I’ve been pirated.

Wow. Does that mean I’ve made it as an author?

It appears that Google image search has changed its algorithm, because when I doing a search last night, a lot more of my photographs showed up.

I was doing a routine check to see who had used legitimately, borrowed or stolen my photographs, either when I was photo editor for CBC News or my personal work.

This time a book cover showed up in the search, something I had never seen before, a book by Robin Rowland, with the title in English “Intetnet Inquiry Skills.”

Haotusshu.com appears to be the website for a Chinese “publisher.”   Putting the page through the Google translator comes up as “China Machine Press”, and it says the book is available through a couple of  Chinese books stores,  including something called “Amazon Excellence.”

At first I thought the Chinese pirates had grabbed my 2000 book, The Creative Guide to Research, but reading further on the Google translated page, it turns out that it is a pirated edition of  my (co-authored with Dave Kinnaman) 1995 Researching on the Internet.

That books was the first popular book on Internet research and was written just as the Netscape Navigator beta was released, so it covers pre-Netscape search tools such as Gopher and Archie.

It’s not clear from the site when the book was pirated, it may have been back in the late 1990s.

If it was recent, of course, then anyone who bought it would have been dealing with information that was ten to fifteen years out of date.

I asked friends at the CBC  bureau in Beijing to see if they could get a copy. Unfortunately, the website says Intetnet Inquiry Skills is no longer available.  Too bad, it would have been a great addition to my personal book shelf.

Screen grab of Chinese page promoting my pirated Internet book (click for larger version)

English version of the page (as translated by Google)