After my 7 years in Russia....This is not a surprise at all...People wouldn't believe how huge the black market is in Russia.... too many stories to tell.... Western Europe and North Amerika are the ones living in the bubble..everywhere else is living in the reality of the black market to some degree....
Quote:
Originally Posted by Serpentine
I've actually read a few chapters of some older sf novel that I couldnt find elsewhere. Besides the lack of styling (which is nice, compared to many retail books), I only worked it out after seeing a diagram containing a whole bunch of cyrillic characters 
That said, you can't really blame them, while the US has seen the large platforms expand quickly, even Europe is only getting there now. The third world (I'll include you guys, Russia) has pretty much nothing, besides for tiny independents or extremely limited Adobe-DRM brick and mortar online presences which insane pricing. Throw in translations and fan rips - it only proves the importance of the technology and market; it is merely a matter of time before companies work it all out. Just look how long it's taken for -good- digital distribution of games (Which the ex-Soviet block still gets treated badly with, but it's improving and they have figured out pricing more or less).
I cant help but smile at comments like :
Little do most people understand; How important the pirate rips of books had been, in order to show the potential of devices and drive the market to pick up the back-catalogs.
So quick to point fingers (not really in this article) once the commercial players show up, seemingly refereeing a game that started decades earlier. |