Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
My personal reading pattern is to get interested in a subject and then read about it. Because of this, I don't read many current books. And unless I am missing something, the darknet consists of recent books whose authors and editors do deserve compensation, rather than books by authors such as the late Dr. Haight.
Another subject I have been reading up on a bit lately is the history of the Latter Day Saints church. And I have not found any out of print, but still in copyright, Mormon history books which are available as illicit downloads. Am I missing something?
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Popularity. I could be wrong, but the two books you describe don't sound mainstream, of wide-interest, or one's likely to be found on more than a fraction of a percent of reader's bookshelves.
The books making it onto the darknet (I suspect) are making it there
a) because they're mainstream now
b) were mainstream/important enough that people still read them now or recognize the author's name,
c) were/are popular/significant in their genre (e.g., science fiction and mystery are fairly well represented by historical texts right up to the present),
d) are/were controversial
e) someone just made the e-text for their own specific reasons/interest and it found it's way from there.
f) are US (or maybe UK) published (a numbers game here).
(in case it interests you, the other day, I did find that the Mormon Missionary Diaries are mostly scanned (very nicely) and available to peruse online for free at
http://www.lib.byu.edu/dlib/mmd/ )
p.s., I just took 2 minutes to do a search of one area of the darknet and, while I don't find reference to Gordon Haight, there are a ton of George Eliot texts.