Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Site selling fanfic from many sites including L&C archives

Briefly, ebooks-tree.com seems to be scraping content from a lot of sites including the archives and putting it on line; there appears to be some sort of charging system so they are profiting from fanfic without the author's permission.

This blog post describes what's going on and how to complain:

http://impishtubist.tumblr.com/post/116316699750/i-didnt-wanna-do-it-fyeahcopyright-weve

On a quick check I found Nan Smith's The Vampire Murders and several stories by Shayne Terry. There are probably many others.

Thanks for the heads-up. I see they have thirty of my stories posted. I am about to write them an e-mail to have them remove my fanfic from their site.

Joy,
Lynn

This is absolutely shameful! Thanks for the notice. I hope this gets shut down quickly.

Gross. I just emailed that telling them to take my work down.

Thanks for the alert. They have one of my stories, a deeply personal one. I have emailed them about taking it down.

The website claims to be free. I don't see where they could be charging for access to any story (not that I tried to download my stories as that would only encourage them). I agree that it's annoying that this website is listing my stories without my authorization, but I don't see how this is really any different from doing a Google Search and having my stories pop up (which they do).

When doing a search on your own stories, were any of you asked for fees? Did any of your try to download your own stories? Were you able to do so for free? I'm just curious. Are they just listing available Mobi on the web (although organizing all my archived stories together into one giant pdf I suspect must have taken some effort, a big server, or some kind of specialized program). They claim not to have anything on their own servers, so how do they have a pdf compilation of all my stories? There isn't one on our archives. This whole thing is a bit confusing.

It seems like a pretty disorganized website. When I tried to do a search of my name by the first 2 letters, it gave 30+ pages of authors whose name started with Vi. The list wasn't even in alphabetical order, so searching that way would be pretty time consuming and frustrating. It was only after I typed my name into their search engine did I find my stories. It's possible that they weren't known to this website until I did a search for them. /shrugs/ Who knows?

Marcus, that blog you linked to was pretty vague on the details. There was no specifics included, except how to have one's stories removed. It almost feels as if someone shouted "fire" without having actually seen the flames or smelt the smoke. I hate to be a Perry here, but where's the proof that what this website is doing is more than compiling (badly) a list of mobi available to download from the web?

Additionally: As this website seems to be disorganized, I'd worry more about someone downloading some kind of virus in lieu of my stories.

I agree with Virginia. It's just like a google search except they have some kind of programme that can 'read' the story you want and turn it into an ebook for you.

On the Home page it even says...

No regulary payments, hidden fees or other expenses. It's totally free

Bad English I know ...

I must admit it's a bit disturbing that I'm physically listed, along with 'some' of my stories. Clearly they do a periodic update, because it's basically a look at the archive as of a few months ago.

There was another site I used to use to turn my own stories into e-books years ago, before I started on LnC fic, and it would link to fanfiction.net. You put in the url of the story and it turned it into an ebook. The ebook was never stored on their site and only available for you at the time you were on the page as you were the one who put the url in. Personally I only ever used it for my own stories, but you could use it to get any fic into e-book format. I never saw a problem with this as it was just making something that was ALREADY accessible to the world, available for those who preferred to read in a way that felt more like a book. Unfortunately a fanfiction.net update a few years ago meant that this website could no longer access and read those fics.

I'm choosing to see this website in the same light. The only thing that concerns me (slightly) is that they have a list of names, so 'something' is stored 'somewhere' on their servers. This other site stored nothing and you had to put in the url of a story that already existed before it would convert anything for you.

EDIT: Remembered the name of the website I used. And now it's gone completely due to programming problems with their server. FlagFic.

Virginia,

You can see all of your stories in one place if, instead of searching on your name, you click the relevant letter ("V", in your case) in the "Authors" line near the top of the page, and then click the relevant link at the top of the following page.

Yesterday I had started to try the download process for one of my stories to verify that a) They indeed had it b) it was as I had written it, and c) A fee was charged. When they required me to create an account to continue, I terminated the process

Joy,
Lynn

I only found one of my stories there, Terrible Teen Paranormal Romance: LnC Style. They don't appear to be taking things off of fanfiction.net, or off of older fan fiction sites that haven't been updated in a while (like my Titanic fanfic site, Anne's Story Page), nor do they seem to be taking stories off of this forum.

The fact that you have to create an account, and it's only free for 5 days, looks fishy to me. I wouldn't trust it (plus it's illegal to make money off of fanfic except in certain specific cases, like the fanfic e-books you can buy on Amazon.com).

I noticed that they also link to public domain books, like those linked at the Online Books Page. They didn't ask me to create an account when I clicked on those.

Anything posted in chunks, (ie chapters on fanfiction.net, or threads on here) probably can't be read by their programme without a LOT of intense programming and access to THOSE sites basic html/css. It's one reason why flagfic stopped being able to access fanfiction.net. I'm guessing that the sites they link to all have the complete stories on just one page.

I can't see anywhere that it's only free for 5 days. I can't find any reference to signing up for an evaluation period, or anything. I haven't actually gone all the way through the account set up process, but I can find no mention of a fee.

That's absolutly true, but I don't think they are making money. The only reference to money I can find is in regards to legal fees if you dispute something under copywrite and it turns out you were lying.

Lynn and Annie, when you went to that site it actually asked you for credit card information and TOLD you that the service was free only for 5 days? Because nowhere on the site does it mention that (that I could see). Did it say how much they planned on charging you for access to the fanfiction? If so, that sounds illegal (i.e. bait and switch / false advertising) and should be reported to the authorities. Or did it just ask for you to set up an ID and password? (No credit card or payment required.) An annoying amount of websites do that.

Again, by requiring a credit card to "access" so-called free material online sounds fishy (or should I say phishy) as in that they are trying to steal people's credit card information. I'll have to do some of my own research later on when I have more time.

Hi Virginia,

I bailed out when they asked me to type in a userID and password to create an account. They did not ask for any credit card info at that stage; I don't know if that would have been the next step had I started to create the account.

- Lynn

Something else interesting: I was able to download my story "The Diagnosis" just now in both epub and mobi format without registering, but when I tried to download :A Hair-Razing Experience," I was asked to register. I decided to click on the button to register and saw the following message, "Access Required
You need to create an account to gain permission to access
unlimited downloads & streaming.Take advantage of our special promotional offer to gain unlimited access for 5 days for free." Upon closer inspection, however, I realized that I was no longer on the ebooks-tree web site. Instead, I was on the site www.tzarmedia.com. It looks like tzarmedia may be the site that is selling access to fanfic.

I haven't time to explore the matter further right now, but if anyone else wishes to pick up the trail, please let us know where it leads.

Joy,
Lynn

Yes, some stuff can be downloaded without difficulty, but other things require you to register, and it does say 5 days for free.

The chapter thing may explain why it hasn't picked up anything on my fanfic website -- almost everything there is posted in chapters, and the links to the stories take you to lists of chapters.

Odd. I've tried and tried, but I can't replicate this. I've had no problem with any of my stories and I've never ended up at that other website. Strangely enough, when I looked around at work it did prompt me to make an account - but the account creation screen was still on ebooks-tree and looked nothing like the tzarmedia creation screen. From home I've not been prompted at all.

There seems to be no way to know what tzarmedia is offering unless you do sign up though. You cannot even browse, until you decide to signup. The only indication, to me, is that it seems to be an online streaming source, trying to compete with something like netflixs or Amazon, etc. Can't see that the 'books' they talk about will be fanfic, though.

MIND JUST EXPLODED WITH THIS THOUGHT: What if this was all started just as a rumour BY ebooks-tree to raise their profile and get traffic on their site? I know I've visited many times today, trying to figure this all out!!!!!

DO NOT leave credit card details - this was posted at another site:

It's actually a bit worse than just profiting from advertising. The site appears to link back to a scam site known for stealing credit card information. They require that people who want to read their content provide a credit card number in order to sign up. http://penguinsweaters.tumblr.com/post/116309676368/untitledbychoice-fyeahcopyright-update

Yep, that's what that sounded like a scam. If they are based in Delaware, perhaps someone should notify that District Attorney's office for the state and let them know about this fraud happening within its borders.

As a good rule of thumb, never give out your credit card online unless you've investigated a site and made sure it's legit.

When I tried to access my story I got rerouted to a page called lilbooks, which was written in very bad, hardly readable German. I never asked the browser for a translation, so my guess is that the site read my IP-adress. I'd say that they would have put
a little more effort into the translation if this was any serious business.

I googled lilbooks and found a site that deemed this homepage as not trustworthy.