Quote:
Originally Posted by Stuart Young
I was chatting to Alex recently, regarding e-book piracy. An it got me thinking, how many of you Mobileread(ers) actually know where to get illegal e-book content from? No, this thread isn't for trading links, etc! However given the fact devices like the iLiad are now available, I'm sure we'll be seeing more about this type of content theft in the news.
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I wasn't looking for it for a few years, as I have enough of public domain books to read, but about a week ago I thought I'd look around, to see how easy it is to find, starting from zero.
First phase, searching with Google. Within 10 minutes, I found two links.
One - a home page of an e-books scanning group with an irc channel, and guidelines on how to use it, how to ask bots for books, how to download books through DCC. I got onto the channel with chatzilla, tested everything, downloaded a few books to check. No authorization required, save for Identify to NickServ on irc channel. No need for any passwords or belonging to any "secret" group. A *list of files* I downloaded from one of the file serving bots on the channel was 79MB of pure text. One can issue a !find command to a specific book, with a few search terms, and the bot responds with a list of books it has matching those terms. One can also ask a channel ot (which has lists of all bots stored) with a @search command, and get bck a zip file with search results. If I was looking for a specific book, I would go there.
Luckily search engines for books on legal sites are already better than this, faster and look better - but payment methods aren't
Another one - an archive of all books uploaded to several irc channels over the course of years. On a webpage, one of the rapidshare-like sites, many of which showed up over past years, the type with user accounts. The whole archive is on a specific user account. It has 7 years of ebooks, each year in a folder, each month in a subfolder, each day in subfolder of the month. Each day is a zip file, containing about 100 of ebooks - typical size of the zip for a day is 100MB. If I was a collector, I would go there. I could start leeching then, and it would probably take me a month or two, with a good connection, to make a mirror. And this mirror would be 250 GB - zipped. Again, no authorisation of any kind is required to get it all.
Well, there was no second phase, I stopped looking.
Of course, most of the books come in multiple versions - original scan, proofreading versions, etc. so there are many duplicated in this. I've seen 10-15 versions of a single scan in the years past, with progressively less and less errors.
I don't know if the publishers are doing anything to chase such initiatives, but they're huge and practically in plain sight.