please don't feel guilty for stirring up the hornet's nest. It's pretty easy for people to say "hey man, don't be like Mettalica, just be cool, don't try to enforce the copyright, share the software" or whatever--but the people who are saying these things, it is not their stuff on the line. It is YOUR stuff. If you don't want a guy making an illegal $9 off YOUR stuff, then that's your call. Personally what I think this guy is doing is immoral and illegal and if it were MY stuff, I would make sure that he and people like him can never do business on ebay again.

It's not guilt, just sort of awe coupled with exhaustion! I wasn't prepared for the passion that came out of it!

Comment's been unscreened, but if you'd leave a username of some sort next time I'd like that lots. My vast psychic powers fail to tell me who Anonymous is every time!

As a bookstore employee, I'm ALSO ticked off at the ARC business.

There was a big discussion of it on Jim Butcher's forums - the conclusion was that yes, it is illegal to do this, but the fans are torn back and forth about whether it's "good" or not. Jim himself has chosen to leave the issue alone.

Myself, I'm inclined to memorize the contact details of the people involved and try to get them and whatever their source is blacklisted from ever receiving ARCs again.

Just my 2 cents worth.

I have pondered this issue many times since my husband and I both work in the media and receive lots of review copies - more than we could ever hope to keep. His company takes any orphaned review copies and has a big auction at the end of the year with the proceeds going to charity. My company just puts them out on the freebie table and anyone who wants them can take them.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the people who take them don't just turn around and sell them but I'm not sure how to deal with that. I've tried donating brand-new, full-release books to the local library, thinking that this would allow the library to offer more books to readers that they wouldn't have to spend money on. Instead of them putting the books into circulation, they sold at the next library sale for $.10 each and what didn't sell was thrown in the trash.

I think the best use of ARCs that the reviewers can't use or keep would be to donate them either to prison libraries or to soldiers overseas. Those people would be very appreciative of having new material to read and not as likely to just snap them up in the hopes of making a quick buck.

As it is, this guy on ebay is just out to make a profit, no matter how unethical it is. I saw three books on his list that we just received this past week (and we're on very good terms with the publicity folk who sent them). I'll alert them to the sale and perhaps they can get involved with getting this stuff pulled from ebay.

As I said in the other list, I don't think that ARCs being sold AFTER the official published copy is out should be considered bad, since they would be a collector's item. However, selling them before the "real" copy is out is, in my opinion, a copyright infringement, just as if they stole a copy from your computer and sold it.

btw, you might also want to go to e-bay and report the listing as a copyright infringement in addition to your agent and editor notices. At the bottom of the listing is a button to report the listing, then a bunch of pull downs, at one point listing the copyright infringement.