[dongi]

I have more than one thousand physical books, most of them inherited
from my parents and a few hundreds bought by myself.

I have never bought an ebook in my life but I have loads. My ebooks are
divided in 2 categories Technical (Computers, Electrical, Electronics,
RF_Microwave, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics, Systems etc.) and Fiction
(all the literature books).
I keep all the technical books in PDF and DJVU formats while the Fiction books
are all EPUB, MOBI and occasional PDFs. I have over 6000 unique titles of
technical books and over 30000 fiction books (I read in several languages and
this allows me to cover a lot of authors). Each of these categories occupy some
35GB in size but I have downloaded probably 3 times as much and then erased
duplicates and uninteresting books. While I have at least flipped through a
few pages of every technical book I have, most of the fiction books are virgin.
I usually just pick randomly a fiction book and delete an author entirely if I
don't like it. There is no risk for me running out of read material this
lifetime.

I have spent a lot of time writing various Perl scripts and arranging books in
categories, changing their names in a consistent way, fetching metadata from
the internet (based on ISBN), inserting covers etc. This allows me now to
serve my own books from my private network and to search through ebooks metadata.

I have all the tools to remove ebooks DRM but the irony is I seldom use
them because I only get DRM-free versions. Occasionally I might remove
PDF file protection just to edit them: split, merge, crop white margins.

I've been collecting technical books for at least the past 10 years while
the fiction books are all just 1-2 years old. If publishers wouldn't have
been so greedy with ebooks I would have probably bought the books instead
of pirating them. When I see on Amazon, Kobo an the like prices like
10-15£ for a fiction book or 150£ for a technical book I always wonder
who pays that kind of money for one file with DRM on top. I would have bought
all my books if the prices were a tenth of what they currently are at the time
I've started to acquire my e-ink readers and tablets. Now they have completely
lost me as a client. If I want a book it is usually already on my drives, if
not I know all the places where I can get it: torrents, newsgroups, library.nu
(now defunct), IRC. I will probably only occasionally buy paperback books for
the rest of my life.

I have a large income and I can afford any ebook I want (not the above numbers
but at least the ones I will ever read) even with today prices. I don't buy
them because I feel the current prices are over inflated and I prefer to spend
the cash on tangible stuff like electronic gadgets.

Book publishers are probably in the worst position when it comes to piracy
because books have the smallest size of all media. I can share my entire
collection on memory sticks and portable drives. An entire collection has
the size of a single Bluray movie.

Books are not the only media I pirate. I have all the music I ever wanted;
some from my own CDs but most from the napster and allofmp3 era. I don't
pirate music anymore - there's nothing new out there that I want. I can
play non-stop 2 months worth of music without repeating a song. My music
also accompanies me where-ever I am. I can redirect the music to any room
of my house and my car computer synchronises wirelessly when in the driveway
so I have my entire collection on the road.

I pirate console games too, I have hundreds of burned PS2 and Wii DVDs and
some 5000 DS games. I don't play games anymore - it's a terrible loss of time,
I used to years ago but now I'm just collecting them.

As for movies my drives are full of them. I have a dozen or so computers around
the house, most of them servers with more than 10TB of storage space in total.
I have access to a thousand or so channels (via multiple LNBs and cardsharing)
and I'm recording movies directly from the satellite DVB or terrestrial DVT feeds.
Beside those I'm also using newsbin for titles not yet available as broadcasts.

As a positive note I don't pirate software because I'm using only open source.

I am confident that I will see in my lifetime legal sharing of all internet
files. Civilisation and science are better served by sharing knowledge and
culture rather than making some people rich. I want to see all publishers,
record and movies companies go bankrupt and only after that I will directly pay
the authors.

I also vote with the Pirate Party and I am a true pirate.

Argh Matey!