Last week Moon+ Reader was pulled from the Google Play market due to allegations of piracy from Russian based Litres. The two sides of come to terms and now Moon+ Reader finds itself available for download once again on Google. To celebrate, the app is now 50% off for a limited time only.
The essence of the claim had two main facets that were levied against against Cool Reader and Moon+ Reader. The first had to do with their support for OPDS, which allowed users to to manually link to online directories. In some cases, readers would link to pirate websites and get free content. The other had to do with a pre-installed link to a specific pirate website, that from the outside looked legit, but clearly wasn’t.
Litres said in a statement today that they “We recognized the mistake with the requirement of filtering options that would prevent users with OPDS book readers to add links to specific directories manually. Our only requirement is for the removal of pre-installed links to pirated library.” They went on to say “We apologize to all users of the applications and Moon + Reader for the temporary inconvenience and inability to read books in their favorite applications. We are confident that in the near future these applications will reappear in Google Play and the App Store. We also thank all active participants in the discussions, online forums for close attention to the situation. Your reaction to the incident has helped us to critically look at our requirements for applications that contain links to pirated library, and will greatly assist in the early resolution of the incident.”
So it looks like this matter has come to a close. Users do have the ability to link to any library they want, and most do it via Smashwords or Project Gutenberg for free content. The one specific piracy website has been eliminated from the build and Moon+ Reader and Moon+ Reader PRO are now both available on Google Play again.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
