2015-09-23

Unauthorised EPUB versions of books on iTunes and B&N

I have discovered that the company that produces my hardcopy books for Engine House Books (lulu.com) has also, unbeknownst to me, been auto-converting the PDF files into EPUB and making the results available for sale on iTunes and at the Barnes and Noble NOOK store.

I never explicitly authorised them to do this, and, as far as I know, my permission was never even sought. Presumably, there's some legalese in the Lulu Terms of Service that gave them the right to perform these (what I regard as underhanded) activities without explicit consent from me.

 I have now explicitly removed the EPUB files from Lulu, and will check periodically to make sure that they don't return. As best I understand it, my having removed the files from Lulu will also result in their removal from iTunes and B&N in short order.

In case you wonder why I would not want the books available, there are several issues (apart from the obvious one of their doing this without seeking explicit permission):

  1. As the EPUB files were auto-generated, they contained no manual corrections or interventions to improve the look on a reader.
  2. The PDF files contain some material that either will not autoconvert sensibly to EPUB (which is really a form of HTML) or material that should not sensibly be present in an electronic version of the book.
  3. The fonts and general style that Lulu chose were, frankly, embarrassingly bad.
  4. The prices set by Lulu were considerably higher than those I normally set for electronic books.
I am (admittedly slowly) working my way through my fiction books and making them available in electronic formats, using manual conversion from the original text files, as opposed to automated conversion from PDF files.

Category Five is the latest to be converted, and should be appearing shortly in the iTunes and B&N Nook stores.