A couple of days ago I post a blog about EBooks-Tree (a book downloading websites who had been collecting and 'selling' online fiction without the permission of the authors) - blog here.
After checking the site, a few Mibbians and I saw that our stories had been copied there as well. So we all sent messages to their contact page asking for them to be taken down. I never got a response from them via e-mail, but I did check back at the site this morning and saw that my stories have been taken down. (Thank goodness.)
So if your found that your stories were up there too, you should probably take a moment just to double check that it's been removed. And if you didn't check before, you should probably take a moment to double check that your stories aren't up there.
Here is a link to the site, the search bar is right at the top of the page. You can search via your usernames and if your pieces are up there, they should come up.
A few of us who tried to check out the site noticed that once you tried to actually download your story, you were stopped by a page asking your to register and log-in with credit card information and such. According to AO3 - which is where they were getting the stories from, it seems - once you registered and then tried to download the books, the link actually took you back to AO3's ePub options. So, in the end, it looks like the site wasn't actually 'hosting' the stories but had them advertised on their site, asking users to pay to access the links, and then directing them to AO3 anything. Basically, they were trying to set up some kind of fake-gatekeeper business to collect money for access to something that's already free.
It reminded me a bit of this story, because that's pretty much what they were trying to do. Like some weird guy who goes to a random party and stands by the door and charges people $5 to get in - but the party's free and he has no affiliation with the party-throwers.
Seedy business. Glad it's over.
- Audrey
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