Quote:
Originally Posted by SuburbanZombie
Doubt there will be much book piracy. Reading isn't "cool", the latest Transformers movie or hip hop album is...
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You couldn't be more wrong...because of small file sizes, book piracy has been around longer than music piracy!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru
What do you mean "if"? What do you mean "yet"?
Piracy of ebooks has been around for years, and today it's pretty rampant. Some are scans, while others are actually typeset PDFs. Lots of audiobooks too.
I'm not sure about the Kindle, but other ereaders make it easy to put just about any compatible file onto it manually. You can download ebooks of all kinds off the Internet. It's not that difficult to find them if you've downloaded other media types that way.
Not that I'd know or anything, but I think that pirating ebooks would be easier to do than music and movies. Smaller file sizes are just one part of that.
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Every book with halfway decent circulation is available on torrent sites and usenet as a .mobi, .epub, .pdf, or .txt format file.
Back in the days of Napster, eDonky, and Kazaa, (and before, trading files on IRC), they were usually scans that had been run through an OCR (optical character recognition) program. Some of these scanning packages weren't very smart, so this would lead to interesting artifacts, like letters being wrong, or words being squished together. You can read an on-topic document apparently created in this manner, complete with awesome straight-from-the-scanner 'readable but funky' typesetting here:
_How scan a book - (a guide to piracy ¡tico)
Book scanners worked one of three ways: Manually, on a flatbed scanner (and people say pirates are lazy!), automatically fed, after slicing the binding on a book and making it just a stack of papers (sadface for book destruction
) or on one of the many DIY and commercially available high speed book scanners.
However, these days, the sources are usually existing ebooks from one of the various online stores that has had the DRM stripped off of them.
Back in 2004, I would read books on the cash registers in .txt format at the game store I worked at when it was slow. Nowadays, I have some uploaded onto my blackberry to read while I am carpooling or during downtime.
As an example of what's available, here's a screenshot of a file I haven't downloaded, but that is a single 480MB file pack, that I could download with about four clicks, of all (with a few exceptions) of the files on the current NY Times Best Seller list, both fiction and non. It actually includes each book on the list twice, in both epub and mobi format, with an average book being between 1 and 3 megabytes per file.
(clicking on the image just goes to a bigger image, not the actual file, and all of the identifying information has been stripped out)
