Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
It's important to remember that the majority of the books floating around the darknet currently are scans of paper books.
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I'm not sure what this points out. On the one hand, a scan of a paper book to me would be equivalent to the old cassette recording of a piece of music: you listen to it a few times, then determine whether you want the real CD, or put up with the slightly lower quality of the cassette, or tape something else over it. I'm certainly not opposed to that kind of "piracy", and I've personally bought many CDs which I already had on cassette.
On the other hand, you could say that people are willing to put in a lot of effort to avoid paying for a book.
When you take into account that digital copies (of CDs or DVDs, for instance) are of the same quality of the original, I'm worried about publishing the PDF of my book. It would perhaps make things very tempting to copy.
Over here in The Netherlands, "piracy" is pretty rampant. People even look at me strangely when I say I prefer to
buy software, and that they don't need to "burn a copy" from their latest CD for me. What I find even stranger is that people leave their computer on overnight to download a torrent of a DVD, take the effort of burning it to a DVD, including printing the cover (!), while I just drive by our local blockbuster equivalent and rent the movie, probably for about the same cost (taking printer ink, empty DVD-R etc.).
Anyway, so far I like the "personalized copy" idea and the password protected PDF.