I realise my measly ~1500 books - legally acquired over the last four years, about 75% of them paid for, the others legally acquired for free - which come from about a dozen different sources (Amazon isn't the be-all and end-all for all people, especially if they'd also like to read books in languages Amazon doesn't offer) are not quite the mythical 40,000, but I really would have a very hard time organising them without Calibre.
Amazon's management options really do suck as soon as you get into 100+ books and if you've bought (and yes, I mean
bought) books from elsewhere as well, it gets even more clumsy to try and use the Amazon cloud / Manage My Kindle for any actual ebook management.
Anyway, I guess that makes me a pirate, and someone whom shops (the same ones I've bought hundreds of books from) would apparently need to block, cooperating if needs be. Because, you know, I have a lot of books, and I've dared to shop in more than one place...
(At least I'm in good company, as I rather suspect that the majority of Mobileread users here are in a similar category, give or take a few hundred books.)
And yes, I've heard that the uploads-required system used to work for certain sites, especially in the FTP corner of filesharing, in the past, but I've really never come across a torrent site requiring uploads of new files in order to download something. Keeping a certain upload/download ratio in some cases, yes, but that mostly means that one should keep seeding even after the entire file has downloaded. But I've never exactly looked into the sort of really high-end exclusive pirating clubs that Sirmaru seems to be familiar with.
