Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
Of course you could write a script that download all the books but it would be much easier if you could just use ftp or something else to download all book. I would say that the lack of a well defined programmatic access to all the books are restricting people.
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While I agree that it would be nice to be able to download books in bulk (I'd be more interested in a user-selectable group than the whole collection), the lack of that ability is not an unfair, inappropriate, or otherwise artificially limiting restriction. Besides, there are more books on MobileRead than any one person could probably read in their lifetime, and that's presuming there was a single person every book appealed to.
For starters, not all books on MobileRead are PD in all countries: some are PD in Canada, but not the US, and vice versa. Any automated system would have to be able to determine a member's location and only provide those books that are in PD there in order to prevent the site from running afoul of legal issues no one wants to face.
However, not providing a service is fundamentally different than restricting another's actions. It's saying, "I'm not going to help you," rather than "You can't do it."
It could also be said that requiring a bulk option would be restricting the uploaders. There's no requirement that anyone providing a download has to make it easy for the downloader (it doesn't make sense to make it hard, but who says people have to do things in ways that make sense?).
Anyone who wants to provide a bulk download option can. No one has to. I personally think people who want to do that would be better off working toward that goal than worrying about why it's not available here.