Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
It may also have something to do with the fact that, until recently, most books didn't have ebook editions and so pirates established a workflow that involved OCRing. Also you can get most pbooks for free (from libraries) to pirate them, whereas, you have to pay to get a DRMed version of an ebook to pirate.
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If the second reason is true it would at least back up my conclusion – that pirated e-books aren’t coming from legal e-books.
For the first, that’s one of the reasons I called my little experiment “hardly scientific.” I should perhaps do it again and this time also check against e-book availability, including only pirated HTML editions of books for which e-book editions are available.
BUT I also have a feeling that pirated editions of such books will be less common and less frequently distributed. So to check that I should be monitoring e-book pirate hangouts and comparing posted books with legal e-book availability, and see if I can get any sort of download statistics from darknet e-book servers and cross compare those with e-book availability. And then...
So it spirals out-of-hand pretty quickly.