Piracy Experiment

[Freeshadow]

+1 for pdurrant
someone quoted a blog entry here (somewhere up the thread)
where the author said: "when you have so little, that you can't pay for my books - you have troubles enough and don't need me yelling at you for stealing"

but if one finally can squeeze out 50$ it would be fair to give it the authors you read not the copists.

if they aren't "great" enough for you why do you bother loading (and keeping after trial read) that stuff?
Either this or that

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by Ankh

"An average reader" will be tempted both by the stories of someone he knows, complaints by authors, articles about the internet piracy, etc. If he has crossed the moral line once, it is most likely that he will try again, it is most likely that he will figure out that he has missed "the major sites".

I doubt very much than an average reader even knows pirated material is available. I think the average reader is happily buying e-books from Amazon or BN and barely knows anything about formats and DRM, let alone that it's possible to "liberate" books or that these liberated books are there for the taking. Morality doesn't even come into play--they are unaware.

[unboggling]

In the spirit of wvcherrybomb's experiment and high-minded furtherance of maximizing the human reading experience, I tried the (drumroll, shudder, gasp, faint…) dread DarkNet. I didn't and still don't know the good sites. I'd never used a bit-torrent client before or gone to a bit-torrent link server before. I learned about bit torrent clients and link servers in about 5 minutes with a phone call and a search.

Once on a server I did a search on ".epub". Lo and behold there were thousands of entries and many of those contained hundreds or thousands of books. I examined metadata for appx 20 randomly selected torrent files and of those selected 5 relatively small files marked "safe" where user comments were positive. Within about 30 minutes I had about 500 MB worth of fiction, appx 700 titles. During this process I experienced a big hassle trying to train my firewall to accept peer and seed requests to/from my BT client and was tempted to turn the firewall off for a half hour completely, which I did. (Shudder. I guess I needed better firewall and BT client software both with finer-grained control.)

Added these downloaded books to an empty calibre test library. Randomly viewed 10 titles from each of the 5 original torrent file sources, then also checked a bunch of titles I was interested in. This process took over an hour and would require a lot longer to check every book, not to mention spend any time fixing format problems. My results: out of 700 titles, perhaps 02% were what I consider readable format quality, defined broadly as being "not too aggravating" on a continuum of aggravating to transparent. Of those I kept about 10 titles that I already own in paperback, after examining them very carefully, then trashed everything else.

This was hardly a rigorous experiment but I feel I can generalize enough from it for some personal conclusions:

1. I won't mess around with bit-torrent sites unless and until I'm much more savvy about firewalls, intrusion defense, and network stuff such as forcing use of static IP address instead of DHCP, and assigning dedicated ports as pinholes through firewall. During this experiment I felt like a sacrificial maiden chained to a cliff waiting for a dragon to eat me.

2. The music I tried during this was OK; trashed it all after testing. Didn't try movies. The books weren't worth the time and worry for a newbie to the bit-torrent process.

3. Additional cost for anonymizing/encryption service and better security software would be necessary before I'd feel more comfortable with the entire process. With that money I could buy eBooks instead.

4. I'd be interested in learning what one of those alleged "good, membership-only" book-piracy sites looks like, how much it costs, what the membership/joining process is, the quality of the selection and formats available. Until that experiment, if ever, I will avoid piracy sites and pirated copies.

In summary, the moral issue doesn't bother me for books I already own in physical form, but at present the risk, cost, and time factors prevent piracy from being convenient enough for me. This is in part because I have high standards for what I allow in my library, in part because I'm a noob, and in part because I'm lazy.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by bucsie

One might have $50 but not $5000 which is what a virtual library might cost. So in that, there is a lack of funds. How can one make so that those money get to the authors?

If you are going to get books from the darknet anyway, buy $50 worth of books, download the rest without paying.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Mobileread rules prevent me from saying properly what I think of your immoral behaviour in sending money to people who give away other people's work and solicit money for doing so.

If you are in a position in which really you cannot pay for ebooks, either though lack of funds, or because they are simply unavailable, I can understand why you might feel it reasonable to obtain them in other ways.

But to have money to spend on ebooks and then to spend it in such a way that none of it goes to the people who created the books you enjoy is unconscionable.

True, but it also disproves the theory that people who download unauthorised content will not pay for that content. As well as donations to sites like that, people also pay for premium usenet access, faster (and ulimited) download slots from Rapidshare, and are also almost certainly paying a premium for faster than they need internet access.

If ebooks were priced as the disposable files that they are, or if publishers had a subscription service where you could download as many as you want, how much of that money that is currently going to pirate sites would end up in the hands of writers instead?

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by bucsie

If ebooks were that cheap - 2-3 dollars, the piracy would go down. It wouldn't be extinct, but still...
But then the writers would have to make a living by selling a lot more, which means they would have to either be great writers or find other jobs.

You're forgetting about the very large second hand market for paperbooks. There is no such secondary market for ebooks, so even if everyone who wanted to read your book was paying second hand paperback prices, you would still be better off financially.

You could also stagger prices, so that people who wanted to read it in the first few months of release would pay a bit more than people who waited, but that would most likely just encourage piracy.

[BenBanned]

Originally Posted by unboggling

My results: out of 700 titles, perhaps 02% were what I consider readable format quality, defined broadly as being "not too aggravating" on a continuum of aggravating to transparent. Of those I kept about 10 titles that I already own in paperback, after examining them very carefully, then trashed everything else.

Im gonna have to pull your card on that one. Iv'e been downloading for quite some time. Maybe last year that might of been true but its no longer the case. At least half of the epubs uploaded now are retail, where as before they where converted from other files like txt.

[unboggling]

I stand corrected. Only checked one link server, and that one didn't even have a category for books. Like I said, I don't know the good sites.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by bucsie

One might have $50 but not $5000 which is what a virtual library might cost. So in that, there is a lack of funds. How can one make so that those money get to the authors?

It would still be better to take that $50 and buy one ebook from each of your five favourite authors, than to give it to people who have not contributed to the books at all.

As for ebook costs. The average amount I paid for the ebooks I read (that weren't free) in 2010 was $3.66: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...47&postcount=3

The average amount so far in 2011 is $4.01: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...2&postcount=52

So I reckon you might have been able to find more than five ebooks to spend the $50 on.

Indeed, at Baen books, $50 would get you about 20 ebooks.

You should no more give money to ebook pirates than you should respond to the adverts in spam.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by Xanthe

If you are running Windows...

...

Personally-speaking, on my computer I'm currently running real-time:
Norton Internet Security
SuperAntiSpyware Pro
Mamutu
Zemana AntiLogger
Ad Muncher
Spyware Blaster
WinPatrol Pro

with Spybot Search & Destroy and Malwarebyte's AntiMalware as on-demand scanner. I've hardened my browsers as much as is reasonable and still allow usable functioning of them.

Holy $DEITY!
those programs must eat up 95% of your CPU cycles and slow down any disk activity tenfold.

Have you considered running on Linux? At least for browsing? At least from a virtual machine?
Give Mint Linux a try. Works nicely out of the box and if something screws it anyway, you simply reinstall, leaving your Windows partition untouched.
There *is* some learning curve, but you seem to be experienced veteran ...

[ProfCrash]

Originally Posted by Catlady

I have a few thousand paper books, bought and paid for. Now that I have an e-reader, I'd like to get these books in digital form. I can't possibly buy them all again--they're not even all available, and I don't have that kind of money. I could destroy them and scan them--a daunting task (and I shudder at the thought of destroying them anyway). Or I could find copies that other people have already digitized, and donate my paper books to the library--which can then sell them and make some money to buy more books. It's hard to deny the allure of the latter approach.

I feel your pain. I have been buying back books that I really like because I really like them and I want to read them again. But there are times it is tempting to say screw it and just get them off of the darknet.

The only time I have done this is when books have not been avaialable because the author refuses to make them available.

I am trying my best to buy the legitimate copies. I see the pback to ebook as similar to the hback to pback exchange a few years back. I didn't get the pback for free or at a discounted price because I bought the hback so I shouldn't get the ebook for free because I bought the hbakc or pback.

But if the books are not available, either it is an older series that has not been scanned yet or the author is being stupid, then I don't have a hge problem with getting it off the net. If and when the author make sthe book available as an ebook, I will pay for it again.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

The problem with instituting PLR in the US is that it would benefit bestselling authors while causing libraries not to carry less popular authors (because the PLR payments would come from the same funds used to buy books). This is not the result anyone wants - and as my library alone purchased over 300 hardbacks of the new Tom Clancy, I don't think that many people feel that he's hurting so badly from library lending that we should pay him more and not buy, say, 20 books from lesser known authors.

That's why PLR payments are capped; there's a maximum payment to even the most popular of authors. The beauty of PLR is that (in the UK at least) the money goes directly to the author, not to the publisher.

In all but a few countries with PLR, the payment doesn't go to *any* author whose book is borrowed, but only to those authors with the correct nationality or who write the appropriate language.

True.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by Xanthe

Please, not the "my taxes" argument. The percentage of your taxes - or my taxes for that matter - that actually buys any books is probably in fractions of cents. You are not actually paying full price for any of those books, no where near. In fact, you probably lose more change from your pocket in a year than you actually contribute to the cost of book purchases.

I pay hundreds of dollars in library taxes every year - I don't have a quick way of finding out how much, or how much of it is spent on books. But my library's budget is $38 million per year, spread across the population of 800,000 in the county. That works out to $50 per person across the board. But 92% of the funding comes from property taxes, which means that homeowners (especially single homeowners :-() pay a multiple of that. (Renters do indirectly pay some property tax, of course, and 8% of their budget come from a share of local income tax).

But libraries are expensive - I'm kind of happy that more non-library users don't quite realize how much they may be paying.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

But my library's budget is $38 million per year, spread across the population of 800,000 in the county.

Where do you live? I've just checked, and those figures are almost identical to those for Norfolk, England. (850,000 population, Library (& Museums) budget of £25 million = about $40 million)

[Maggie Leung]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

But libraries are expensive - I'm kind of happy that more non-library users don't quite realize how much they may be paying.

We all benefit from libraries, even if we don't use 'em. I'd happily pay more library taxes.