Charlie Stross
PSA FOR AUTHORS: some dipshit put a pirate edition of my latest book on Apple Books with a "50% OFF" medallion on the cover illo. They used an obscure unicode glyph in the author name so that searches for "Charles Stross" find it but the bookstore won't merge it.
Where there's one there'll be others!
My publisher's piracy team is handling it.
If you have a book that came out this year, beware! It's a relative of the IDN homograph attack only targeting ebook stores:
Charlie Stross
@leo Apple Books has potentially millions of titles pushed to them by wholesalers or publisher ebook portals. This is a descendant of the old-school SQL injection attack but *it doesn't show up* to a human-eyeball check.
What's needed is for Apple (and other ebook stores: betcha this is hitting Amazon, Kobo, etc) to scan for nonstandard characters in titles and authors and highlight them for a human check.
Leo
@cstross real pirates buy the books and upload them to pirate websites, dipshits download books from pirate websites and try to sell them
It might be related to a technical bug but I still blame Apple Books here, how can they let randos publish books without a human reviewing it?
Like without a Unicode bug you could still publish as CharIie Stross (that L is actually a capital I), or Chalie Ströss and it might still fool people. I doubt another band-aid will fix their fake seller problem.
Are they gonna make you whole and pay you the money you would have made at least?
Charlie Stross
@ms22 @leo I don't know. I expect they'll go after the book pirate rather than attacking Apple (who are much bigger than they are, and sell lots of books for them). I don't think either Apple or my publisher would want to go after good-faith end customers.
ms22
@cstross @leo Assuming people purchased the illegitimate copies, will the legal team try to recover lost royalties from Apple? Will Apple have to notify customers and provide refunds? I understand if you can’t answer, just trying to see if there’s anything that will cause even small financial issues for the booksellers in cases like this.
Charlie Stross
@leo @ms22 Of course they do! But last time I reported an ebook pirate in the Books store to Apple they reacted *far* faster and harder than Amazon …
Leo
Does Apple Books charge any fee (fixed or percentage) whatsoever for selling your books there?
It's such a great business model to profit from pirated book sales, and then pretend it's not your fault when people come knocking.
But for example when you sell stolen motorcycles that was sold to you by a thief, you get into trouble for not checking things properly.
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