Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Herley
llasram, the interim results from my experimental business model may cast some light on this thread. My site has been open for five weeks and so far over 5,000 ebooks have been downloaded. I have received payment for 61. The most charitable gloss I can put on this is that people do not like the books; or perhaps they are all unusually slow readers. In either case it sends me a clear message, which I fully intend to heed, about what I should be doing with my time in future. I salute those honourable few such as yourself, who paid, but you are in a tiny minority.
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Many people who in their early life had no access to information, as there was no Internet, and they lived in a backwater country, later on start collecting voraciously. I frequently see on forums I browse, or in Usenet emails people saying they have over 100 GB of unique pirated ebooks, and measuring with it their progress in... I don't know what.
They can't read them all in their life, there's too little time. But they commit large part of their time to make their collections bigger still, perhaps more time then the spend reading books. They love collecting, feeling of having a possibility to read, much more than reading as such.
I expect some downloads from your site were made by those collectionners, which then put the book in a nice folders with your name and book title, added it to their database and went on to look for more.
61 out of 5000 is a small number - but. I wonder, if your book was on the bookstore shelf, and customers were looking at various books, and some picked yours up, browsed through few pages and put it down, and others would decide to buy it, if 51/5000 wouldn't be the part of the people that decided to buy and read it of the set that decided to look on the few pages... don't assume they read it because they downloaded it, it's so easy to download and look at for a minute... just like browsing in a library or bookstore.
About OCRs earlier: I was wondering what motivates pirates who OCR books with the intention to release them into Darknet. OCRing your books to switch from paper copy to digital copy is a whole different animal, and I think anybody who prefers to do it and not search for the copy on the Darknet won't upload to Darknet.