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Now this is a story all about how my life got flipped, turn upside down. I’d like to take a minute just sit right there, I’ll tell you how I got scammed by some Yankee bell-end.
Some time ago, I’m guessing it was 2007, maybe 2008. I was contacted by Dan Graves from America claiming he was writing a book about smart repairs. He asked if he could use some of the information from my site and that I would get “a cut” of the profits.
I don’t know why but I agreed and I heard nothing from him for a while.
Then some time later he contacted me saying that a physical printed book was going to be too expensive so he was going to release an e-book.

He sent me a copy and “some of my information” actually meant he’d slavishly copy/pasted every page from my website (about 200 pages at the time) and tacked on some shit HTML table at the beginning. He’d also added about 50 pages of freely available information from other forums and 1 page from FQ101.

I explained that I wasn’t happy about that since e-books are easily copied and it would just get pirated. He said “book” and if he’d said “e-book”, I wouldn’t have agreed. That’s when he went full American and said that he’d sue me for removing permission after he’d “done so much work to create it”. So all I could do was let him continue but immediately remove permission for any new information that I added to the site.
This c*** was selling it on eBay for $80 and I didn’t receive a single penny so I could sue him but I didn’t (because I’m not American so I don’t sue people for any tiny reason). It did make me laugh that someone started selling copies for $5 not long afterwards.
Thankfully, within a year, the CD was well out of date and now there’s about 1800 pages of up to date info on the site so the CD isn’t worth a wank.
May karma make Dan’s life miserable.
Lesson Learned
This is why I no longer give permission to anyone to reproduce my content. I regularly get emails asking if they can create a book or rewrite my entire site in another language. The answer is always No. I haven’t been doing the site for 21 years just so you can make money off all of my work.
Pointless
These days, the chance of having absolutely no signal on your phone is unlikely, plus, recovery companies now use satellites to relay breakdowns. So the scenario that you are stuck underground and can’t walk to the outside, all whilst carrying the right tools to fix your car, is highly unlikely.
The other issue is, once the book has been printed, it can’t be updated, edited or fixed. Book printers also like to have photos in 300dpi which I don’t have.
I don’t mind if you print a few pages for personal use but it seems like a waste of paper.
Credit
Thanks to Warren C for the photos.