Just wandering through this thread and am wondering how many of you who are railing against the Dark Net and lamenting the fact that writers and publishers are not being paid for the ebook, have ever bought a used book or taken a book out from a library?
In the first instance, you're getting the value of the author's work without paying him/her anything - in fact, you're making a third party richer on their back (you cannot assume that the person selling the used book bought it at full price themselves) - and in the second instance you have not paid anything for the book and hundreds or more people are reading the same book for the price of one book, probably similar to the number of people who
actually read whatever book they've downloaded on the Dark Net. So unless you've never done either of those things, I don't see your moral high ground being any higher than those who have done so. And those who have done so are the same type of people who access the Dark Net. Especially since many view the ebook Dark Net as one huge lending library by readers for readers.
As has been pointed out, the prime lure of the Dark Net, IMO, is convenience. You can find all the books in a series, for instance, even those that are out-of-print. You feel like reading (or re-reading more likely) so-and-so's series? Just find it and download it. As for the people who put up the books? Sure there's some who do it to be first, but there are a lot more people who put up the books of the authors they love because they want to make them better known, or to share a gem that they've found, or to put up a series that only been available in their country. Rare is the person who is chuckling evilly and deliberately putting up a book by an author for the sole purpose of decreasing his/her monetary sales. In fact, there is only one author that I know of for whom that happened (and no, I didn't put any of his/her books up on the Dark Net
). I have to say I chuckled when I saw it, but then the joke was on me because I started to see the "I never heard about that author before - I really liked that book" remarks and I knew that new fans had been created.
And none of them are making any money off those ebooks, unlike used book sellers or the people who sell out-of-print paperbacks/hardcovers for outrageous amounts (having bought them in the past I know just how outrageous they can be); none of that money is going back to the author. I've seen a lot of now-dead authors who I used to read while I was in high school, and who weren't available in print (or maybe only a book or two was) for decades showing up on the Dark Net, and checking Amazon recently, lo and behold, I find that there are reissues now available. Demand was created.
Many ebooks on the Dark Net do have formatting quirks and annoyances, from being converted from one into many formats. But that sort of goes with the territory of a free book. You get free p-books from other places and sometimes the pages are torn or dog-eared, the dust jacket is torn or missing, the pages are coffee-stained or worse, the book is mildewed or crumbly, etc. - and you accept that that comes with the territory of free p-books. I've seen Dark Net ebooks that were brilliantly converted, and I've bought ebooks from major booksellers that they should have been ashamed to sell. I don't think that you can, taking in all the circumstances, make the case - unless you're a perfectionist - that Dark Net books aren't worth the time and effort to get - especially if it's the only available source for a book that's out-of-print and available second-hand only. Just as we tend to disregard the black flash on our e-ink readers, you tend to just page through the one-line or blank pages or the announcements telling you that ABC Amber Lit was used to convert the book - lol.
All thanks to the OP for starting this thread, but if you couldn't find the books you wanted, then you weren't on the top sites. Most of them aren't open registration and you have to be invited to join them.