[Stitchawl]

Perhaps an important fact of Internet life that seems to be ignored in this thread is 'lifespan' or 'health' of storage sites. A very valid reason to support file sharing torrents is that all too often the repositories go down!

We all have said to ourselves 'next week I'll download 'Such and Such' book to read. 'Next week.' But what happens when next week we go to that site and find 'page load error,' or some other error message because that site no longer exists because of; hacking, virus attack, financial problems, operator personal problems, hosting difficulties, etc., etc., etc.,

Several years ago there was a wonderful location where one could find and download virtually any piece of guitar sheet music, either in notes, chords, tabs, or lyrics. It was called 'On Line Guitar Archive' or OLGA for short. Thousands and thousands of songs. Searchable by title, author, or genre, OLGA was a guitarist's dream. Right up until it disappeared. Simply disappeared.

Right now, the largest and easiest to use Torrent sight is down because of hacker attack. It's been down for the past two weeks and no one knows for sure if or when it will be back. (True, this site does have both legal and illegal books, and it's up to the downloader to choose to be honest or not.) Hundreds of thousands of books, entire collections sorted by author, genre, alphabet, language, or format, available for... oh wait.... no longer available for download. And maybe it won't be back. Just because some hacker decided he/she was bored on a Saturday afternoon.

Personally, I was very upset to lose OLGA. Personally, I'd be very upset to lose the MR downloads. I'd be very happy to have the option of putting the entire download selection into a small corner of one of my hard drives as insurance against losing the availability of the MR downloads. We buy health insurance, automobile liability insurance, even earthquake and flood insurance. We pay a lot of money for these while at the same time praying we never have to make use of them. Why not free book insurance?

I'm sure not everyone feels the same way. So why not have both options available? If you want them all at once, take them all at once. It would be as fast a download as a good movie. Faster if there were several seeds available. If you prefer to download one book at a time, do it that way. MR's books are all public domain so no legal entanglements. The only things preventing this are the restrictions placed by the people who put the books here to begin with.

Stitchawl