Several web sites offer online full-texts of books that are out of copyright, e.g. http://www.gutenberg.org.
However, aside from the copyright owner, which is almost always the author or their publisher, ANYONE who posts, distributes, or transmits the text of these books online is violating both the U.S. and the International Copyright laws, infringing on Intellectual Property, and can be fined and jailed for it. (In general, anything first published within the last 52 years in the U.S. will still be in copyright. When the law was changed, it became copyright duration matched the rest of the work, i.e. the author’s/copyright owner’s lifetime plus 50 years.)
Writers make a living by creating their work. To read or use it without paying for it, is STEALING, pure and simple.
If the work is valuable enough to read, it must be paid for.
This is particularly true of audio books, which are "performance" pieces and thus carry more recent/current copyrights.
Several web sites offer online full-texts of books that are out of copyright, e.g. http://www.gutenberg.org.
However, aside from the copyright owner, which is almost always the author or their publisher, ANYONE who posts, distributes, or transmits the text of these books online is violating both the U.S. and the International Copyright laws, infringing on Intellectual Property, and can be fined and jailed for it. (In general, anything first published within the last 52 years in the U.S. will still be in copyright. When the law was changed, it became copyright duration matched the rest of the work, i.e. the author’s/copyright owner’s lifetime plus 50 years.)
Writers make a living by creating their work. To read or use it without paying for it, is STEALING, pure and simple.
If the work is valuable enough to read, it must be paid for.
This is particularly true of audio books, which are "performance" pieces and thus carry more recent/current copyrights.