Quote:
Originally Posted by stustaff
The current situation means that the hard work of uploaders will be unseen by me because Downloading from here is harder than getting a (no doubt poorer quality) torrent file elsewhere.
I can only see negatives in this for MR and no positives of the current situation set up.
|
Positives of the current situation:
People who want free MR books have to come here. Have to see comment threads, are exposed to the "similar threads" section underneath each post. Have an opportunity to participate in the discussions.
Negatives of bulk downloads:
More people who collect ebooks, esp. MR ebooks, without saying hi.
One of the goals of MR is to encourage discussion about ebooks. Distributing free, well-formatted ebooks came about because of that goal, and many people at MR, including those formatters, don't want want that ignored.
You *can* come to MR and download books and never join the conversations. And people are welcome to do that. But MR wasn't designed as a free ebook repository; "allow strangers to grab lots of books and go away without talking to anyone" is not one of the goals here.
It's not forbidden at all. Strangers (and anyone else) are very welcome to do that. You don't need a login ID to download the books, so anonymous strangers can even get books. But since that's not the *desired* state--since that's not what's *wanted*--which is ebook-related discussions--MR is not providing resources that would encourage an unwanted goal. Not even for the convenience of the regulars, who would happily stay & discuss even if "all the westerns" could be downloaded in one neat zip file.
For the regulars, it's a minor inconvenience. For ebook-collectors (hoarders?) it's more than that... but the site wasn't created to facilitate easy collecting of ebooks that aren't going to be read & discussed.
It would be worth making bulk downloadable sets
if and only if there were a way to do so that doesn't detract from MR's goal of more ebook communication.