Daniel_

I recently bought a Kindle. I've been looking through the free classics on the Amazon site, and project gutenberg is full of interesting stuff, but where do you download books?

I had a conversation with some friends at work, and we were wondering if there was piracy in eBooks yet? I've never really thought about it, but have no idea of the answer.

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Fremen

On the Project Gutenberg site, you find the author you want, then click on the story you want, which will take you to a download page, and from there you pick which format type you want.

example: Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie - Project Gutenberg

I don't know about the Amazon site download procedure.

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SuburbanZombie

If you buy a kindle from Amazon, it will arrive already linked to your Amazon account. If you buy it at a store, you have to link it to your account.
Kindles come with either just wifi or wifi with 4G connectivity.
Just turn on the wifi connection, go to the Amazon store and browse away. We've only got about 30 book so far, but I don't think its taken any more than 15 -30 seconds to download.

Doubt there will be much book piracy. Reading isn't "cool", the latest Transformers movie or hip hop album is...

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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telekinetic

You couldn't be more wrong...because of small file sizes, book piracy has been around longer than music piracy!

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)

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SuburbanZombie

Oh yes I can

Cynthetiq

Not only were they doing the OCR thing, but in the early DOS days people were just typing them into text files.

books, there's lots of them, like pokemon. One must try to collect them all.

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Strange Famous

Not that I'd know this, but I have heard that you can get pretty much any ebook in .mobi or .lit format from bittorrent.

If you get it in .lit format there is a free piece of software called Calibre that will turn it into .mobi

And if you plug the kindle into a sub cable, my PC at least just sees it as an external drive that you can copy and paste files into.

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