[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Kitabi

PDF and other textbook formats are not that great on eBook readers if you can get them at all. Plus the editing and typesetting on a lot of these books tend to be atrocious so running them through Calibre/other tools is a waste of time unless you are that desperate to read the book.

Some yes, some no. Some of the pirate versions are higher quality than the commercial ones.

Most aren't, but it's less because "people are lazy" than because there's no particular reward, not even social points, for being meticulous about bootleg ebooks. There's no way to indicate, "this one is carefully crafted to look great in your ebook reader" the way that books here at Mobileread can. There's no way to pull the lousy first-version OCR-with-errors version out of the sharing pool. There's no way to legitimately promote the better versions, and a lot of proofreaders/formatters would prefer to save their time-consuming work for stuff that can be openly shared--Gutenberg's Open Proofreaders, or doing new versions of Creative Commons works that were released in PDF, and so on.

I have seen books which look as if they were typed in by someone learning to type. Very different from a ripped cd. CD/DVD drives and sofware are more widespread than OCR's and scanning a pbook is much more tedious than ripping a disk.

So far, yes. But 30 years ago, photocopying was done at huge, expensive machines that only offices could afford; now you can have a $60 box at your desk that copies papers. (And scans. Badly.) In another couple of decades, we may have achieved "flip through this book in front of the camera & it'll convert to ebook."

For the moment, I remain unconvinced that the publishers are under the same kind of pressure that the recording industry was under.

The recording industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. A "gold" record has sold a million copies. Top-selling albums sell 10 million copies or more; it takes 20 million to make Wikipedia's records page. The book industry deals with much, much smaller numbers... Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows set publishing history with 12 million books printed for its first run.

Best-selling records count their millions of sales. Best-selling books count thousands. Oh, maybe tens of thousands... but only a handful of authors on the planet can expect to sell books by the million. *Any* popular band could jump to a million in record sales.

The publishing industries have always been scrabbling to balance cost of creation (author's work) vs cost of production (printing & distribution) vs how much the public will pay. Ebooks threaten the delicate balancing act they've put together; they're under a great deal more economic threat from ebook filesharing than the RIAA is from Napster.