Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Random Acts of Kindness - May Wrap-Up

Random Acts of Kindness (R.A.K.) is a feature created by Book Soulmates. Find out more information about it here. You can sign up each month with your wish list and participate by sending some RAK love, too!

Here's what I received for May RAK!

From Sierra
Paranormalcy by Kiersten White {Goodreads | Book Depository}
(ebook)

I sent two books back to Sierra, HEX HALL by Rachel Hawkins, and THE IRON KING by Julie Kagawa, both in ebook format as well. I didn't realize this last month, but it's super easy to send ebooks. All you have to do is attach them to the email you're sending. For me, it means I can still send some love without having to spend the money I'm supposed to be saving.

I'm going to switch gears here a bit.

I also got a whole slew of ebooks from someone else. They were all books on my wish list, and I really want to read them, but I made sure to delete them. Let me explain. I'm pretty sure the books that were sent to me were downloaded or pirated from the internet. Their formatting was messed up, the title and author were coming up as "Unknown" or random other names. Basically, I didn't trust that these books were BOUGHT, or even acquired through trustworthy means. I was thinking of keeping the books, but my morals and values won out, and I'm glad for that.

I don't want to point fingers at the person who sent the ebooks to me. The point here is that even though giving and accepting ebooks through email is pretty easy, BE AWARE of what you're accepting and giving. If you have any reason to suspect that the books are not from trustworthy sources, use your brain. Would you like it if you created something magnificent and wanted to share it with the world, only to find out that people have been stealing it from you? I'm betting that's how these authors feel and I don't think that's right.

Sorry to go all sombre and serious on you for my RAK post, but it needed to be said!

Did you participate in RAK for May? What did you get? If you didn't participate, make sure you check out BookSoulmates and share some love in June!

2 comments:

  1. I too was offered a lot of eBooks, possibly by the same RAKer ... it seemed fishy to me and while I didn't confront her about it I simply declined the offer.
    Distributing such "unofficial" eBooks is just wrong. Period. I really wish people would respect the work author's put into their books and not greedly download them from certain sites.

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  2. I would have never though of sending e-books through e-mail. That's purely genius! But I agree with Birgit that sending unofficial ones is not right.

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