Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.
...
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.
...
I also vote with the Pirate Party and I am a true pirate.
Argh Matey!
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This post (bolded items especially) indicates to me that this "pirate" is a data hoarder and not so much of a reader representing significant lost sales to the author. It would take me over 60 years to read 30,000 fiction books and I read a very large number of books per year; in fact, this "pirate" spends a lot of time (and presumably draws significant pleasure) from acquiring, cataloging, and manipulating their collection of books, leaving little time left for reading; they probably also own/manipulate/catalog more movies than can realistically be viewed in a person's lifetime. They own thousands of video games but never play one.
ETA: I also take pleasure in book acquisition, but not to this extreme; I own a few hundred books I have not yet read, mostly freebies and bargains in genres that appeal to me, and I manage my collection in Calibre. However, I insist on acquiring my books by legal means, have at least a passing interest in the book subjects, and I do actually have time in my life expectancy to read them all.