Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
No. If I want to browse a book I'll use the sample pages. The darknet is just too much hassle.
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I've personally never had much trouble finding anything I wanted on the "darknet". (Not that I do so often. I have no use for the Windows software the darknet is awash in; and my musical tastes run pretty much toward classical, so I can generally get my music legitimately fairly cheaply.)
While I often use the darknet to preview books, I rarely actually read books from the darknet. They're mostly either unformatted, unproofed raw text (not a pleasant reading experience) or PDF, which isn't well suited for ereaders. The few books I have read I've either already purchased (the leaked version of
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I already had on backorder at Amazon) or purchased subsequently -- e.g., some of Harry Turtledove's alternative fiction stuff.
The only exception I can think of is
The Lost Symbol. As ashamed as I was to have actually paid for
The Davinci Code (
never trust professional critics), I had sworn Dan Brown would never see another penny of my money. But a local literary rag had asked me to review
The Lost Symbol, so I downloaded it, without regret.
That's not to say I don't have unpurchased stuff floating around my hard drives. But that's nearly all stuff I either decided I wasn't interested in (hence, no lost sales) and haven't cleaned out yet, or haven't gotten around to looking at.