Dorchester was reportedly stealing Brian Keene's ebooks (see inside for more info)

Here's something new I just found out: Dorchester Publishing does not own the digital rights to Brian Keene's books. Yet for some period of time they continued to sell those same ebooks on their site.

That's right: Dorchester Publishing was selling things they didn't own, which would be theft by many (if not all) definitions of the word.

After several fruitless attempts to get Dorchester to pay him the money he's owed, Keene asked for the following:

"I negotiated a deal with Dorchester that allowed for: 1. The immediate reversion of all of my print rights, and 2. The reversion of all of my digital rights as of 11:59pm 12/31/10."

That was in December. Dorchester was still selling Keene's books in January and according to Dear Author's article, his attempts to get that stopped ended with the company trying to pass the blame off on to other companies. As the author himself said, "The first time, I allowed that it could indeed be a mistake. Four times later? It is no longer a “mistake”. It is theft, or at the very least, staggering incompetence."

This is just inexcusable for Dorchester to make excuses & pass the buck like this. It's also inexcusable that just like before, Keene hasn't seen a dime from the ebooks that were sold during this time period.

I'm absolutely horrified at the outright gall of this company. I'm most certainly upholding my personal boycott of this site- perhaps permanently. There is no excuse for Dorchester's actions except for pure greed. Even if by some stroke of incompetence they were unable to remove these books, there's no excuse for them not to pay Keene the money that the received from these sales.

I honestly can't believe that they were unable to get these books off of the various sites, especially the kindle. If you're familiar with the whole Penguin/Amazon Kindle fiasco then you'll remember how quickly Penguin was able to yank their books from Amazon's site. If you count the amount of time they spent warning Amazon, it was a far shorter amount of time than Dorchester had, that's for certain.

So remember, boycott any & all of Dorchester's labels, which includes Leisure & Love Spell. I'd tell you to go to their facebook page or forums & protest but they've been deleting any mention of this from their pages. Get out the word any way you can. Tweet, blog, post it as a status on your personal face book pages, or post in one of the various chat rooms or forums on the net. Do whatever you can to spread the word about this & the boycott.

(All info & quotes were taken from Dear Author's article entry here, which in turn was taken from Keene's twitter & other social sites.)