How BookDefender Works
You provide the details. We handle the monitoring, the takedowns, and the reporting—so you can get back to writing.
BookDefender protects your ebooks and audiobooks from piracy across search engines, pirate sites, file-sharing platforms, and unauthorized distribution sources. Here’s what the process looks like from the moment you sign up.
Step 1: Sign Up and Share Your Book Details
Once you sign up, we collect the information we need to begin protecting your work. This typically includes your author name, book titles, pen names, and links to your official author website or authorized retail listings.
This information is what allows us to distinguish your legitimate listings from pirated or unauthorized copies. The more complete the picture, the more effectively we can identify infringement—so we take the time during setup to build a thorough understanding of your catalog, your formats, and your retail presence.
If you write under multiple pen names or have titles spread across different retailers, that’s not a problem. We account for all of it during onboarding so nothing falls through the cracks from day one.
There’s one more thing that happens during this step that most services won’t tell you about: we look before we take your money. Before we bring on a new client, Shane personally reviews your catalog to assess whether your books are actually being pirated. If he doesn’t find evidence of active infringement, he’ll tell you. He won’t sign you up for a service you don’t currently need. If piracy isn’t impacting your catalog right now, he’d rather be honest about that and give you the choice of whether to start protection now or wait until your situation changes. Not every author needs our service today, and we’d rather earn your trust by being straight with you than take a payment for a problem that doesn’t exist yet.
Step 2: We Monitor, Verify, and Submit Takedowns
After setup, we begin actively monitoring for infringing links across search engines, pirate sites, file-hosting platforms, and other unauthorized sources.
When we find pirated or unauthorized copies of your work, we don’t file a takedown request automatically and move on. Every link is verified by a human before a request is submitted. This verification step is what keeps our accuracy high and ensures we’re targeting real infringement—not legitimate listings, authorized retailers, or dead links that would waste everyone’s time.
Once verified, we prepare and submit takedown requests to the appropriate platforms. That includes direct filings to hosting providers, file-hosting services, domain registrars, search engines, and any other platform where your pirated content has appeared. As a Google Trusted Copyright Removal Program (TCRP) member, BookDefender has the credibility and infrastructure to submit requests at scale through expedited pathways that most individual filers and smaller services can’t access.
Our systems combine automation for speed and scale with human verification for accuracy. Automation helps us detect and process infringing content faster. Humans ensure that every takedown request we file is accurate, legitimate, and targeting content that’s actually harming your sales.
Step 3: Access Your Reports in Your Author Portal
As a BookDefender client, you receive access to your own author portal—a personalized dashboard where you can see your protection activity at any time.
Your portal shows your total protection impact, current activity, and historical data going back to the start of your service. Reports are uploaded directly to your portal for easy viewing and download, giving you a clear record of the links identified and submitted for removal.
During the initial 90-day clean-up period, reports are delivered every 15 days so you can see the early progress as we work through existing infringement across your catalog. After the clean-up phase, reports shift to every 30 days for ongoing maintenance service.
You never have to wonder what’s being done on your behalf. The data is there whenever you want to see it.
What Happens When You Release a New Book
This is where BookDefender’s approach is different from most services.
We don’t wait for you to log in and submit your new title. We don’t require you to send us an Amazon link every time you publish. We stay invested in what our clients are doing—following your release schedule, keeping up with your publishing activity, and making sure new titles are covered as they come out.
Can you send us new release information? Of course, and some authors do. But it’s not required. We don’t believe that busy authors should have to stop what they’re doing to manage their anti-piracy service. You hired us to handle this so you could focus on writing. We take that seriously.
What BookDefender Protects
BookDefender specializes exclusively in ebooks and audiobooks. That focus is intentional. Book piracy has its own ecosystem—dedicated piracy sites, specific distribution methods, and search patterns that are different from music, film, or software piracy. A service that understands that ecosystem and monitors the platforms where book piracy actually happens will always outperform a general-purpose tool trying to cover every type of content.
Our protection covers your full catalog: every title, every digital format, every pen name, across every platform where pirated copies may appear.
BookDefender by the Numbers
Over 5.5 million takedowns filed across all platforms. A success rate above 95%. More than twenty years of experience fighting book piracy, dating back to 2004. Google TCRP membership, with over 1.3 million URLs submitted to Google alone and one of the highest removal rates of any reporting organization focused on book piracy.
These numbers are verifiable. You can look up BookDefender’s Google filing history at Google’s Transparency Report—search “BookDefender” under Reporting orgs.
Ready to Protect Your Books?
BookDefender provides professional, human-verified DMCA takedown services built specifically for authors. Whether you have a handful of titles or a catalog of hundreds, we’ll handle the monitoring, the takedowns, and the reporting—so you can get back to doing what you do best.
Protection that works while you write.