I've been going through this thread, and could not help but comment. The culture of entitlement has definetely saturated our society, but I feel that's only because technology is advancing faster than our ability to appreciate it. Music, movies, and now books are so easy to acquire that for some it means nothing to have them. Why fight it? The information at our fingertips is mind-boggling. Remember when a Super Nintendo Game cost our parents forty to fifty bucks, and you got maybe one a year? It astounded me to find out that the game itself barely takes up a 1mb of space in a computer. Now you can own every game ever made from it.
So what does any of this mean for the new niche of yanking books for free out of the Internet? Speaking very generically it might, in some ways, actually benefit the writer whose book has been distributed through our World Wide Web. As others in this thread have said if they steal your book often then you must have done something right when writing it. Also those who snag books rather than movies, and music are avid readers, lurkers of libraries and the used-bookstores of old, and some of which demand perfection in the books they read. If the copy they have is badly formatted, ocr errors and whatnot, they are very likely to stop reading it, and buy the official version anyway. No reader wants a jarring experience when they're reading books.
Free ebooks are awesome-I won't lie about that, but properly formatted books from the big publishing houses rock. The WOT books are a prime example. I've seen the ripped versions of these books-which suck, by the way-own the paperback version of these books, but was so dissatisfied with the pdfs, that I bought all of them out of the Sony Bookstore, anyway. Jordan's definetely had his chance to empty my wallet more than once. And the worst part is I've given over fifteen years of my life to the expectation that someday the series will be done.
Sorry about that. Mind was wandering. But's that's me. Love books more than people. Is that so wrong?
