  Only someone too cheap to go out and buy the book.  

While I get peeved every time I see a new site pop up, I'm not going to let it bother me too much... I'd rather spend my time thinking about the next edition :-)

Adam, I have your latest APress book downloaded legally from the APress site.  I own many books but I now prefer to get ebooks because when I travel I can take my library with me. In addition, books in the UK are priced at 1GBP = 1.5 USD so buying ebooks in dollars from the US means that I can have a greater range of titles than would have otherwise been possible.

Ian

A really cool service would be if Safari Books, Books 24x7, or some publisher allowed you to add purchased books to your account.

Imagine I bought your book and tore open an envelope. Instead of a CD it would have a code to add your book to "My Library" at Safari Books.

The Safari (or whoever) could police it to ensure there weren't multiple people accessing it at once or people from different countries all the same time. A really persistent person could still copy/paste the entire text to a Word document but hopefully would become too inconvenient to be commonplace.

My biggest preference is to have a searchable CHM eBook that doesn't require internet access but it's exceedingly rare that I'm somewhere that I don't have internet access.

Can't edit my message but I wanted to say that I'm definitely not trying to make light of your situation. I can't imagine what it feels like to see countless months (years?) of work poured into something that people are just putting out there for download.

I've always been a big advocate of paying for anything you're getting fair use of. I only hope that some of the people downloading are seeing the value of the book and choosing to go out and buy a copy.

To clarify - the only eBooks I have are ones that I've paid for (or my employer paid for).

Paul,

I still remember when I was at the university, I did not have enough money from parents to buy the computer I wanted and I started working as a programmer to earn some by myself. I was earning enough to buy the latest EGA or Hercules display adapter, but not enough to buy all the books I was hungry of, they simply were too many! So, i used photocopies of them (at the time, no e-book was available. :)). I never felt wrong in doing this, I always thought that I would have paid them when I would have money for.

Now, my life is very different, I can afford buying more than a book (and, honestly, I don't have time to read all what I'd like to read and buy) and I simply do not even think of reading a PDF when I can read a printed book. Said in different words, I can apreciate the amount of work in a book because I can understand it and I can understand it because I read so many photocopies. :)

So, what is the point? Don't blame students because they copy books, probably they need to do it and this is the only way they can really learn how to be future professionals with high competency.

That said, if they are professionals and are copying a book... well, probably they are simply too stupid to fully understand both the book and the value of your work so blaming them is a waste of time. :)

Alberto

Through this article, you are provided with three illegal productive eBook creation tips. With this information, you'll be well on your way to enjoying your own success.

the only eBooks I have are ones that I've paid for

To come back on an ancient thread,

i find illegally downloading ebooks a great way of sorting out what is really the book i want, and afterwards i buy the hard copy via Amazon.

Don't be mistaken, not even 10% of the ebooks downloaded are even opened... They're just there "just in case".

I actually downloaded illegally some books i already have in hard copy, just because the publisher doesn't have a pdf version available, or you have to pay for a subscription... I already payed once, why pay twice??

Anyhow, Adam is right, people who only download it illegally, probably didn't even intend to buy the book ever, or are just doing prospection.

Oh, a last thought, i didn't download anything by you, as i'm (not yet) interested in databases :-)

Hi, im a college student in south America. It is out of the question for me buying all of the books i need each semester, so I usually fotocopy them or download them.  I haven´t downloaded your book in particular, and I understand your situation. On the other hand, it really is unfair that rich people (who are born rich) have access to knowledge because of money, while the less fortunate ones cant. Knowledge should be a right on its own, and not a benefit.  Of course, many cultural stuff is wrong, such as prestige, which should be related with people like you who pursuit knowledge.  I'd be glad to pay if I could, but i can't, i'd be glad to have a lot of stuff other people have, but i can't.  That's life.