Quote:
Originally Posted by guyanonymous
There are a lot of "romance" novels on the darknet. It's an interesting contrast to the Sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, and almost all other books that would make it onto a top-100 list of a newspaper/magazine in any given week.
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It might be because romance novels seem to be the genre in which the books more quickly go OOP (out of print). You can often find the current books by an author, but their back catalog is usually only available via the used book route, if at that. Most of those books were only issued in paperback format, with its inherent fragility. And many romance authors, while not writing a specifically named "series", nonetheless set their stories in a particular location, or have a character or two from a previous novel reappear in a later book. A prime example of that are the Regency writers who create their layers of aristocracy and social arbiters. So a reader who enjoys the world created wants to read more stories set within it, but cannot find those books for sale.
Romance readers also have a slightly different mindset from those of other genres. I'm not saying it's a persecution complex, but I would bet that most older readers of romances have heard the phrase, "why are you wasting your time reading that trash?" more than once in their lives.
So a sisterhood of sorts has developed among those who read that genre - it's our guilty secret and when we find others who share our interest, it's almost like we give each other a secret handshake. So making romance books available to other readers of the genre is just sharing books with other people who love the same thing you do. The whole issue of copyright, authors' rights, and publishers' rights is not even a blip on the radar.