I’ve been offline for a while (and there are a flurry of posts about that coming up), but I had a very strange thing happen yesterday. Earlier this year, I published the Facebook API Developer’s Guide. It seems to be selling reasonably well on Amazon…even broke the top 100 computer books for a couple of days.
Being it’s a book on Facebook, I’ve had a few folks add me as a friend and shoot me messages and ask some questions. It all seemed pretty cool, until yesterday. I got a note from a person in Tunisia who added me as a friend and asked a question. I sent a response thanking him for purchasing my book, and this is where I was a little taken aback. In fact, this was his exact response:
well, to be honest with you i got your book from a torrent site, i would have bought it if i wasnt living in Tunisia, I hope this won’t affect anything :)
I didn’t quite know what to say. He was nice enough to send the link to the torrent site, and apparently there are 41 seeders and 3 leechers.
At first, I was thinking of trying to get the site to remove the link, but I’ve been around long enough to know that doesn’t really stop anything. I have say that I’m still scratching my head on this one. I’m not sure if I’m flattered that there are people that think its worth stealing, offended that someone would under the pretense of purchasing my intellectual property ask a question (could have just asked, I’m a pretty nice guy), or mad that he stiffed me a 20% commission on a book.
Still trying to figure this one out…