Quote:
Originally Posted by unboggling
This discussion is still going on? 
Some observations to supplement my earlier post that said it's too much trouble:
After further research and experimenting, I found it's possible to obtain a lot of eBooks with relatively good to superb formatting. The problem is that most of the sources I found are large torrent files (4 to 6 GBs) containing thousands of eBooks each. Unless you pay for the privilege to selectively download items within it, you have to download the entire file then sort through it. The metadata associated internally with those eBooks tends to be inadequate and inconsistent unless you luck out, which seems rare. The file structures are different from torrent file to torrent file and usually internally inconsistent. So there is no automatic way to generate most of the metadata. Therefore "sorting through it" is not a trivial process and might take a week or more of full-time work (depending on file size) in rebuilding the author and title fields to be clean enough to fetch metadata, not to mention going through multi-thousands of books manually choosing which ones to delete once your metadata is clean enough to base a decision on.
The moral issue can't be solved by debate here or anywhere else. Morals arise from deep-embedded core values and differ from person to person as well as culture to culture. The only related issues that can be decided anywhere are what laws to make in each country regarding digital piracy and what teeth to put behind the laws. I'm not a lawyer, but even I know that laws without teeth are expensive boondoggles perpetrated on the taxpayer.
My personal opinion is that most eBook consumers will find it too difficult or too much hassle to obtain significantly large amounts of books through piracy. The key word is "significant," meaning in regards to significantly detrimental to publisher sales figures. If my assumption is true then what is the fuss all about? |
There are free programs that you can download to select particular files rather than the entire 4GB's or whatever
I do agree with your opinion that a minority of ebook readers are currently pulling from piracy, however. I only know one person in my entire social cirle who knows how to do it, actually.