The hunt for more titles

[spooky69]

Originally Posted by Patricia

Spooky 69: we are a legitimate site and do not condone such illegal activities. Authors have to make a living. Even Tom Clancy (though he doesn't seem to realise that he has a potential ebook readership).

Don't get me wrong; my unofficial, pedestrian advice that everybody in the world should steal as many English-language books as they can get their hands on because they will never be caught is just that: unofficial and pedestrian. Still, this is an informational website, and everybody should have access to the information that they can steal their hearts out in terms of any available text and there will never be any long-term consequences from pursuing that action to the full extent that one's self-declared morality could possibly come to bear. Basically, and here are some lyrics I wrote:

Dilemma feat. Kelly Rowland

Freeee book
Free, free book
Freeeeeeeeeeeeeee book

Why would I pay for the privelage of reading this text?
What's next? Paying for my music? Lead goo sick!
Where can you find a guy like me on the internet?
Stealing books and music, it's never no sweat!

Do the piracy of media mambo
You can never be caught, but better
Do the piracy of media mambo
Even in the U.S. if you are stealing movies, Qwest will just potentially send you a strongly-worded letter but this will not actually have any effect on your internet access!

Internet ac-cess?
People in some African countries pack less!
Except in Nigeria
Feel the fear-ia
You scam artists, why is the massacre in Sudan
And not in Nigeria or Iran

Hoo-hah
I like to choose-ah
My rights, right?
Time to put up a fight?

Yes!
No!
Yes!
No!
The people saying "no" have got to go!
It's time to fight for what's right...
All through the night...
All right!

Have you never seen...the desperate child...
Clutching at...the teat...
Of socieeeeettttttttyyyyyy?

It's so obvious!
What?
It's so typical!
I know!
Who own the highways?
Republicans!
Who owns the telephone poles?
Democrats!

Aaaand...
So...
Where do they stand on the issues?
Like Gay Robot said, "Pass the tissues; we all got issues!"
Will it be Barack?
Will it be McCaine
This Reebok rebate tension is driving...me...absolutely...
Insaaaaane!

2008
Make it great
2008
Pull your weight

I'll be right behind you in my car
Together we can go far
This is the issue; yes
Having fun is the bessssss-tuh!

Soooooo
Ohhhhhh
Let me go!
Make some peace!
In the Middle East..at least!


That's all the lyrics I can write for one night, but even though this song doesn't have a tune ye, I think you'd agree that it can be very inspirational!

[RCR]

Originally Posted by Patricia

Spooky 69: we are a legitimate site and do not condone such illegal activities.

I love reading screenplays. I find they're more tightly written than novels and (obviously) more visual. A simple google search of "screenplays" finds a huge heap on the net in basic html/txt, which makes them easy to download and convert.

I've downloaded and converted some golden oldies and some recent titles.

This is for my own use, and I have no intention of sharing them. Could someone tell me if this is illegal to do? If I had saved the original screenplay to my desktop computer, and then read it there, is that okay?

Does the act of converting the file, and putting it on my Sony make it illegal?

Or are the screenplays, even though they are in plain view on the net, and not on torrent, illegal in themselves?

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by Patricia

Spooky 69: we are a legitimate site and do not condone such illegal activities. Authors have to make a living. Even Tom Clancy (though he doesn't seem to realise that he has a potential ebook readership).

Part of the problem is that so many titles are *NOT* in ANY ebook format and quite probably won't be available as such for some time to come. I just hate it when I can get ONE of Susan McBride's 'Debutante Dropout' mysteries (and not the first one), but none of the others. Or being able to get "The Hunters" and "The Shooters" from W.E.B. Griffin's latest series, but not the first two.

And I really WANT to get rid of my paperbacks. I'm never going to buy McBride's DD series in hardcover and the mmpbs just soak up floor space. So between the publishers not wanting to offer ebook versions (or wanting hardcover prices for ebooks when they already have mmpb versions on the shelves), or the publishers not giving a damn about filling out the ebook lists with older books from current authors, it gets tempting to search the IRC channels, usenet and the torrents for 'illegal' copies.

Part of the issue is that so many people want to delay issuing in ebook format and that just drives readers who want to embrace the new tech to find other sources. Hello! I think it's been proven that even threat of lawsuits and criminal prosecution won't prevent 'customers' finding alternative sources - even if that means not paying for the ebooks.

Baen figured it out. Baen offers it's books in both dead-tree and ebook formats. Baen doesn't charge ridiculous prices (Okay, it charges $15 for e-ARCs (electronic Advanced Reader Copies).) and offers the ebooks in a variety of formats. Baen's authors benefit from this.

Derek

Just by looking at the interest in Convert LIT and MobiDeDrm shows how much people want to get legitimate books (properly formatted, legal, and as a real purchase for ownership) as opposed to less ethical means.

Most of us want to do right by authors and publishers. We want to buy their wares. We want to fund their livelihoods. We want their blasted books! They want....time to stop and things to stay as they are. Change to them is often bad. (Old enough here to remember when the big argument was changing paper quality in paperbacks to a better grade. Publishers were sure that would bankrupt the paperback market since no one reads a PB more than once.)

Baen was the first publisher that really got my cash and that was due not so much to selection (of which we can agree there is a niche market compared to mainstream) but the fact that I could move the books where I needed them. Because of their openness and constant updating they now get cash from me every month. Even if the monthly selection isn't that interesting to me it's worth a gamble to see if there is something new.

ConvertLIT caused my book budget to increase even further. With that, more mainstream books became usable on the reading devices. Still, some books were Mobi only. Now that may be changed also and yet another budget increase is in the works.

Despite all that, yes, some books are just not available legitimately. Volumes 2 and 3 of the Dresden files. 12 volumes of the Wild Card series. Armor. The Sten novels. The infamous Harry Potter series. And on, and on. Seeing something like this just gives the impression that publishers either don't understand the markets that are growing (probably the main problem) or don't care (unlikely since it is what makes them money).

Kinda like here at work. If management doesn't understand something, they ignore it or try to regulate it out of existence. Even if it will cause longterm harm by ignoring it is still relegated to the closet with other bogeymen. If something is ignored, it can't affect you. (A bit like playing peek-a-boo with a baby.)

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Part of the issue is that so many people want to delay issuing in ebook format and that just drives readers who want to embrace the new tech to find other sources. Hello! I think it's been proven that even threat of lawsuits and criminal prosecution won't prevent 'customers' finding alternative sources - even if that means not paying for the ebooks.

Agreed. If I want an e-book version of a p-book (and up until recently I've been reading LIT's on my comp), I'll look if I can buy it somewhere first. If after searching quite carefully for it (even in obscure formats... I'll convert it, no problem) I don't find it, I'll pirate it and won't feel the slightest bit of remorse after doing it... hey, if they don't want my money, fine...

[vivaldirules]

I did not desire to spark another storm about legal/ethical concerns of downloading content. I only meant to voice my opinion that the presence of a few obscure DRM removal techniques will not have any impact on the vast majority of owners of ebook readers. Who wants to hunt to see if such tools exist, find where they are at, figure out what Python is, download and install that, and then figure out how to use it to fix a problem they shouldn't have had to deal with in the first place? Give me a break! So I think that the poor availability of ebooks to those owners will remain a major issue until all of the vendors of these readers (and the publishers and authors whose works they sell) get serious about making much more content available. In my own case, I see that these techniques are available to me and could use them but I have no desire at all to fool with such nonsense - at least not until there's that one ebook in some other format that I just can't live without!

[Roy White]

Don't feed the trolls

[RSaunders]

Originally Posted by Roy White

Don't feed the trolls

I think there's a real insight in Roy's comment. Authors deserve to be paid for their work. Programmers, on the other hand, only deserve to get paid when their code works. A book+DRM is part book and part program. I'd gladly pay for the book part, if I could get it without the DRM part. A publisher, who did NOT write the book, paid for the DRM part. Perfect, unbreakable, DRM would be the sort of program I'd pay for. Not that I've ever seen such a thing attached to a book. Cheap, easy-to-undo, DRM is pretty common. That's not a program that I'd pay to encourage.

Authors are welcome to my money, DRM programmers = trolls, are not.

[Roy White]

My comment was actually directed at the general tone of the above 'spooky' trolls post. I've been on a lot of forums and there are always people who dont really have much of an opinion one way or the other but who LOVE to get stuff going, like a Jr high kid who throws rocks at a hornets nest near the bus stop just to watch other kids get stung.

Its so blatantly obvious that internet thievery is really stealing and that downloading illegal books is really against the law and is really ripping Authors off just as completely as if you stole a five dollar bill out of their wallet at Burger King when they weren't looking that for anyone to come on here and 'claim' that they think its ok to download illegal books and that we should go crazy and download every single book on the internet can't possibly REALLY think that. So, the kid throws a rock at the hornets nest then gets a thrill out of the buzz and sting afterward. You know, trolling like a fisherman for a bite. (And here I am feeding the troll, offense meant 'spooky69 ya idjit!!!! by dignifying his ridiculous troll and song with a reply) Folks the Emperor has no clothes on. And the troll serves no real purpose on a board like this.
I believe Freedom of speech means you have the right to offend someone so you have the right to troll on this board. And I have the right to call you an idjit for trolling.
I wont feed you again Spooky so when you reply with another troll hoping to start a flame war, (Which is your real reason for your idiotic 'song' ) I wont reply...

Roy

[Roy White]

YA IDJIT!

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by Roy White

YA IDJIT!

Thank you! Absurdly bad behaviours need to be confronted and in public even if doing so is unpleasant.

[Cthulhu]

I'm not trying to flame anyone, and amn't the last bit interested in fishing, but I must say this: there is something amiss with applying out-dated business models to modern formats.

This is a slippery slope, but is possessing an electronic/digital copy of a text that a person legally purchased not akin to ripping the audio data on a CD to a computer' hard drive? People love that option, that ease of use; Apple is making money of the idea as a business model (so is Amazon, et al). Indeed, sadly, this wonderful move toward being digital and the 'singularity' encourage corruption with its simplicity.

That being said, malicious "piracy" to prove a point is asinine.

Does anyone on the forum have the means to contact the appropriate rep. at any publisher? Would glaldy pester the correct person to get digital copies of some of my favourite books....
maybe I should start a petition we can send to Penguin, McGraw-Hill, and their cohorts.

[waden34]

A petition to the publishers is a good idea, even though I'm not sure how effective it would be. One of the main reasons I got my reader was so I could reclaim the large space my bookshelves currently take up, so it is disheartening to not see some of the books I love in a legitimate digital format.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by RSaunders

Perfect, unbreakable, DRM would be the sort of program I'd pay for. Not that I've ever seen such a thing attached to a book. Cheap, easy-to-undo, DRM is pretty common. That's not a program that I'd pay to encourage.

I don't ever expect to see perfect unbreakable DRM.

It's the old conundrum of computer security. The more secure a system is, the harder it is to use, and the more creative the users get about circumventing it. The only perfectly secure computer is the one that is disconnected from the network, powered off, and locked in a bank vault somewhere, and even then I'm not 100% sure about the "secure". I'm am sure it's perfectly unusable.

The urge to apply DRM at all stems from a viewpoint that the market isn't willing to pay for electronic content unless forced to, and Steps Must Be Taken to make sure they don't simply give it away to all their friends. My take is that the market will pay for electronic content, if it's content they want to read, fairly priced, and easy to purchase. Despite the number of torrent files out there pointing to sourrces for ripped copies of hit albums, Apple still does very well thank you with iTunes. Apple understands that offering what the customer wants, pricing it properly, and making it easy to buy works. People will pay for it.

Publishing may catch on someday. We're at least beginning to see cracks in that ice.
______
Dennis

[dhbailey]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

[snip]

Publishing may catch on someday. We're at least beginning to see cracks in that ice.
______
Dennis

The recording industry was incredibly slow to adopt the new electronic media and distribution models and got burned horribly in the procress. Aiding that destruction of the older monolithic "recording industry" was the ability of many artists to get their music recorded professionally and distributed without the use of the record labels. What is left of the industry has just barely managed to salvage itself with its formerly huge ego bruised and battered but survivable.

But one very important factor in the whole recording industry debacle is that so many people listen to music and were willing to do whatever they had to to get the music onto the new portable electronic listening devices. So there was a huge potential market for the recording industry to adapt to.

The book publishing industry is much smaller than the recording industry and is even more bound (pun intended) by tradition than the recording industry. The book publishing industry is something like 600 years old (going back to Gutenberg -- much older of course if one takes into account all the hand manuscripts before the movable type printing press was invented) and the recording industry was only 100 years old or so when it had to scurry to save itself.

Far fewer people read books than listen to music, and listening to music is something many people do in far more varied settings than reading books is possible. You can listen to music while doing many jobs, while walking in the park, while exercising, while in bed with your eyes closed trying to fall asleep, while reading, while driving or riding in cars or public transportation.

Reading a book is only possible in a much reduced subset of situations where one can listen to music, so there is less public outcry for electronic distribution, and so far, less of an economic incentive for the publishing industry and authors to pursue electronic distribution. Adding to the problem for publishers is that they saw what happened to the recording industry, and are overly cautious about trying to find means of distribution which will protect their works from piracy.

Yet another complicating factor is that the court decisions (as opposed to provisions actually written into the copyright law itself) which have supported consumers' rights to convert audio into different formats (location shifting, I believe it's called, which allows a person with an LP or CD to record it to a cassette to listen in the car, or more recently convert it to mp3 files for use in a location where the originally purchased medium can't be used) or to record TV shows to watch at a later time (time shifting -- so you can watch a program which airs when you're at work and unable to see it) haven't been put to the court test to see if they apply to printed materials.

In other words, we don't know (at least I haven't heard of any court cases which have been decided) if it will be considered legal "fair use" by the courts for us to convert printed materials into electronic media in the same manner as has been decided for audio and for TV broadcasts.

It well may be the same (i.e. physical format to electronic format, or conversion among electronic formats) but we don't know yet.

And the publishing industry and authors are so worried about being burned the same way that recording artists and the recording industry and the songwriters were burned.

So I think it is important that we who are the early adopters of the ebook formats need to prove that it will be a safe market for the publishers and authors to move into by not downloading copyrighted materials we haven't paid for, and not sharing the files we have purchased with others beyond what is allowed by the companies we purchase from.

After all, Sony allows 6 devices (computers/readers) to be registered to the same account, so if there is a family of 4 who all have their own reader, they can share the books very easily if they have one account.

Other publishers such as Baen are going on the "we trust our customers" business model.

The whole thing is still so young that it will be a while before it shakes out. And while it does shake itself out, we have to remember that stealing is stealing even if done electronically and not actually depriving someone of a physical item which cost them money to produce.