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I wonder, if the publishers had been on the ball and actually invested some money in digitalizing their back catalogs and providing them as ebooks at say a $2.99 price, would the dark net ebook sites have expanded as fast as they have?
A lot of the traffic on them originally was people looking for copies of favorite books (most of which they actually owned in paper format) in ebook format for convenience's sake. Not being able to find them for sale by the publishers, they've created their own and put them on the net. This created a behavior pattern of turning to the dark net for books in a lot of people. Not everyone is there looking for the latest Harry Potter or John Grisham book.
Imagine if the first response had been to obtain the book from the publisher's site because it was easily available, reasonably priced, and uniformly formatted. That would have prevented the now-learned response of turning to the dark net to find the back catalog.
I really have no patience with publishers who say "we didn't know ebooks would take off like that". Any company that does not look to the future and try to anticipate technology deserves to pay the price for hanging onto a pre-industrial mindset. There is no reason why a consortium of publishers, authors and readers cannot come up with format criteria that must be met for trade or technical or art books, not to mention magazines and newspapers, to standardize formats so that they appear the same no matter what the ereader used is. There's no reason why when a book is being laid out it can't be done two ways - one more suited for print and the other more suited for the smaller ereader formats.
Case in point, all those "For Dummies" and "Idiot's Guides" books. Their quirky layouts make gleaning information easy in their paper versions, but they are usually hell to read on an ereader.
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