Jacey
Jacey asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

Hi Lois, I bought Penric's Demon from Amazon - a kindle edition published by Spectrum and sold by Amazon. Worryingly someone has just posted this on my review: Marc Wilson says: This is a stolen book, published without the author's permission and very likely illegally scanned from an eARC (electronic Advanced Reading Copy).. Can you clarify, please. Is there a problem with this?

Lois McMaster Bujold The KINDLE edition from Spectrum is legit, and you are fine with it. The audio edition from Blackstone and Audible is also properly licensed.

However, earlier this month (Feb. 2016) some scammer put out a shoddy print-on-demand edition through Amazon's self-publishing arm, CreateSpace, which is just the e-book grepped and put through the system. This PoD paper edition is stolen. I don't know how many copies the scammers have managed to shift so far.

My agent is working on getting attention from Amazon to get it taken down, so I expect it to disappear in due course, with luck before too many more readers are taken in.

Later this year, there will be a legitimate paper edition from Subterranean Press, which will be a very nice hardcover chapbook -- I just saw a preview of the cover art, which is striking. More announcements on that as things get finalized.

Meanwhile, please do not purchase the CreateSpace print-on-demand version. If you have bought it in error, Amazon does make returns easy (I've returned a couple of book purchases myself, for printing glitches.) "I found out this edition was stolen" is a good reason for a return, I would think. Send it back and recover your money.

Ta, L.

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