Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
Yeah, sure, whatever you say. Take your openness somewhere else and stop advocating piracy on MobileRead.
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I don't and never have advocated piracy. If you read my post you'll see that I stated that I buy nearly all my books. The ones I get from pirate places are the very few I want to read that I can't find on Amazon or other legal sources. That happens maybe once or twice a year, and not every year.
I also sometimes buy a book which is formatted badly enough to be distracting and I'll sometimes find a better pirate copy to read. In this case I've already bought the book. That happens a bit more often than being unable to find a book on Amazon but not much more.
It's not that I'm actually against piracy. I'm not. What others do is their business and I'm glad those books are available for the few times I need them. But I do want authors to keep writing books for me and for that reason I think it's important that I pay for books.
As for the argument that getting a pirated book is stealing, that really depends on your definition of stealing. Most people think of stealing as a zero-sum game. I take it out of your pocket and now I have it and you don't. But it's reasonable to include other definitions and call it stealing. I think doing so is more about giving your statements an emotional impact than anything else. I doubt that downloading a pirated book would fit any legal definition of stealing but I'm not a lawyer and I can't really be sure of that.
If I advocate anything it's paying for the books you read. I hope you do. I do. For those who don't, I hope they at least read. A world full of well read people would be a better world.
I was one of the very early ebook readers, long before you could buy ebooks or ebook reading devices. I've talked about this in this forum before but I'll mention it again. In the days before the internet became available to the public there were BBS systems and there was Compuserve. I was active in the HP forum on Compuserve because I had an HP 95lx (later a 200lx), a small pocket size MS-Dos computer that ran on 2 AA batteries. One of the guys in the Compuserve forum wrote a little app for reading books in plain text. I seriously doubt this was the first electronic ereader but it was the first one I saw.
I bought a copy, which came with a book that had been scanned by the author, I forget which book it was, and read it. Soon I scanned a few books, as did other members of that forum, and we were sharing them.
Compuserve had very strict rules about piracy, which, in those days, meant software, since there were no ebooks or music files, etc. Anyone caught posting copyrighted material (programs) was kicked off, and they monitored it pretty closely. But they didn't consider this piracy and they gave us room to share these books. I think we eventually had a couple hundred books in our little library.
Of course that was piracy by any legal definition but we didn't know it and neither did Compuserve. We were just sharing books, something avid readers usually do.
Anyway, this, and probably other similar groups, were the beginning of ebooks. Ebooks grew out of piracy. Without piracy we might have had ebooks anyway but there's no way to really know that.
Years later when the Palm Pilot came available something like the same thing happened. I was an early Palm user and there were ebook readers for sale to use with easily downloadable books long before there were ebooks to buy. Then ebook sellers came along and soon they began talking about those other books being pirated, which, of course, they were, and the idea of piracy was born.
Barry