Walter Jon Williams is pirating pirated copies of his own books, but has discovered that several of his titles are too obscure even for the pirates. To make up for that lack, he’s asking for help. In this blog post, he writes that he’s trying to get his out-of-print books available electronically. “To this end, I embarked upon a Cunning Plan. I discovered that my work had been pirated, and was available for free on BitTorrent sites located in the many outlaw server dens of former Marxist countries. So I downloaded my own work from thence with the intention of saving the work of scanning my books—I figured I’d let the pirates do the work, and steal from them. While this seemed karmically sound, there proved a couple problems.
“First, the scans were truly dreadful and full of errors. (Even if you’re desperate for my work, I can’t really recommend them.)” He and has wife have put in a lot of effort copy editing those bad scans.
“But second, apparently a few of my books were so obscure that they flew under the radar of even the pirates! You can’t imagine how astounded I was when I discovered this.” So he’s “willing to trade. Should any of you volunteer to provide scans of Days of Atonement, Angel Station, and Knight Moves, that lucky individual will get a signed, personalized copy of the WJW book of his or her choice (assuming I actually have a copy, of course). Plus, whatever book you scan will spend digital eternity with your name in it, along with my eternal thanks.”