Fake it to make it

Dr Benjamin Franklin was an inventor, a musician, a diplomat and more besides. He was also a copyright pirate who reprinted the works of nonamerican 18th Century authors without paying them a penny. When he started his business, almost all of the books printed on US soil were Bibles and basic text books. The rest were shipped expensively from Britain. many of the london booksellers did not want to take the risk of shipping their products overseas when they could easily sell their stock locally. So Franklin and his fellow printer-publishers decided to make their own copies of works such as Samuel richardson' 'Pamela'.