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- books only available pirated sites.
Way back when, before the Sony and Amazon ebook stores, there were very few books that were available for purchase as ebooks. In the US, there was peanut press and Microsoft, so if you wanted an ebook you had to "pirate it". (When people read pirate, they tend to think people selling something they got illegally, but I never saw anyone try to charge for scanned ebooks).
Back then, the dark web was the usenet groups rather than what we have now. There were groups dedicated to spreading scanned ebooks. Most of those ebooks were scanned by multiple people, and then edited by multiple people. The best were better quality than most of what one pays for with pre computer back list ebooks, or at least truer to the print edition. The last Harry Potter book was famously available as an ebook before it hit the bookstores.
Certainly the quality varied quite a bit, usually depending on how popular the book was and how many people were willing to edit and make corrections. As I said, the best was very good, the worst was pretty bad.
Once Sony and Amazon opened their stores and started to develop inventory, people shifted to those. I think that I bought my Sony PRS-500 as a Christmas give to myself in Dec of 2006, the first book that I bought at the Sony ebook store was Dragon Riders of Pern. I bought my kindle as a birthday present to myself in September of 2008, the first book I bought was Dorsai Spirit. Since then, I've lost track of what's going on the dark net, but back when I first started to buy ebooks just before 2000, there was Baen Books, Guttenberg and the darknet.
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