Fanfiction Community Rocked By Etsy Sellers Turning Their Work Into Bound Books
Etsy sellers are turning free fanfiction into printed and bound physical books, and listing them for sale on online marketplaces for more than $100 per book. It’s a problem that’s rattling the authors of those fanfics, as well as their fans and readers.
Several sellers, easily found on Etsy and very popular, each with hundreds of five-star reviews, are selling copies of fanfiction taken from sites like Archive of Our Own (Ao3) and reselling them as bound books. The average price of these bound copies is around $149. Some sellers claim that they’re simply covering the cost of materials, while others just sell the books, usually with the fanfiction writers’ Ao3 username on the cover.
Down the chats of the official Fanlore discord server lately (of which I have been in for the past few months), they've been discussing this kind of transgression alongside the HP fanfic debacle (specifically, the Manacled one, of which upon its reworked professional release by its fanfic author gained enough controversy within and outside the fandom that it warranted for a wiki article on its own).
Also, one editor has suggested using "illegal fic binding" in place of the term "illegal "fanbinding" as the latter connotes the non-profit work with a for-profit tone in a negative way. Another has noted that het (in other words, F/M) fanfics sell much more than other pairing-centered ones, and attract more outsiders willing to buy that much for an illegal fic-binded copy, in disrespect to those original authors; throw the franchise copyright shenanigans in, and there we have the entire panfandom world at a crossroads battlefield against those recklessly profiteering for the sake of it.
Also, as a side note, there's also this recently-created wiki article section about said fannish controversy:
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fannish_Bookbinding#Criticism_and_Controversies