All content creators hate piracy, as there is nothing to love about losing profits and exposure. As we know piracy takes on many forms, it comes as the altruistic modern day robin hoods (profiting from ads on their site and donations while the creators gain nothing), the malware Santas giving free ebooks with a “special virusy spice” added, the illegal resellers trying to sell pirated content and more.
Recently a site called “bookinistika.com” spawned which is trying to sell many authors titles at a lower price.
– Is it authorized to do so? – No..
– Is it copyright infringement? – Definitely..
– Is it piracy? – You bet!
– Is what they are doing legal? – We will have our friend Leo answer the question on the .GIF bellow..
– But is this something new?
No there were, are and will be many sites like this one. One example is kisslibrary.net which after Pirat.io exposed it, it became kissly.net.
Bearlib.com another “gem” where we had to go as far as to shutdown their payment methods in order to force them to cease operations. The list goes on..
What makes bookinistika.com so special? Lets dive into how it tries to mask its piracy operation into a “legitimate selling point” for eBooks.
First of all, its a hidden website. What this means is that if you try to Google search for book results hosted on their site, you will find there are none. This is done in an effort to evade our anti-piracy scanner and authors from finding out about them. (does it work? Nope..)
For the more tech savvy readers, they do the “hiding” by setting their websites robots.txt file options to disallow indexing of the books section, tags, categories and more.
(In simpler terms: they are requesting from all search engines to not show all URLs/links having to do with bookinistika.com/book/*anything* .
Screenshot showing the disallow robots.txt settings on the website bookinistika, making it invisible to the search engines.
– How did they get my content on their site and how come they have so many authors titles?
Its easy for anyone with coding/scripting skills to harvest (not manually but with automated methods) the official pages of authors on Amazon in order to extract in bulk the book titles, book descriptions, author, book covers and of course the price in order to undercut the authors.
Then they try to hide the piracy by portraying that their platform is a user generated content site. Meaning that there are actually real users or publishing houses who are uploading all the content to their site and “benefiting” from the profit sharing their wonderful platform offers!
It is definitely not they themselves who have uploaded all that content on their site. Nope, don’t you dare think that even for a minute!
- So are they like Amazon or Kindle unlimited in a way?
Hmmm, not quite.. They are the equivalent of some shady looking person in a trench-coat in very bad neighborhoods dark alley, where he is trying to sell you “totally legitimate and authentic” Rolex watches from his personal collection inside his suspicious van.
Honesty, its the best simile we can think of..
- Do they actually deliver the goods if someone purchases from them?
Regarding the delivery we are yet to find how bookinistika operates on that part. Some piracy sites especially those which accept solely Bitcoin/cryptocurrency payments, do not deliver any goods after payment.
Since all cryptocurrency transactions are one way and non refundable, others send out a pirated copy or even a wrong book.
- Is bookinistika.com popular, have I lost multiple sales due to their operation?
Other sites that operate similarly to them, are a greater danger for authors than bookinistika. The whole sites launch and activity seems to be during the past 90days, based on multiple factors such as (Alexa ranking and more).
The visitors are mostly bot based due to their bounce rate and time spent on site from countries which are notorious for piracy and bot traffic.
Statistics on the traffic, popularity and Alexa metrics of Bookinistika.com .
- I don’t mind if they steal my eBook sales, whats the worst that could happen?
Authors that sell exclusively on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited sign a contract that they will not be selling their titles elsewhere. If Amazon finds your eBooks for sale on another platform they have the right to remove your book from their listings and also withhold any earnings you might have pending, for violating your contract with them.
You might think “But its piracy, they know that I didn’t put it up there!”.
The thing is that they don’t dive that deep into each site, as many pose as legitimate businesses on the first look.
Bellow is an author who had their Amazon account flagged for copyright infringement, as a result from their book being distributed on a fake eBook selling site.
The author did not sell any of their books on any platform other than Amazon. Pirates did all the dirty work on their own..
– Do they comply with legal procedures and the DMCA law?
Some do, some don’t, but we have our ways to deal with them, in order to stop the piracy and illegal distribution of your content!
– How can I get my content removed from that piracy website and other shady sites like it online?
Contact us for a free consultation and quote, in order to find the best solution for your needs and budget!
* Recent update: After our pressure and claims, all book pages on their platform are now redirecting to a blank page.
They have also shutdown their search page so it displays no results, no matter the search query inserted.
Could this mean the end of the Bookinistika eBook piracy site?
~Possibly.. Hopefully.. Time will tell.. One thing is for sure, we wont stop monitoring their activity and taking further action against them!
We are closely monitoring the situation and are posting constant updates here and on our Twitter / Facebook pages:
https://twitter.com/pirat_io/status/1229587368694419461
https://www.facebook.com/dmca.takedown.service/posts/828688977596783
Thank you for this article!