Author Roy Osherove promoted pirated versions of his ebook, then polled readers to find out if they would purchase the print or offical ebook version. A great smart response to piracy I think.

Roy Osherove, author of The Art of Unit Testing, was naturally angry when he discovered pirated copies of his book on RapidShare and some people even had the guts to openly share links to those illegal versions of the book on Twitter.

It took him about three years to write the book which now sells for $40 and Roy makes about $2 for every print copy sold on Amazon. The download version of the same book costs around $25 though royalty earned from the sale of these PDF copies is even less.

Since there’s little you can do to prevent people from downloading your PDF books, Roy is trying a unique experiment – he has put some Rapidshare links on his blog from where people can download the full PDF version of his book without spending a penny. The idea is that this may convince some readers into buying either the printed or digital version of the book once they have read the pirated copy.

Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow is known for giving away PDF copies of all his novels for free (under a Creative Commons License) and this in turn helps in increasing the sale of his printed books.

David Pogue, who has authored several popular computer books, however has a different viewpoint. His publishers, O’Reilly Media, do not offer electronic versions of his books only to contain piracy.

Check out the article /w poll results:
http://www.labnol.org/internet/book-author-offers-pirated-ebook/9911/