Torrents and torrents..

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by tompe

This is different. If a person upload a file that you do not download. Why should you feel thankful just because you have the potential to download it? What if you do not want the book?

And even if you download it I feel that it is wrong to base these kind of interaction on being thankful. Being thankful is passive. A better thing is to contribute something back to the shared project of making PD books available in good editions. And you do that because you feel this makes the world a better place and not because you are thankful.

Hear, Hear!

(having uploaded 5 title to various Project Gutenbergs, working on more...and writing bad pulp stories gratis to the public domain.)

I do have one question about uploading here. Is uniqueness (i.e. this is the first upload of the work anywhere) more valued that just proofing and editing and doing format work? I don't know if I should redo titles available elsewhere, do reserve my uploads to completely new scans/works?

[orion2001]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

You can show thanks in ways other than simply saying it. I've known a lot of people who give thanks by giving back.

So why not consider people seeding these ebook torrents back so that it is readily available to the community a means of thanks? Obviously they care enough about the works to actively share it with thousands of other like minded people and in the process making it readily available. In addition, all the great literary works are now distributed across a huge number of people so that even if the original 'seeder' disappears it is still active. On the other hand if tomorrow, MR goes down for whatever reason, all the great work and effort put in by all the uploaders here will be in vain.

I know that torrents have gotten a bad name due to all the filesharing of copyrighted materials, but it is also a highly effective means of sharing files on the internet and it is a little surprising to see so much opposition to it.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Hear, Hear!

(having uploaded 5 title to various Project Gutenbergs, working on more...and writing bad pulp stories gratis to the public domain.)

I do have one question about uploading here. Is uniqueness (i.e. this is the first upload of the work anywhere) more valued that just proofing and editing and doing format work? I don't know if I should redo titles available elsewhere, do reserve my uploads to completely new scans/works?

All uploads are valued. The quality of the upload is valued most. Correcting a terribly formatted eBook is of great value. Offering a new book is great. The value to the community is measured individually based on downloads but there is no problem if the book is not that popular. It is still valued.

If you look in the section on uploads you will occasionally see requests for uploads, which can offer some guidance.

Dale

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

All uploads are valued. The quality of the upload is valued most. Correcting a terribly formatted eBook is of great value. Offering a new book is great. The value to the community is measured individually based on downloads but there is no problem if the book is not that popular. It is still valued.

If you look in the section on uploads you will occasionally see requests for uploads, which can offer some guidance.

Dale

Thanks....

[Stitchawl]

Perhaps an important fact of Internet life that seems to be ignored in this thread is 'lifespan' or 'health' of storage sites. A very valid reason to support file sharing torrents is that all too often the repositories go down!

We all have said to ourselves 'next week I'll download 'Such and Such' book to read. 'Next week.' But what happens when next week we go to that site and find 'page load error,' or some other error message because that site no longer exists because of; hacking, virus attack, financial problems, operator personal problems, hosting difficulties, etc., etc., etc.,

Several years ago there was a wonderful location where one could find and download virtually any piece of guitar sheet music, either in notes, chords, tabs, or lyrics. It was called 'On Line Guitar Archive' or OLGA for short. Thousands and thousands of songs. Searchable by title, author, or genre, OLGA was a guitarist's dream. Right up until it disappeared. Simply disappeared.

Right now, the largest and easiest to use Torrent sight is down because of hacker attack. It's been down for the past two weeks and no one knows for sure if or when it will be back. (True, this site does have both legal and illegal books, and it's up to the downloader to choose to be honest or not.) Hundreds of thousands of books, entire collections sorted by author, genre, alphabet, language, or format, available for... oh wait.... no longer available for download. And maybe it won't be back. Just because some hacker decided he/she was bored on a Saturday afternoon.

Personally, I was very upset to lose OLGA. Personally, I'd be very upset to lose the MR downloads. I'd be very happy to have the option of putting the entire download selection into a small corner of one of my hard drives as insurance against losing the availability of the MR downloads. We buy health insurance, automobile liability insurance, even earthquake and flood insurance. We pay a lot of money for these while at the same time praying we never have to make use of them. Why not free book insurance?

I'm sure not everyone feels the same way. So why not have both options available? If you want them all at once, take them all at once. It would be as fast a download as a good movie. Faster if there were several seeds available. If you prefer to download one book at a time, do it that way. MR's books are all public domain so no legal entanglements. The only things preventing this are the restrictions placed by the people who put the books here to begin with.

Stitchawl

[DaleDe]

As Harry said, if someone want to take this on and develop it they could, independent of MobileRead. Alex has plenty of more pressing work he wants to do with the site. By the way, everything on this site is backed up.

Dale

[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by Stitchawl

Several years ago there was a wonderful location where one could find and download virtually any piece of guitar sheet music, either in notes, chords, tabs, or lyrics. It was called 'On Line Guitar Archive' or OLGA for short. Thousands and thousands of songs. Searchable by title, author, or genre, OLGA was a guitarist's dream. Right up until it disappeared. Simply disappeared.

OLGA went down due to copyright issues. It wasn't a sudden thing really, only was if you just used the site and didn't keep an ear to the ground. I do miss it though.

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by tompe

Being thankful is passive.

I take the entirely opposite pov. Expressing gratitude is a very positive and generous thing to do imho.
In my society many people find it very difficult to say thanks these days, because they consider it a sign of personal weakness - I think that attitude is misguided, and a great pity.

I am very grateful to the Uploaders here, whether I read what they have contributed or not. I can be grateful they have made books available to others, even if I won't read them myself. Not everything has to revolve around me and my wants.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by Stitchawl

Perhaps an important fact of Internet life that seems to be ignored in this thread is 'lifespan' or 'health' of storage sites. A very valid reason to support file sharing torrents is that all too often the repositories go down!

We all have said to ourselves 'next week I'll download 'Such and Such' book to read. 'Next week.' But what happens when next week we go to that site and find 'page load error,' or some other error message because that site no longer exists because of; hacking, virus attack, financial problems, operator personal problems, hosting difficulties, etc., etc., etc.,

Several years ago there was a wonderful location where one could find and download virtually any piece of guitar sheet music, either in notes, chords, tabs, or lyrics. It was called 'On Line Guitar Archive' or OLGA for short. Thousands and thousands of songs. Searchable by title, author, or genre, OLGA was a guitarist's dream. Right up until it disappeared. Simply disappeared.

Right now, the largest and easiest to use Torrent sight is down because of hacker attack. It's been down for the past two weeks and no one knows for sure if or when it will be back. (True, this site does have both legal and illegal books, and it's up to the downloader to choose to be honest or not.) Hundreds of thousands of books, entire collections sorted by author, genre, alphabet, language, or format, available for... oh wait.... no longer available for download. And maybe it won't be back. Just because some hacker decided he/she was bored on a Saturday afternoon.

Personally, I was very upset to lose OLGA. Personally, I'd be very upset to lose the MR downloads. I'd be very happy to have the option of putting the entire download selection into a small corner of one of my hard drives as insurance against losing the availability of the MR downloads. We buy health insurance, automobile liability insurance, even earthquake and flood insurance. We pay a lot of money for these while at the same time praying we never have to make use of them. Why not free book insurance?

I'm sure not everyone feels the same way. So why not have both options available? If you want them all at once, take them all at once. It would be as fast a download as a good movie. Faster if there were several seeds available. If you prefer to download one book at a time, do it that way. MR's books are all public domain so no legal entanglements. The only things preventing this are the restrictions placed by the people who put the books here to begin with.

Stitchawl

I think you're missing the point: there is no restriction that's preventing the books from being put up for download in torrent/bulk form. Yes, a decision has been made that the books aren't going to be put up in that form here - but deciding not to do something is different from restricting other people from doing it.

No one is restricting people from putting books up in torrent or other bulk format: they are simply not choosing to do it themselves. There is a difference.

[fugazied]

I did some searching around torrent sites and found 1-2 public domain ebooks. It does seem a little strange that someone hasn't zipped up a complete package of them for ease of download.
I found plenty of PD sheet music, songs and even a couple of films. But at this stage it seems that for PD you need to go to one of the websites offering direct downloads like project gutenberg.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

I think you're missing the point: there is no restriction that's preventing the books from being put up for download in torrent/bulk form. Yes, a decision has been made that the books aren't going to be put up in that form here - but deciding not to do something is different from restricting other people from doing it.

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.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by Superlucky

Taking the adage literally is to miss the point. Asking something of volunteers who upload books here is not at all like asking something of Sony or Amazon. Going to a friend's house for dinner is different than going to a restaurant; it's only okay to bitch about the service at the latter.

Sure, which is why I specifically pointed out why I don't use the service here, rather than "demanding". If they change it it'd be good, otherwise I'll just use the forum.

fugazied - Well, they're out there on several p2p networks, but not torrent sites. I can think of several reasons why, but we're getting into honestly boring sociology...

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

I think you're missing the point: there is no restriction that's preventing the books from being put up for download in torrent/bulk form. Yes, a decision has been made that the books aren't going to be put up in that form here - but deciding not to do something is different from restricting other people from doing it.

No one is restricting people from putting books up in torrent or other bulk format: they are simply not choosing to do it themselves. There is a difference.

There's another consideration: some uploaders here do not want their books distributed elsewhere, especially not in torrents. While there's likely nothing they could legally do if they were (it's unclear how much formatting is protected by copyright law, and plenty of publishers seem to want you to believe it's entirely covered)--there is something they could do.

They could stop uploading.

This is the reason we have copyright law in the US--to convince artists it's worth their time & effort to offer stuff to the public, because they get to control some of the public use of the materials. Copyright law doesn't cover the MR uploads (for the most part), but the same goal does: Don't annoy the artists you'd like to go on producing works for you.

[Lemurion]

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.

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.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

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."

Well, I do not agree that it is fundamentally different since I the moral system I think is most sensible is a consequence ethical system.

Also if it is trivial and no work involved to give ftp access to all the books for example if somebody asks for it then not doing it seems to me to be a restriction in other ethical systems also.

The reason a lot of people have not downloaded all the books and provided them is because they think some uploaders will complain and try to forbid it. But if you say that it is just starting doing it then it is just for somebody that is inspired to go ahead.