Quote:
Originally Posted by GlennD
There was a time I felt justified in downloading books, and downloaded collections from Usenet all the time. I assure you, the choice was not more restricted. Back then, no one considered themselves pirates, digitizing books was a labor of love, because there wasn't a retail market yet. (I was reading on a Palm III at the time, that and the Usenet reference should give you an idea of the timeline.) I was able to get backlist books that are still not officially available as ebooks yet.
The standard was much lower, as you say, and many of those books had OCR errors that were pretty ranged from making a book unreadable to downright funny. For a while I thought that there was a character in the Wheel of Time named "Thorn", because the scanner's OCR software read the 'm' in Thom as 'rn'.
(And yes, I've deleted those Usenet downloads, and my library is entirely legit now. I'm of the opinion that (legal or not) the illegitimate digital books served the purpose of proving there was a market for them, much like MP3s did the same for the digital music market. There just aren't any arguments for illegally copying books now that they're widely available.)
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That's pretty much my experience. I played in the Usenet sandbox and downloaded a lot of ebooks mostly because no one else had ebooks. Some ebooks were almost professionally done, others not so much. A lot depended on how many people were willing to proof read and compare to the original text. Of course, it was a matter of honor that I had paper copies of all the ebooks that I downloaded back then. Got to feed the authors.
Before the Kindle store opened up, Baen was the only books easy to find and those never showed up on Usenet. I stopped looking at Usenet about the time that the Sony store, then the Kindle store opened up. I think I still have those books archived somewhere, but they aren't in my calibre library and I've purchased the vast majority from the Kindle store as they became available.