Piracy Experiment

[Quexos]

Well I can assure you that what you found is NOT Retail quality
Retail quality is said of an ebook that is not just put together by fans or pirates but actually purchased then made available online. It is by definition the best quality version available. With table of content, complete text and nice formatting.
So I stand by what I said: Pirated Retail quality ebooks do exist but they are a small minority.
As for low or bad quality copies out there, they are no match to the Retail one can purchase on official sites thus I don't consider it worth worrying about for publishers or raving about for pirates.

Originally Posted by Bilbo1967

OK - took me approximately 3 minutes to find what you described above. Haven't downloaded them so can't actually verify that they are retail quality (whatever that means).

I will not give any links to their whereabouts for obvious reasons.

[jkeene]

I can see a collection in Dutch, format unknown, and a collection in English, format .TXT. Findable from public websites.

I've found in my two tests of the darknet that the format was generally poor, with scan errors that, for me, made the books unreadable. I like history books, which often include italicized foreign phrases. Being essentially monolingual, I have a hard enough time translating something that is spelled properly, with scan errors I'm doomed. Fifteen minutes puzzling out a bad scan of a foreign language just isn't worth free.

Sure, my sample size is small, but it costs me time to go back and look again. Probably time better spent keeping up with Kobo coupons or LivingSocial gift cards.

[MR. Pockets]

Originally Posted by gollu

Sorry to tell you that, but your experiment was not very scientific. Darknet is a success because it's full of content and it's easy to get through. You don't always get what you are not paying for, but for an experienced leacher it'd take half an hour at most to find out if a certain content is available and at what quality.

Maybe not scientific, but it at least demonstrates that piracy isn't nearly the issue e-publishers want you to think it is. If an "average" user can't find e-books worth pirating, then all you have to worry about are the experienced people. (Who I'm guessing don't make up a large section of the e-reading community.)

[Bilbo1967]

Originally Posted by Quexos

Well I can assure you that what you found is NOT Retail quality

And you know that how?

[CommonReader]

Originally Posted by Quexos

Really ? then you won't have any trouble finding, hmm ... say the complete set of 5 books by Jean M. Auel, retail quality of course, called the Earth Children's series (The clan of the cave bear, The mammoth hunters, The valley of horses etc ...) in epub of course. If 99% of the stuff is out there, then this one should be easy considering it's very popular.
So do you take my challenge ? PM me the results if you wish (or write them here if it's not against the rules )

Well, it took less than five minutes to find them both in English (epub) and German (pdf). I'm not sure if pirated books are a serious problem for the publishers already, but there is no lack of available sources for pirated books, for sure.

[TGS]

Originally Posted by Bilbo1967

Did this just become a requests thread?

No! Requests will get you banned

[GA Russell]

If the day comes that legit copies are uniformly high quality and pirate copies are typically poor quality, I think that the publishers will be in good shape.

However, I can imagine that people will feel burned by poor quality legit copies, and will turn to the darknet, feeling like they have nothing to lose. That is to say, if the eBook might be poor quality whether it costs money or is free, I can see a lot of people trying the free version first.

That makes me fear for the publishers' future, because I suspect that when a person becomes accustomed to using the darknet, he will stay that way.

(I have never read specifically about the music industry's experience with this issue. But as I understand it, ten years ago Napster was used mostly by kids in high school and college, not 30-year-olds. But I suspect that those people, now in their 30s, continue to use the darknet for their music because they became accustomed to doing so back then.)

My conclusion is that it is imperative for the publishers to ensure that their eBooks are high quality. The ball is in their court.

[TGS]

Increasingly I suspect that copies that are circulating will become publishers' versions rather than scanned and OCR copies...and it's shocking how bad some of them can be.

[Quexos]

Originally Posted by Bilbo1967

And you know that how?

Well first you are not giving me the link for me to check (or checking yourself) thus you cannot debunk my point.
Second. I have been looking out there so this is how I know I'm right. It would be very surprising that "tons" of retail quality books are available on pirate sites and that I have not at least heard, or seen it. After all tons of movies and mp3's are indeed available and nobody argues that they are not.

I have noticed that even on private torrent sites, where you can find a concentration of ebooks, these turn out to be not so good. Few are retail quality, scattered through different formats and with lots of issues.
So again I'd be happy to be wrong but it's very unlikely that you (or any one else) "know" of a place on the net where retail quality books galore ...

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Bilbo1967

OK - took me approximately 3 minutes to find what you described above. Haven't downloaded them so can't actually verify that they are retail quality (whatever that means).

Ditto, a minute to find a torrent, a couple of minutes to download those ebooks. Good quality .lit files, easily converted to ePub in Calibre. Now deleted, of course.

There is a vast quantity out there, but I don't think it actually has much effect on sales. It seems to be mostly a competition to see who can get and post the biggest collection.

I will say that I haven't managed to spot a UK edition of the Harry Potter ebooks. There are astonishingly good versions of the US editions out there though.

[Bilbo1967]

Originally Posted by Quexos

Well first you are not giving me the link for me to check (or checking yourself) thus you cannot debunk my point.
Second. I have been looking out there so this is how I know I'm right. It would be very surprising that "tons" of retail quality books are available on pirate sites and that I have not at least heard, or seen it. After all tons of movies and mp3's are indeed available and nobody argues that they are not.

I have noticed that even on private torrent sites, where you can find a concentration of ebooks, these turn out to be not so good. Few are retail quality, scattered through different formats and with lots of issues.
So again I'd be happy to be wrong but it's very unlikely that you (or any one else) "know" of a place on the net where retail quality books galore ...

I wasn't trying to debunk your point, you were trying to debunk mine (and failing).

I hadn't realised you had checked every website out there - you must have been looking for a really long time.

Here's a quote from the site in question (I've changed it 'slightly' so that it can't be googled by the way);

"Here's a retail version of the *******series Books.

DRM removed. Original epub..."

Again, no, I will not download them, and I will not give you the link,not least because of your rudeness (just think, a little politeness and you could have had them tonight ).

[Quexos]

I must apologize if I sounded rude. I did not mean to. I was only debating the point and doing several things at the same time. No hard feeling okay ?
While I obviously can't check the entire internet. It seems just surprising that you so easily found actual retail versions of a book that on the biggest sites of the planet (a certain bay for instance) and a couple of other big ones as well, does not appear (again as a retail).
Now maybe you happen to know some small private site that happens to have them, it's of course possible. (but in this case the majority of people won't find that small site, thus making that pirated retail out of reach from the majority of people).
Also just cause the uploader says "retail" does not mean it really is. Again only checking the book will prove things one way or the other. (Some uploaders just suspect or think a book they themselves downloaded is retail and don't check any further the issue, then re-upload it and call it retail)

Anyways I hope you believe me when I said I did not mean any rudeness.
Cheers friend

Originally Posted by Bilbo1967

I wasn't trying to debunk your point, you were trying to debunk mine (and failing).

I hadn't realised you had checked every website out there - you must have been looking for a really long time.

Here's a quote from the site in question (I've changed it 'slightly' so that it can't be googled by the way);

"Here's a retail version of the *******series Books.

DRM removed. Original epub..."

Again, no, I will not download them, and I will not give you the link,not least because of your rudeness (just think, a little politeness and you could have had them tonight ).

[CommonReader]

Originally Posted by Quexos

Well first you are not giving me the link for me to check (or checking yourself) thus you cannot debunk my point.
Second. I have been looking out there so this is how I know I'm right. It would be very surprising that "tons" of retail quality books are available on pirate sites and that I have not at least heard, or seen it. After all tons of movies and mp3's are indeed available and nobody argues that they are not.

I have noticed that even on private torrent sites, where you can find a concentration of ebooks, these turn out to be not so good. Few are retail quality, scattered through different formats and with lots of issues.
So again I'd be happy to be wrong but it's very unlikely that you (or any one else) "know" of a place on the net where retail quality books galore ...

That's a pretty silly way to argue your point. People here don't have to prove anything to you and they are certainly not going to violate the forum rules for your sake.
As you may have noticed many people aren't that impressed by your vaunted "retail quality". It's rather irrelevant as well. When people have the choice between a "retail quality" ebook for 15 $/€ and a perfectly usable ebook for free, which one is going to be the preferred option for most readers?

[jkeene]

Another look and I found epubs in English. Tried one (then deleted it), and while the text format was acceptable for the few paragraphs I read, it was missing the maps. I couldn't quickly locate my wife's copy of the book, so maybe there's an edition without maps, but I could compare it to the Google Books sample. Google's had the maps. The darknet version I found did not.

It's entirely likely that my torrent-fu is weak.

[Quexos]

Ok lol this is getting out of control. I never asked to violate anything for my sake. But it may have been misconstrued perhaps because I did not express myself as I wanted to, again sorry about that.
And maybe people don't care for retail quality, I don't know. All I'm saying is while in the wild tons of books are actually easy to find, only few look like the purchased versions or so it seems to me.

Originally Posted by CommonReader

That's a pretty silly way to argue your point. People here don't have to prove anything to you and they are certainly not going to violate the forum rules for your sake.
As you may have noticed many people aren't that impressed by your vaunted "retail quality". It's rather irrelevant as well. When people have the choice between a "retail quality" ebook for 15 $/€ and a perfectly usable ebook for free, which one is going to be the preferred option for most readers?