Ethics of downloading ebooks

As a traditionally published author, I ask very strongly that you get your ebooks via legal means, be it buying them or using your library lending. (My public library lending system is actually pretty easy and awesome. I am also in California.) I do not and will never have a donate link on my website and you giving money to me directly doesn't help me to continue to get book deals, which is how most authors manage to grow their career and continue to write the books you want to read. Publishers decide whether or not to continue to work with your traditionally published authors based on their sales, AND on how many libraries chose to buy their books, and how many of those books are bought by those libraries. If people get my books via illegal means, those eyeballs are never recorded, the publishers see no money and believe my books aren't popular enough to pay me to write, someone to edit, someone to publicize, someone to proofread, someone to copyedit, someone to design. My deals get smaller and smaller, and the next thing you know, I can't afford to write books anymore. I know people to whom this has actually happened. So, unsurprisingly, I vote unethical. I don't ever ask that people buy my books, but I do ask that if they don't want to buy it, that they check it out from the library or borrow it from someone who did buy it. (BTW, if you wrote me a polite note about your piracy, although I would be polite in response, that response would not, I do not think, be the one you'd like to receive.) Please don't illegally download it. If you are this opposed to Amazon, why don't you return the Kindle and use the money to purchase the books in hardcover or paperback from your local independent bookstore? Thank you for asking this question.

Are you sure your public library does not have an e-book lending program? The city listed in your profile has a public library that offers Kindle book lending through Overdrive. My local library uses the same system, and it's really very simple and convenient, at least for books they have available in Kindle format.

Is it ethical for me to use these illegal sources for books that I either receive as gifts or would have checked out from the public library anyway? I say no. You are already capable of reading those books through the two means you cite. Presumably reading them on the Kindle is of some value to you, or else you wouldn't be posting this question. The ethical thing is to pay for that value. Or, if you decide that your opposition to Amazon outweighs whatever value you would get from reading these works on your Kindle, the ethical thing is to not read these books on your Kindle.

I saw this this morning and spent a lot of time thinking about whether I could write an answer anyone would find credible, as my livelihood depends on people purchasing ebooks. (I manage the ebook production group at a publishing company.) I'm still not sure I can, but I thought I should at least add my perspective. My first point is exactly what The corpse in the library says: publishing an ebook takes a layer of work (that my group does!) beyond publishing the book in print. Buying a paper book and then pirating the ebook isn't analogous to buying a CD and then ripping to mp3, because making an ebook isn't just a push-button process. Though increasingly there are simple options for making some kinds of books into ebooks (or for making books and ebooks simultaneously), those are for brand-new books that have been created digitally and with clean semantic structure built in. Many of the ebooks my company makes are conversions of books published before modern XML-structured digital publishing (our backlist predates the U.S. Civil War, to give you an idea), and involve rights negotiations (because the original book contract didn't include electronic rights); reclearing all third-party permissions (every photo, piece of artwork, song lyric, line of poetry, and long quotation has to be reviewed for whether the original contract granted permission to use it in electronic format); OCR of a print book and then formatting and proofreading; changing or adapting any elements that don't work in electronic format (removing references to "facing page"; turning cross-references and indexes into links); creating new covers and updated metadata; and the like. jhc (who, full disclosure, is married to me) once wrote http://www.metafilter.com/121365/Random-Harper-Penguin#4650274. Because ebook conversion is not free, not every book becomes an ebook. When you buy an ebook (or borrow one from the library, or get one through a subscription service), you're not only supporting the author and publisher, but you're also telling them that you value having access to that content in digital format (which many of the people commenting in this thread obviously do). It's important for the publisher to know that, because it influences what books we invest in making into ebooks in the future. On the Amazon point, I would say that one excellent way not to support their approach to the publishing industry is to buy ebooks elsewhere. Because such a tremendous portion of ebook sales go through Amazon, Amazon has extraordinary leverage against publishers and readers (not just at the high-profile contract negotiation level, but also in being able to, for example, require their own proprietary ebook format and to force Kindle owners to buy all their ebooks from them). Having more legal sales go through Apple or B&N (if you like a retailer who uses the open epub standard), through Tor or O'Reilly's own websites (if you're anti-DRM), or through Kobo (if you want to give a slice back to your local indie bookseller) is a way for you to vote on how the ebook marketplace should look, while also giving publishers some space to push back against Amazon.

If you go the route of buying elsewhere than Amazon & converting, buying through Kobo allows you to http://www.indiebound.org/ebooks

Library checkouts do affect an author's sales, in that libraries look at usage of books by an author when deciding whether to purchase new books.

For what it's worth, it's possible to buy books from stores that aren't Amazon, break the DRM, and convert them to a kindle format (Calibre can do the latter two steps automatically).

Publishing a book in paper format involves work. Publishing it as an e-book involves another layer of work. If you say it's okay to pirate a copy of an e-book because you bought it in the paper format, you're overlooking that second batch of work that somebody did. As someone who wrote books that you can now illegally download, well, I wish that you wouldn't. I want those pennies, and I want those sales figures.

Overdrive is kind of a hassle to set up, but I have used it successfully to read quite a lot of books on my Kindle. For Free, yay! There is an argument sometimes made that publishers who sell ebooks should not retain DRM on those books, and that the buyer should have the option to, say, back them up, or read them on different devices. People who feel this way might choose to use Calibre (which is a pretty good ebook-management software application), and a plug-in for Calibre is available to the adept googler which might enable those buyers to, among other things, convert said purchases to other formats.