It’s finally happened. One of my eBooks has been pirated and ended up for free download. I’ve officially arrived.

I’m not giving them traffic with a link but here’s a screenshot:

pirated beyond

Now anyone can save themselves the bank breaking 99 cents that Beyond Amazon, eBay, and Etsy costs and download it for free… Or can they?

The link above advertises not only every possible eBook format for free download but also the audiobook.

Um… there is no audiobook. I keep meaning to record an audio version and for half a second I thought maybe they’d saved me the trouble but, no, all is not what it seems. Both the links to download the eBooks and the mysterious audiobook actually only download an exe file that isn’t my book at all… it’s a virus.

Now here’s where I’m having a little moral dilemma. I COULD track down contact info for the site and try to make them remove the page or take some other drastic action. But that seems like a lot of trouble and, in a way, isn’t this site doing me a bit of a favor? Someone tries to download an illegal copy of my book and, whammo, they’ll by punished with a virus teaching them a valuable lesson. So maybe the best thing to do is just sit back and see how this pans out.

I know. I’m terrible.

What would you do?