Sariel

Yes, that's now my first book got pirated.

I think most of it went to charity, as it was up to buyer to decide who gets his money. But I can't tell for sure - this deal is so recent, it will be a while before I get a report from the publisher.

Did you try BookDepository? They're pretty solid and they're promising free delivery worldwide: http://www.bookdepository.com/Incredible-LEGO-Technic-Pawel-sariel-Kmiec/9781593275877

20,000 copies having been printed does not mean $20,000 on my account. I get royalties for books sold, not printed. And it may take a few years to actually sell all 20,000. Miguev, I'm happy my book had such an effect on you, regardless of where it came from. Again, I want to stress that my primary concern isn't self-pity or getting more people to buy the book - I'm just worried about the publisher. I wouldn't mind piracy so much if it didn't threaten to put the publisher out of the business, and the business is not doing well as it is. Take a look at this: http://outthinkgroup.com/the-10-awful-truths-about-book-publishing One quote: "The average U.S. nonfiction book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 3,000 copies over its lifetime." So, I just want to discourage people from using and sharing pirated copies. With numbers as low as these, every person counts. It's eventually up to us and only us whether there will be more books or Lego or not.

Thanks. The ratio appears to be roughly 7 printed books sold per every single ebook. I'm not concerned about revenue here as much as I am about inconveniencing people who prefer ebook version over printed one. I love printed versions like every bookworm does, but let's remember than ebooks come with plenty of advantages, such as being available in an instant and with zero shipping costs.

Thanks again. I don't think I can engage Lego in any capacity here. First of all they have absolutely no reason to be affiliated with any of my books, and if they wanted to, I can only imagine how many limitations it would put on me as a writer. Secondly, keep in mind that for all the lawyers Lego has, they haven't really been able to succeed against physical piracy of their product (take all bootleg minifigs, for example) so I doubt they would succeed against a virtual one.

Thank you for all your support and your kind words. Just to make it clear, it's not my intention to advertise my books here and make you buy them. It's about the bigger picture: our part of the books market. I wanted to make it clear what piracy is and how it affects this market. I don't care much for my revenue, but I care for having chance to make another book. And I'm not the only person putting days, weeks and months of work into it - people's jobs depend on the books market condition. I was hoping to discourage at least a couple of folks from downloading the pirated copy, because every person counts given how very niche our hobby is. Look, Stephen King sells millions of books. But books on Lego? I don't know about others, but mine usually get 20,000 copies printed in first printing. 20,000 copies of English edition sold worldwide. That's how small our part of the market is. So trust me, it really doesn't take much to put a publisher out of business.

Thank you. These books are usually over 250 pages long, that's a lot of scanning. Most potential pirates will be too lazy for this, I think. And if they do pirate it, well, in this case at least they put some effort into it :)

Thanks Fernando, thanks Anio. Yes, releasing DRM-free ebooks makes pirate's "job" easy as pie. It's second time that we've done this in good faith, thinking of what's best for legit customers, and it's second time this good faith proves unfounded. I realize I won't make piracy disappear. But it shocks me that there are AFOLs sharing these pirated ebooks left and right because they see absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Guys, this thing has been a growing issue for me for some time and I want to share it with you. I'll try to be as brief as possible. Things is, my second book is now available in ebook format - in fact, me and publisher chose to release the ebook as part of the Humble Bundle because this way we could direct large part of the revenue towards the charity. But, just like with my first book, it is now widely pirated. I consider it a serious problem - let me explain why. There are two issues. First, I know not everybody likes me. I've become popular and this alone is enough to make some folks frown, plus it also puts me in a big spotlight - me, and everything I do. I'm just a regular builder and sometimes I'm just tired of answering the same question and explaining the same thing for like 500th time. I'm getting 42 comments per day from YouTube alone these days. And I'm trying to keep up with them, because many people have questions I can help them with. However, I only have patience of a human being, so my reaction is sometimes sarcastic e.g. when asked 20th time about thing that is explicitly explained at the start of a video and in description below it. People can miss things that a video literally starts with - but that does not excuse me, obviously. I sometimes wonder if I should stop following comments completely. But long story short, it's easy to bash the popular guy, I get it. And it's easy to overlook help I'm offering and focus on bad stuff, but well, I can't ask everybody to like me. I'm not a jar of Nutella, after all. The problem is, for some people this dislike alone is a perfect excuse to commit piracy. Second, whether you like me or not I think you'll agree it's good to have books on Lego being published. Some of them may have helped you, some of them may have simply been pleasant to read - mine or somebody else's, fortunately there are many writers active in this area. But here's the problem: pirate enough stuff and there will be no more books. Literally. I've risen these two issues because I've just talked today to one person who's partially responsible for pirating my second book, and this person told me two things: first, that I'm a rich **** that gets rain of money from the Lego company, and second that they thought this book was free. So let me explain something. First, I'm 32, living in a rented apartment, I don't have a car and never had one. What little savings I have come largely from my full-time job: I happen to be rather successful as a graphic designer, which isn't easily achieved in this particular field. And sometimes I don't buy a single LEGO set per year because I can't really afford it, I'd rather use my money with Bricklink and only after looking really long and hard for bargains. There are MOCs out there that costed more to build than my entire LEGO collection did. So much for being rich. And as for Lego, I never got a single penny from them because what would they pay me for, exactly? True, they send me Technic sets to review and I get to keep them. I only had to spend 6 years building my YouTube channel to achieve that, and I put hours of work into every single review, and then report back to Lego about its popularity. I realize many of us would gladly spend hours with camera to get a free set, but trust me: you would think twice if you had 10 sets to cover in a month, some 6,000 pieces altogether, and each video requiring about 8 hours of work from start to finish, on average. Oh, and don't forget about folks who will reupload your review as theirs once you're done. Second, and final: no, these books aren't free. I wish they could be, but that won't happen in this world. Because in this world my last book involved 6 months spent coordinating efforts of over 40 people from all over the world and I simply couldn't do that without publisher's backing. I'm one guy and I can't do everything nor pay others to do things like composition, proofreading, reaching out to resellers, marketing and so on. A book like this is born from the work of many professionals who simply have to earn their living. So when a book like this comes out, it has to earn back what it cost to make. And it cost quite a bit, because somebody - the publisher, mostly - paid for all these people's work, and then for printing, delivery and a dozen of other things, and he did it up front, before the book earned a single penny. I'm not a lunatic to think that every copy pirated is one copy not being sold, but the fact remains that piracy hurts the book's chance to profit. Many people, when facing a choice between paying and downloading, will choose the simpler option. What some of these people don't realize, I think, is a simple dependence: if this book doesn't bring a profit, the publisher will never make another one. And why would he? He just put a lot of his money on the table and he didn't get it back. It's really that simple. I did mention consequences in the title. You see, there's a third book in the works and at this point I'm really unwilling to release it as an ebook. I'm inclined towards printed version only. I've talked to the publisher about our options with ebooks and DRM and we agree that it wouldn't stop the pirates, it would only harm legit customers. It's not a final decision, but what is final is fact that pirating a book is a felony. The very first words you can see in this book are: All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Which means that pirating a book is not only hurting the publisher, but it can potentially result in a legal action, too. It's stealing property, and the publisher who's essentially the property owner in this analogy, is equipped to fight back. I'm telling you here and now that I will pass any pirating websites I come across along to publisher's legal department. Why? Because I'd like to make another book happen. And no, it's not exactly like I do this to wallow in money. I get less than $1 for every copy of the book that's sold. And then I pay taxes in two countries - because I live in one and the book sells in another - and then there's reserve against returned copies deducted from my royalties, simply because customer comes first. At least for us. Can't speak for the pirates. Sorry about the lengthy post. I hope you'll understand. Sorry if I sound pissed, it's just that I've written some 4,500 emails to get this second book done and then somebody pirated it with like 2 clicks. I hope that person is swelling with pride.

Thanks for mentioning me. I just wanted to point out that argument can be made about the last entry being only partially Lego. While the engine itself seems to be all Lego, which is really impressive, many elements that are crucial for this car to work such as chassis, driveshafts, bearings and wheels, have nothing to do with Lego. One could say that they were perhaps necessary for the project to work at all, but still, calling it a "Lego car" seems a bit stretched. "Actual car with bits of Lego on it" would be more accurate. Also, I was never sure my trike was the fastest out there. It was just the fastest I was able to build :)

With four legs is kinda reminds me of that ;)

True, but she did wear her integrated insulation layer. Being fat & fluffy makes for great shock absorption ;)

Not really. I would need to rework the entire lifting mechanism to pull the fork upwards AND downwards as well. That's possible but it'a a huge change.

And I'll be happy to see what they use it for :)

Thanks! This bad boy: http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItem.asp?P=4767

Very impressive! I can't imagine how much work went into making these sails work so well. Superb idea and execution, it works beautifully and looks splendid, so majestic. I was surprised to see the speed you were getting from that amount of sail surface - this attests to the quality of your design. All that is missing is a hamster with eyepatch and some ships to plunder ;)

Built for fun, not an entry for any contest: Photos and reading: http://sariel.pl/201...yster-forklift/ And the combined electropnematic switch, which can make things a lot easier when your pneumatic system has just one valve:

Be advised that with the old wheel, the tire is practically impossible to remove once in place.

I don't know about this small fraction thing. This is probably besides the point, but I can tell e.g. that books on Lego are seriously affected with piracy. With MOCs the situation is different, of course, but as Blakbird said, crediting someone takes adding just a few words and makes a big difference. Has this actually happened to anyone? I can't imagine saying no to a person who has the decency to ask.

While instructions can take multiple weeks to make. Instructions alone, not to mention the time spent on designing the MOC in the first place. I agree with Blakbird, I think simply crediting the builder in such situations would solve everything here. The copyist gets money for time spent copying the MOC, the builder get some promotion for his effort behind the instructions, everybody wins. And it's decent thing to do.

It's all kind of a slippery area, but I think you selling something directly to your neighbor is a different realm that people putting stuff at eBay or displaying it at exhibitions. Look, I know there is backlash against what mahjqa is saying. I know it's easy to say "but that doesn't hurt you", "it's not illegal", and generally speaking "you're a jerk who wants credit for everything". I just hope you won't one day wake up in a community that does nothing for others, nothing for free, and is busy mainly looking for easy money to make off the others. Because that's where this kind of thinking leads.

It seems someone here clearly isn't being adult enough for Eurobricks. I'm sorry to see that someone who represents the worst part of our community has audacity to call himself an expert (no matter how dumb that "expert" sounds). Honestly, it's interesting to see a community that booted out a contributor like Dluders, but lets an obvious troll off with a gentle scolding. Personally, I'm totally with mahjqa on this thing. Same thing has happened to me, with MOCs I designed being sold for serious money and being displayed at exhibitions to paying audience without giving even a slightest credit. I chose to ignore it, but mahjqa has the point. It's just sad to see people who barely have enough skill to follow instructions feeding off the hard work of others. You would think twice if you knew amount of work needed to create instructions of Tachikoma's quality. It's true that it doesn't hurt the creator directly, but it makes that creator think twice before doing any effort for the community in the future. Look at it this way: what's the point of spending endless evenings on making instructions if you just feed the leeches?

You can tell these are antique because 8880's rims are actually white ;)

I know some great, very inspiring builders from early 2000s, but not necessarily from earlier than that. From the top of my head: Andrea Grazi and obviously Jennifer Clark. Generally speaking, I think Technic has kind of bloomed after 2007, when the Power Functions system was released. It brought an amazing number of very skilled builders to this hobby, while the earlier 9V Technic system was, I think, frustrating to many. Not to mention the 4.5V system: