Quote:
Originally Posted by Puddytat purr
Interesting, I've actually been battling with this myself over the past few weeks of owning my cybook.
I did download a load of pirated stuff and I've bought a grand total of...one e-book 
I did actually mention in another thread somewhere about how great it would be if we could get a discount on an electronic version of books we already own.
I have discovered that I am having to go through the books I have downloaded and format them all correctly - so that the lines flow rather
than ending
up
with something that looks like this!
I'm beginning to wonder with the £ - $ exchange rate whether it's worth it and should I just buy the damn things anyway!
I think what I'm gonna end up doing is deleting all the e-books I've downloaded (mainly because my laptop is screaming about the amount of space it doesn't have anymore), to give the laptop some space, to hope that buying them means they'll be formatted properly and the way I shall pay for them is by selling their hardcopy versions to my friend!  |
I don't think you should, currently, expect the books you paid for to be better formatted than the pirated one. I don't have much experience with books I need to pay for to read, but I read lots of posts here on badly formatted books people bought (especially from Sony bookstore).
On the other hand, I've never seen a book pirated with the intent of making money from it. In consequence, to some degree it's certaily a work of love. I either see books with (scanned, not proofread) in title - or v1.0, v1.1, v1.2, denoting proofreading and fixing by various people. Pirated books don't have much OCR errors left. They're rarely at the level of beautifully formatted books on this site (with illustrations etc.), but all blocks of texts are nicely formatted.
Also, from Sony, Amazon or any paid store you get one version of a book. When that's badly formatted, there's nothing you can do besides writing to publisher. With pirated books which are popular you can find sometimes even hundreds of various versions, made wholly independently of each other. Chances are one of them will be formatted just like you like it.
By the way, DRM-supporters could wonder how many of those versions were obtained by breaking the DRM of a published book, and how many were OCR-ed from paper versions. And if the DRM was unbreakable, would that stop Darknet? DRM-ing a book is a waste of time when the book has been pirated, as everyone who would be able to break the DRM will look for the book on Darknet first.
I judge that if I could be sure that after I bought the book:
1) I could read it anywhere (no DRM).
2) It would be nicely formatted, nicely released, with original cover and illustrations inside.
3) I could pay for it without losing half a day of time filling forms, or getting myself special credits card, preferably with one click.
The store would be the first place I'd go to.
Don't expect the people, staticstically, to be led by morals in life - when were they ever? It's ease of getting the book and usability of what you bought that will decide for majority.