"Most e-books in The Netherlands are not paid for."

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

You are living in a world of your imagination.

What he describes is common practice on top-end FTP sites. For every contribution you make, you are allowed to download something else, in a certain ratio.

The bigger the contribution, the higher the ratio to stimulate contribution. You can imagine that the ratio for programs such as Photoshop is higher than the ratio for contributing one ebook.

For example... You can download 2 books in return for providing 1 book, but you get 7 games for providing Photoshop.

These are the pirate websites par excellence. You only get in there if you're a top dog that can get his hands on very new, very big stuff, and very early. In the past, people working in stores would be in these ranks; the store often got games shipped a few days before release, so they'd open one, rip the CD/DVD for the FTP, and put the game back. Then, a no-CD patch and/or serial crack would be created.

In the Netherlands, there has been a huge hunt for these types of FTP's some years back.

[Yapyap]

I realise my measly ~1500 books - legally acquired over the last four years, about 75% of them paid for, the others legally acquired for free - which come from about a dozen different sources (Amazon isn't the be-all and end-all for all people, especially if they'd also like to read books in languages Amazon doesn't offer) are not quite the mythical 40,000, but I really would have a very hard time organising them without Calibre.

Amazon's management options really do suck as soon as you get into 100+ books and if you've bought (and yes, I mean bought) books from elsewhere as well, it gets even more clumsy to try and use the Amazon cloud / Manage My Kindle for any actual ebook management.

Anyway, I guess that makes me a pirate, and someone whom shops (the same ones I've bought hundreds of books from) would apparently need to block, cooperating if needs be. Because, you know, I have a lot of books, and I've dared to shop in more than one place...

(At least I'm in good company, as I rather suspect that the majority of Mobileread users here are in a similar category, give or take a few hundred books.)

And yes, I've heard that the uploads-required system used to work for certain sites, especially in the FTP corner of filesharing, in the past, but I've really never come across a torrent site requiring uploads of new files in order to download something. Keeping a certain upload/download ratio in some cases, yes, but that mostly means that one should keep seeding even after the entire file has downloaded. But I've never exactly looked into the sort of really high-end exclusive pirating clubs that Sirmaru seems to be familiar with.

[QuantumIguana]

The "elite" (or as they sometimes write it "ElItE") Zero-day WareZ trader isn't the typical example of illegal copying. They wouldn't call themselves "elite" if it was typical. Does an equivalent underground of dweebs exist for e-book trading? It's not at all hard to find books to download illegally if you want, which takes away eliteness of it.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

40.000 songs is a huge number of songs to own legally.

I have finished ripping all of my CD's a few weeks ago, and have not acquired any new ones since. My Foobar (the music manager I use) says that I have 10,649 songs, in 716 albums (where one album can have more than one CD's: one of my classical music "albums" is actually a box of 40 CD's; I also own quite Jazz/Blues/Soul albums/box sets that have 10 CD's each).

Foobar says it would take 4 weeks, 5 days, 16 hours, and 47 seconds to play each of my songs ONCE.

It means that owning 40.000 songs would equate owning 2,736 albums. (Which means that one owns at least that many CD's / LP's, as an album can have multiple discs.)

That's a lot of music...

Granted, I've just been reading "for myself" for 13 years (before, it was all required reading for school and college; having to read 25 books in Dutch and 25 in English atop the normal text books was quite enough) and I have been re-reading a lot, while I have been collecting CD's for over 20 years. (Acquiring them went extremely fast in the last 4-5 years though, when I started shopping abroad and discovered Amazon's second-hand marketplace.)

I never said they were legal, in fact given the post I was replying to that piracy of ebooks was worse than that of music I figured that the music was pirated was implicitly implied. Same with 40,000 ebooks, although with both this could be legal in some cases with PD books or a humongous amount of time recording/ripping etc.

I don't have much music, because I can listen to Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen and a few others till the cows come home, which considering that I have no cows could be quite a few years yet. But I am still pretty confident that more people collect, legitimately or not, music than literature.

Helen

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

What he describes is common practice on top-end FTP sites. For every contribution you make, you are allowed to download something else, in a certain ratio.

I know that there are such sites. It was the description of this as "the typical scenario" that really got to me. Well, and most of the rest of his post.

[Waylander]

There always seem to be a lot of fallacious and specious claims by this certain poster in response to the issue of DRM, Calibre and having more than one ebook on your e-reader at a time, and if he spent more time reading than posting these repeated and egregious claims, he might read more than 12 books a year. Not everyone reads as little as you Sirmaru, and not everyone is as in love with Amazon as you are, even if we do use them. Please refrain from making these wild generalisations about people who use the above mentioned ebook storing software and its unofficial drm removal plugin, as people don't like being called a pirate when the appellation is so far from their true condition.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Well, and most of the rest of his post.

LOL. He sometimes seems to have a knack for constructing those kinds of posts

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

LOL. He sometimes seems to have a knack for constructing those kinds of posts

I have uncles that age that make him seem remarkably sane. I do think he has some odd opinions, but then so do I. Pretty sure I actually lived through half the episodes of Trailer Park Boys growing up which has warped my viewpoint on everything no doubt. Perhaps he lived through strange and eerie and occasionally wonderful times as well. I find him a tad quaint, but hardly a blot on the landscape.

Helen

[Katsunami]

Tell me something about old-fashioned opinions

My parents sometimes have opinions that make me sigh and tell them.... mom... dad... I love you both, but please try to get it through your heads that it is NOT 1961 anymore. Nowadays, some things are done differently.

A few weeks ago:

Mom: "What? You E-MAILED AN APPLICATION LETTER?! Those should be written by hand (using a fountain pen!) and posted! E-mailing is even worse than using a typewriter!"
Me: *Sigh* .... *Groan* .... Mom .... 2014. Remeber?
Mom: "Yeah, yeah, but some things NEVER change!"

I give up. In The Netherlands, most people can't write 5 sentences anymore without getting cramps in their hands

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

It's not at all hard to find books to download illegally if you want, which takes away eliteness of it.

Absurdly easy.
The anti-piracy pundits even tell you how to do it.

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-18438_7-20033437-82.html

(Being an old reference, I suspect that particular packaging is gone.)

Getting 40,000 ebooks legally isn't hard.
Nothing magical.

I have 30,000 PD epub editions from the BLACK MASK collection, purchased on DVD.
Plus another 14,000 Gutenberg editions in Mobi/LIT I prettified and converted a few years back from the bulk Gutenberg cd image download.
About a thousand BAEN ebooks from webscriptions going back to the last century and the Promo CDs.
A few hundred Kindle ebooks, only purchased after the tools came out. (Before that I only bought DRM-free or LITs.)

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

He seems to be confusing the minority of exclusive-club torrent sites with the mainstream, which is exactly the kind of reasoning that is to be expected of someone who has repeatedly claimed in this thread alone that all users of Alf and/or calibre are most likely pirates, because only pirates have more than three or four books at a time

Well this thread is about an article that considers that having an average of around 100 not-paid books on ereaders is a piracy issue regardless of the abundance of public domain books and the fact that many ereaders come with preloaded books that people don't always bother to delete. So sirmaru's mistaken impression goes well in line with that kind of reasoning.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

Well this thread is about an article that considers that having an average of around 100 not-paid books on ereaders is a piracy issue regardless of the abundance of public domain books and the fact that many ereaders come with preloaded books that people don't always bother to delete. So sirmaru's mistaken impression goes well in line with that kind of reasoning.

But MobileRead is the home of people who complain against that kind of reasoning, so there is an established tradition that we don't buy into that claim.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I give up. In The Netherlands, most people can't write 5 sentences anymore without getting cramps in their hands

Well, I can! And luckily not all parents are like yours, both my mother and my mother-in-law are not like that. They are both too dependent on modern technology to keep in touch with the rest of the family (even my grandmother is using Facebook and now has a tablet... And she's from before the war!)

Well, back to the topic:
As I've never used torrents, I've no idea how that works, but I have searched for books that I wanted to replace (but aren't available officially) online (just being lazy and "asking" others to scan those books for me I can't get our scanner to work with Windows7) And I never uploaded any of my officially bought books. Newsgroups and IRC are also ways to get those books.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

As I've never used torrents, I've no idea how that works, but I have searched for books that I wanted to replace (but aren't available officially) online (just being lazy and "asking" others to scan those books for me I can't get our scanner to work with Windows7) And I never uploaded any of my officially bought books. Newsgroups and IRC are also ways to get those books.

Do you think that buying a paper book gives you the right to have a free ebook?

[Mivo]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Do you think that buying a paper book gives you the right to have a free ebook?

Morally? Absolutely.