December 22, 2007 by roland.

I had heard this statement for quite some time, but had never really paid much attention to it, until this week. Thanks to the progression of technology and free software to edit/manipulate PDF files, book piracy is becoming a serious epidemic.

Most of you reading this know that I have a computer book series entitled “The Minimum You Need to Know”. The current focus of this series is the OpenVMS marketplace. These books are on the high end and without competition. By “high end” I mean both price and the fact that 10,000 copies over 10 years is a lofty goal for the series. There simply aren’t many dedicated technical professionals out there willing to invest in their careers.

If you enter the computer book writing/publishing arena and focus on the high end topics, not the oatmeal $35 list price books, but the higher end topics, you will hear a saying: “You only sell one copy to all of India”. Before you go tagging me as a racist, you should know that I didn’t create the saying, and less than a month ago had an experience which tends to give it weight.

Yes, about a month ago I got an email from a person working for an Indian off-shore IT consulting company. They had just been assigned to work on a COBOL and FMS system for a client, and they didn’t even know how to log into an OpenVMS machine. They did a Web search and found my book previews on the Google Book site. You only get a few pages with the preview (not nearly few enough though since the smallest amount of a book you can expose is 20%, it needs to be 5%). This person took it upon themselves to email me and ask me to send them the entire contents of the book in a Word doc. I kid you not. They wanted it for free in a form their company could use to train others. I kid you not.

This got me to thinking about the advances in both technology and OpenSource software. For basically no money you can download or obtain a free set of CD’s containing the new industry standard desktop (Ubuntu). Bundled with it is the latest OpenOffice software and a rash of other programs to make your life (personal and professional) much easier. There is even free scanning software and free programs which will let you edit/manipulate PDF files, assuming you cannot get OpenOffice to open the PDF you are interested in editing.

All of this was supposed to make our lives better. But, like the Internet, nobody building it stopped to consider the downside.

Printer vendors have been working long and hard to make POD (Print On Demand) a viable solution for all. Many of these printers can now even print the cover and bind the entire book in one automatic process if it is one of the standard supported sizes. It truly is a marvel. In a few years they will figure out how to put a finish coat on the page so the toner can’t be felt by a reader and doesn’t remelt when the book is left in the sun.
Given all of these advances it truly is a wonderful time to be an author. You don’t have to care one hoot about finding a publisher. You can buy some ISBN numbers and publish your own books. Not only that, you can sell them on-line for list price with just a little bit of effort.

This week, the downside of this really hit home. I was taking a break from writing and surfing around the Web checking on my books. Seeing who was saying what, their ranking at various sites, and who was selling them. Lo and behold, there was a vendor on the Amazon site claiming to be selling new copies of “The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer” for $65. I had never heard of this vendor. I had never sold them any books. The price they were selling for was below the normal wholesale price, so they would have had to purchase more than 300 copies to make that price profitable. My distributor hadn’t contacted me for a restock in a while, so I contacted them. They had never sold to this vendor either.

Curiouser and Curiouser.

You couldn’t get an actual physical address for the vendor at Amazon, but you could send them email through the Amazon site. I sent them an email asking where they obtained “new” copies since there are only two sources for them and neither of us had sold to them. A few days later I got the following reply from an AOL address.

=====
We wouldn’t know where to begin.

We are supplied with books for re-sale from over 1,000 sources.
=====

Yes, I left off the email address and vendor name. After getting this response and forwarding it to my distributor, I had them contact Amazon. The vendor is now gone, but we still haven’t found out how many copies they sold through Amazon. The problem is, good intentions have been abused. That vendor sales page doesn’t have any background checking because it was supposed to be for people who wanted to unload used copies and for authors wanting to sell a few copies themselves for more than wholesale. Now, it’s an eight lane highway for book piracy.

Not all books are a candidate for this kind of piracy. While it is true that an offshore operation like that can print an 800 page book with the included CD for around $5.00/copy because they don’t pay anything resembling wages to their workers and their supplies cost next to nothing, they don’t pirate just any books. They look for the slow moving, high end technical books. Why? Because they are selling these books in their own country for a lot of money via book stores which have no Internet presence. $25/copy is a lot of money when you aren’t paying anyone for it and have less than $5/copy in the printing.

It should be noted, that this vendor claimed a US location (somewhere in Virginia), but a little poking around on the Internet found a Nigerian printing house by the same name. Coincidence? Do the math. You pay someone $10/day to scan a copy of the book into a series of PDF files, then paste them all into one file. Probably takes them less than a week. You bought the original copy through a used book vendor so you paid way less than list for it. You chose your target by talking with an off-shore consulting company that was looking to train developers in a specific technology. You get them to agree to buy 200 copies at $25/copy, then print a 500 copy run to bring your costs below $5/book. Next you have a friend or employee living in the US put “new” copies up on Amazon and a few other Internet sites offering a $90 book up for $65. In just a few weeks your 500 copies are gone. Your less than $500 investment in the book production netted you thousands, and you have no author to pay.

I post this blog not to whine, but to inform the other authors and publishers out there putting out high end books. You have invested well over a year putting these books together (I know it took over a year for the book in question here). Now, there are people out there making knockoffs for very little money and taking food out of your mouth. It’s not just you they are raping though. It’s every IT worker in every country where you have to pay for an education to work in IT. They are taking your jobs and not even paying for an education to do it.

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December 10, 2007 by roland.

It seems you cannot turn on the news these days without seeing some story about immigration reform. We can thank the multi-year election cycle for that. Much air time is burned talking about needing a fortress like fence for the southern border. Personally, I would prefer the candidates to focus on the illegal immigration which is actually a threat to national security rather than those who come over to take the kind of jobs nobody really wants.

What kind of illegal immigration you ask? The kind which is going on every day with consulting firms bringing IT workers over from countries known to harbor al-Qaeda training camps and recruitment cells on vacation and tourist visas. Placing them in companies where they can run pre-strike surveillance and report the information back via email.

This threat has already been identified once, and there appears to be nothing being done about it and nothing being said in the current presidential campaigns. Not all that long ago Pakistan arrested a computer consultant whose PC contained what officials in this country termed as multiple man years of tactical surveillance about financial targets in New York city. Six months later the UK arrested this mans accomplices (if memory serves correctly, there were six of them). The US didn’t bother to nab them while they were here.

So, presidential candidates. If you want to get my attention, and the attention of the American people, quit taking campaign contributions from the very same software companies that are putting our lives at risk out of nothing other than greed. Forget about barricading off Mexico. We all know the solution to that problem is an improvement in the Mexican economy. If they don’t need to come her for jobs they won’t. If any of them were software consultants willing to work for below minimum wage like terrorist operatives, your very same contributors would have them here on a vacation visa racking up billable hours.

Of course, once the Mexican economy improves, you will have a much bigger problem to deal with. There won’t be anyone to pick our fruits and vegetables. When the American public has to pay $30 for a bushel of apples or $12 for a single head of lettuce, you will have a much bigger problem indeed.

Yes, some of them are moving drugs across the border in back packs. If you do the math, you will see there aren’t enough back packs coming across the border to account for the tractor trailers full of drugs being confiscated in this country, let alone the quantity of drugs not being caught, or the tons of crystal meth being manufactured within our borders. So, that argument doesn’t really hold a lot of water.

Yes, some of them end up in the ghetto and join street gangs. This problem exists for every ethnic group which ends up in the ghetto, including those that join gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood. That problem won’t be solved until you eliminate the ghetto. The problem is, many of your campaign contributors need the ghetto. It is where they find people to work for minimum wage or less. This is what gives them the money to contribute to you. In truth, your campaigns are being financed by the exploitation of these people.

Too bad none of you read the “Ethics in Income” act I posted here, because that would solve most of these problems, and give the government the money to solve the rest, even considering the amounts you tend to line your own pockets with.

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