The Stupidity of Worrying About Piracy

“Banning people from reading my book on Amazon is unlikely to deter someone who is truly motivated to pirate my book, and to scan every single friggin’ page — however one does it — you have to be pretty goddamn motivated. You’d also have to pretty motivated to read my entire book through Amazon’s less-than-entirely-user-friendly text preview tool. Most people just aren’t going to do that, and the ones that are, I’m not going to sell to anyway. I’m not going to punish the people who are likely to buy my book on the off chance that I might temporarily inconvenience someone who won’t. That’s just stupid. So: I’ll let Amazon show off the entire book. I don’t see how it can hurt me, and I see lots of ways it can help me.

Does this mean I run the risk of being pirated? Well, clearly it does. But let take a nice cold shower and look at this logically, shall we?”