Quote:
Originally Posted by Mivo
But then people would torrent 40,000 books each, feed them into Calibre, and not pay $400,000.
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No, I don't think so. There is only a small number of people that do this.
There is a LOT of crap floating around on pirate sites. At one point, I downloaded a book that was unobtainable because of regional restrictions.
It was an unconverted retail EPUB (It can determined by looking at the CSS), but made to be as small as possible. EVERYTHING (even the maps) was stripped out of it, except for the text itself. That's no book anymore. That's TXT-file in a renamed ZIP.
Other books have been converted and reconverted so many times that not only the code is mangled up, but the text as well, probably due to people setting different layouts in Calibre.
Pirate stuff isn't worth my time anymore. Finding a good unmangeld version of that book cost me so much time that, had I equated it to my salary, I could say that this book cost me €30; maybe even more.
I'd rather spend €5-6, and then KNOW that I get a good book. (Although, there are some early ebook releases still around. Sometimes you get official books that look as if they are pirated versions...)