[Tex2002ans]

There is a mismatch between the title of the thread + the "question" (a statement?) in the poll + the initial post.

I won't vote in the poll, but I will only focus on the initial post:

Originally Posted by KyBunnies

If you came across a site that was distributing/sharing eBooks what would you do?

Use it of course. The more and easier access people have to knowledge, the better. The more people can read and learn, the better.

Archive.org is one of the greatest distributors/sharers of books. So is Project Gutenberg.

Then we could be talking about what type of ebooks are being shared? Scientific Papers? Journal Articles?

Here is one article from the New York Times last year, Should All Research Papers Be Free?

“Realistically only scientists at really big, well-funded universities in the developed world have full access to published research,” said Michael Eisen, a professor of genetics, genomics and development at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime champion of open access. “The current system slows science by slowing communication of work, slows it by limiting the number of people who can access information and quashes the ability to do the kind of data analysis” that is possible when articles aren’t “sitting on various siloed databases.”

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“The prices have been rising twice as fast as the price of health care over the past 20 years, so there’s a real scandal there to be exposed,” said Peter Suber, Harvard’s director of the office of scholarly communication. “It’s important that Harvard is suffering when it has the largest budget of any academic library in the world.”

The price of many academic journal articles is insane, and not many people/institutions outside of the Western countries can even afford such fees. How effective is your education going to be if it becomes impossible to even get access to some of the latest research in your field?

Then there is those filthy places called libraries that share works to millions of people FOR FREE.

One of my favorite articles on the topic is this one:

Public libraries started appearing in the mid-1800s. At the time, publishers went absolutely berserk: they had been lobbying for the lending of books to become illegal, as reading a book without paying anything first was “stealing”, they argued. As a consequence, they considered private libraries at the time to be hotbeds of crime and robbery. (Those libraries were so-called “subscription libraries”, so they were argued to be for-profit, too.)

British Parliament at the time, unlike today’s politicians, wisely disagreed with the publishing industry lobby – the copyright industry of the time. Instead, they saw the economic value in an educated and cultural populace, and passed a law allowing free public libraries in 1850, so that local libraries were built throughout Britain, where the public could take part of knowledge and culture for free.

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And another one of my favorites is this one on Falkvinge.net:

The way media piracy works is that one person or group purchases a work, and then shares it with millions of other people. This supposedly deprives the author or artist of those millions of people’s money. One group has acquired over 50 million media items, and makes each of them available to approximately 20 million people — which must be a tremendous hit to creative professionals’ wallets. This notorious institution is called the New York Public Library.

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