Ebooks on bittorrent!

[astra]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

Block downloading could be what I mean indeed.

As far as torrents and illegal,that's exactly the same as :
- Money and black money
- immigrants and illegal
- Workers and workers without a work permit
- Cars driving 50 in a 50 zone, and cars driving 90 in a 50 zone

Just because the opportunity is there, does not mean it's illegal, or should even be seen as illegal.

Anyways just giving my .2ct here...

Hey, PC or Mac are an opportunity. Why do they keep on selling them?

[Halo]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

Although there may be legitimate value to torrent sites, I, too, would be most unhappy to see our library associated with a technology which is so widely used for illegitimate purposes.

The web, and the Internet in general, is also widely used for illegitimate purposes but here we all are. 95% of the email sent in 2007 was spam which is all scams and viruses. That doesn't lessen the value of email as a tool. The real purpose of the bittorrent protocol was to take advantage of the often unused outbound bandwidth on most network connections and aggregate it to transfer large amounts of data. That way the burden of distribution of content could be lessened for the publisher. There are many organizations that use it for legal content distribution.

That being said, I don't believe there is much value in distributing the mobileread ebooks via bittorrent. The size of the data is small, so I doubt that it would significantly reduce the bandwidth usage of the site. The greatest convenience I could see would be that you could get all of the books with a single download. At the moment one must download books one by one. It takes too many clicks to accomplish. This could be addressed with a zip file containing all of the available ebooks. I'd rather see that happen before making a torrent of the files.

[vivaldirules]

I think comparing bittorrent with the air we breathe (both are used for good intentions and otherwise) misses the point. As far as ebooks go, I think it's probably safe to say that the use of bittorrent is predominantly for illegitimate purposes and provides little legitimate value.

[Taylor514ce]

Bittorrent is a maker of torrent client software. One doesn't upload or download content or even torrents to or from them.

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by Taylor514ce

Bittorrent is a maker of torrent client software. One doesn't upload or download content or even torrents to or from them.

Inexactitudes drive you nuts, don't they? I'm just saying.

[Taylor514ce]

If we want to have a serious discussions about the merits of using torrents to distribute books, then step 1 is to understand what a torrent is, and how torrents work.

"Ebooks on bittorrent!" isn't a promising start, and when everyone repeats the same error we get nowhere.

[Ned]

Originally Posted by Taylor514ce

Bittorrent is a maker of torrent client software. One doesn't upload or download content or even torrents to or from them.

According to this wiki bittorrent is a peer to peer file sharing protocol.

[acidzebra]

I had no idea that people perceived bittorrent this way, thanks media. Or some people are a bunch of p2p-luddites.

Bittorrent is THE most advanced p2p protocol we have right now, and what people use it for is irrelevant - if you want to share data with many peers efficiently without shouldering all of the bandwidth used, you look at bittorrent. That is your legitimate value, right there.

I've often looked at the many ebooks that forum members have so thoughtfully formatted, but the way the forum is set up right now stops me from grabbing any number of them, hunt-and-peck through the list, opening the relevant post, opening the attachment to the post, sometimes having to click to an additional warning message, it just seems like work. But hey, I'm lazy.

I would appreciate "author packs" as well, using the bittorrent protocol or as a straight download from MR.

[pilotbob]

I don't really think that ebook files are big enough to even warrant the need for bittorrent. ebooks could even be much smaller if they are compressed with zip or something... which I think some are already anyway... like isn't ePub a zip container?

BOb

[acidzebra]

You'd have to ask whoever maintains the server about totals - but just for the Sony-formatted books there are 101 pages of (I think) 30 books linked per page. If we pretend the average book size is around ~500 Kb (I think it is more) that would still amount to 101*30*500=~1.5 Gb of data for just LRF formatted books.

I think all told it would be a formidable amount of data. And nobody balks about uploading, say, 2 Gb of data, but if you have to dole that out to a couple of thousand users the numbers quickly add up.

Anyhow, several of the people who are most active with regards to formatting and making books available on MR have already said they would not appreciate a torrent, and I respect that, although I do not understand it fully. But again, I would still appreciate "author packs", via torrent or not. Hunting and pecking your way to the books you like this is a pain.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

You'd have to ask whoever maintains the server about totals - but just for the Sony-formatted books there are 101 pages of (I think) 30 books linked per page. If we pretend the average book size is around ~500 Kb (I think it is more) that would still amount to 101*30*500=~1.5 Gb of data for just LRF formatted books.

So you are suggesting that there would be a torrent which downloads all the books? If so, I'm not sure about this idea... as I don't want to d/l the full library just to get one or two books that I might want.

BOb

[Taylor514ce]

Originally Posted by Ned

According to this wiki bittorrent is a peer to peer file sharing protocol.

Yes, BitTorrent also refers to the protocol. One doesn't upload/download to/from a protocol, either.

[DannyR]

You certainly do not have to download the entire catalog just to grab a few files. All the modern torrent clients allow selective download of the contents.

Personally I think torrents are a great resource and certainly preferable to a zip file containing everything which doesn't allow selective downloads. But I definitely think either would be a vast improvement over the current way files are handled. Those who do want to grab the library are faced with days of clicking and downloading. That is unnecessary in my opinion.

[ProDigit]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

So you are suggesting that there would be a torrent which downloads all the books? If so, I'm not sure about this idea... as I don't want to d/l the full library just to get one or two books that I might want.

BOb

For one or two books you're better off downloading them manually.
But if you plan to download say 80 out of a 100, it's much easier to just deselect 20 of the downloads of the '100 pack'. Any advanced bittorrent client supports this function.

However I myself am less convinced that bittorrent is the way to share ebooks.
I think people made a valid argument, that, sharing single books, or even 10 packs does not compensate for the overhead bittorrent puts on a network.

if we're talking about bittorrent,we're talking about at least 350MB packs.. That seems more logical.

Also, people doanloading as large packs as 700MB, are most likely not going to read those books,and just use them for archiving, or sharing with other people on networks.

But I also agree with acidzebra, that it takes too many clicks and searches to download say 20 to 30 ebooks.

Maybe now it's still ok. I own a Sony reader,and am mainly interested in Spiritual, and LRF files.
That brings the total search downto 4 pages, 94 books. SF is worse...188 files...

Now it's still ok; but seeing at the rate ebooks get uploaded, in about a year this number will almost be doubled,and 3 years from now we might have about 10x the amount of books of today

[pilotbob]

So, I think the forum just needs a better ebook/library system. A way to select multiple books and then batch download them.

I sure Alex will have it working in a few hours now that I have mentioned it.

BOb