A few words on a magical working

[ecosophia]

I gather that word has spread fairly widely in the online magical scene about a working I've done relating to my books. The working was one I did originally just after the publication of Paths of Wisdom, my first book, and has been done repeatedly since that time. Its intention is that nobody who steals any of my books -- physically or electronically -- will get any benefit from what they've stolen. 

The reasoning here is pretty straightforward. I can afford to write full time because enough of my readers are honest, and buy my books (new or used) or check them out from the library (which buys them), rather than downloading pirated editions from the internet or shoplifting them from bookstores. Without my royalty income, most of my books would never be written, because I'd have to do something else to pay the rent. If people are going to steal books and deprive me of the income that lets me keep writing, I'm going to do what I can to deprive them of any benefit from their thefts. 

Since word got out, I've received a steady trickle of emails from people who stole books of mine, usually but not only online, and then thought better of it. They want to know what they have to do in order to make it up to me. I appreciate the second thoughts, and fortunately, I built into the working a very simple way out. 

All you have to do is buy one copy of each book that you stole, get rid of your stolen copies, and use the ones you got honestly. It's that easy. Once you own and use a copy you got by honest means, you're free of the working, and can get as much benefit out of my books as your own hard work, patience, and discipline permit.

So there you are. I hold no grudges; I've also done dumb things in my life, learned the lesson, and picked up the pieces later. 

Oh, and if you really feel bad about it, consider buying one of my books and giving it to someone as a birthday or holiday present. While you're at it, if you stole books by anyone else, you might want to consider buying copies of their books too...

Comments

Book theft

[stromfeldt]

Funny tidbit #1: I've been told by many bookshop owners and employees that the most commonly stolen book is the Bible. When telling this once to a used bookstore proprietor he told me "not just the Bible, but other books on various religions as well!" His solution? He stopped stocking them. When a local priest (this was in Toronto) asked him why he didn't stock copies of the Bible the proprietor told him why, and that if the priest wanted him to stock the Bible he'd have to get his and other congregations to stop stealing it.

Funny tidbit #2: I don't know if this is true or not, but when first told about this Bible thing by an employee at Canada's largest bookstore chain years ago, the guy asked me if I could guess what was the second-most commonly stolen book. I couldn't. "Police officer training manuals."

Re: Book theft

[ecosophia]

Okay, that has my head spinning -- though I suppose it shouldn't. The most over-the-top, unrepentant, bare-faced liars I've ever encountered were Christian proselytizers trying to talk me into giving up my religion and embracing theirs. There's literally nothing, no matter how absurd or abhorrent, they won't say.

Re: Book theft

[(Anonymous)]

Stromfeldt, with regard to #2, cops and criminals are the same person working for different teams.

An excellent idea

[ferngladefarm.blogspot.com.au]

Hi John Michael,

I never even thought of stealing one of your books. :-)! What a world we live in. The library here is difficult due to the opening hours, so I usually purchase all of my books either new or second hand. And if I no longer want to keep them, I occasionally sell them, but usually gift them onto an opportunity shop. The shop down here I favour is
provides employment to disadvantaged people, so it seems like a good thing to do.

Of course, that spell also binds you and you may never steal another authors book, but you already knew that. Hehe!

It was a two wombat and two wallaby night last night. The frogs are chirriping their chorus in celebration of the cooler weather. There doesn't look like much rain on immediate the horizon though. Hope your spring is warming up - you appear to have had a long winter.

Cheers

Chris

Re: An excellent idea

[ecosophia]

Glad to hear it. Some of my used books go to a local bookstore that likes such things, but most of them go to charity stores, too.

Spring here is an exercise in contrasts. It's sunny and cool today, it was pouring down rain yesterday, and the forecasts aren't much better than rolling dice. I'm not complaining; it's reminiscent of the Seattle springs I grew up with, though less rainy.

[neonvincent]

The late Issac Bonewitz did something similar. He printed a curse in "Real Magic" on anyone who stole the book or borrowed it without giving it back. The ex-girlfriend I get along with best lent me her copy while we were dating. After we broke up, the thought of that curse compelled me to give it back to her. Besides, the next woman I dated, who became my first wife, dispproved of the book (she was very upset a decade later when she found out that our son had checked out a copy), so I needed to get rid of it.

[ecosophia]

That bit in Real Magic was one of the things that gave me the idea, as it happens. I wanted to do something at once more effective and less over-the-top than he did, thus the specific focus of my working.

A clarification

[degringolade]

I bought copies of your books, but I did download PDF's of the Archdruid Report before you took it down. I trust that doesn't put me on the aforementioned "turd list".

Re: A clarification

[ecosophia]

Not at all! What I post on the internet for free is free for the reading. One of the reasons I consider myself justified in slapping a binding on those who steal my books is that I try to make sure that plenty of my writing is available free of charge online, for those who for whatever reason want to read my stuff and can't afford my books.

One for the Good Readers?

[(Anonymous)]

I have copies of several of your books, all purchased honestly. Would you consider a positive working for those of us who have done so? (And may it rebound on you as well!)

[dufu]

This is interesting to think about actually. I have pirated dozens of books because it's so easy now (I justify it to myself by considering it akin to using the library), but I just redid my CV today and I am not sure whether I got any benefit from any of that piracy. When I think about work I've actually been able to accomplish in my post-college career, my sources have been books I got from the library, purchased myself, or did the leg work to dig out of archives. Now I have to start wondering whether all books carry this kind of curse on them.

[(Anonymous)]

If I may offer an alternative hypothesis, PDF copies of books are just plain difficult to use as books.

Also, the term 'culture sharing' is preferred to 'piracy'. Someone who got the book through official channels decided to share it with others for free, and those others paid that favor forward. Easy to do when the cost of flipping those bits is infinitesimally close to zero. It just doesn't register on my conscience as being theft at all, no different from reading a book a friend loaned to me, or reading a newspaper or magazine that someone has left for others to read, or for that matter a trip to the library. I also block ads, no exceptions, which I feel to be a positive obligation.

I see copyright as fundamentally incompatible with digital technology, with apologies to our host who obviously likes and benefits from the arrangement. To me it makes more sense that our host is being financially disadvantaged by a broken system rather than by being personally robbed by thousands and thousands of different people.

[ecosophia]

No doubt thieves like to use euphemisms like "culture sharing" for their handling of stolen property, but I see no reason why those of us who are having our income stolen should agree to use the same weasel-worded language. Theft is theft -- and my working treats it as such.

[(Anonymous)]

As an author who makes part of a living by selling books, at first glance I agree with you.

But then I consider the real-world analog: a friend of mine buys one of your books and reads it and then gives it to me. Am I then stealing? If I'm not, then a book ending up on a bittorrent site because someone bought and and decided to share it with a friend isn't piracy either since the difference is just scale.

Since I've never been able to come up with an argument I liked to counter that one I've never begrudged anyone from pirating my book, which I presume has happened though I've never checked.

[ecosophia]

If I poke you with a pin and shed one drop of your blood, that's rather different from draining every drop of blood from your body -- and yet that, too, is just a question of scale. If I pick a single flower, that's one thing; if I exterminate the entire species, that's quite another -- and that, too, is just a question of scale. That is to say, scale matters.

[(Anonymous)]

fair enough. I'll admit that that is a good argument I had not really considered.

I'm still okay with piracy of my own work though. I think. The way I figure it, the people who are going to steal my books were never going to buy them anyway, but there is a chance they'll tell someone about them and that person might buy them. Which makes me feel like I've just propogated a Reaganomics argument, but what can you do really. The general reality seems to be that there isn't much I can do to stop piracy. My publisher fights it as best them can, but it seems pretty hopeless, from what I can tell anyway.

For the record, I can't stand ebooks, but I live in an RV, which doesn't leave me much room to store books, so my compromise has been, if it's free on project gutenburg (i.e. out of copyright) I do often grab the ebook. But otherwise I buy the tangible copy. Right now I'm reading paths of wisdom (as part of the LRM suggested reading list), and it, like LRM is handsome in physical form. If you're trying to read these books in ebook form, seriously, consider print. digital marginalia is impossible.

[ecosophia]

And it's certainly your right, as the author of your books, to decide how you're going to respond to theft. Me, I'm an operative magus -- by the time my first book was published, I already had twenty years of experience under my belt -- and so my response was the working I discussed in the post.

[(Anonymous)]

But your two cases are not analogous. In the case of the physical book, if your friend gives you the book, only one copy of the book continues to exist. If the book is e.g. placed on a bittorrent, an arbitrarily large number of copies can be created.

[(Anonymous)]

The tenor of this comment reminds me irresistibly of Gollum insisting that the One Ring was his birthday present.

[(Anonymous)]

JMG, what about purchasing your books over Amazon? Does one just get an odd slap every now and then? Or is the odd slap every now and then the usual workings of the universe?

[ecosophia]

I'm not at all a fan of Amazon, but people who buy books from them aren't going to be subject to my working. (If anybody's going to field bad karma from Amazon's misbehavior, it's Jeff Bezos.) So it's the usual workings of the universe in this case.

Copying out of books in a bookstore

[(Anonymous)]

I remember when I first starting building my metaphysical collection. At the bookstore I went to, there was a woman with a book on witchcraft sitting on one of the chairs and copying spells out of one of the books there. Even then, as a newbie, I shook my head and realized that was not a great way to get good results from a spell!

Re: Copying out of books in a bookstore

[ecosophia]

Even as a newbie, you had a good dose of common sense -- which is a fine basis for magical practice, by the way. It's traditional in folk magic that if you have to buy anything for a magical working, you have to pay the full price for it without haggling or the spell won't work; the same principle applies here.