Torrents and torrents..

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

I can't see why not, but do you have a link to an old discussion (no need to rehash it again).

See post #9 above. Sparrow kindly posted the link to it there.

[Superlucky]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

I disagree completely. Harry has put hundreds of hours into proofreading and formatting ebooks which he then uploads here so that anyone can download and read them free of charge.

Backed. Should we really be looking a gift horse in the mouth? Fifteen seconds to download a (free!) product that takes days to consume doesn't seem that outrageous to me.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

I disagree completely. Harry has put hundreds of hours into proofreading and formatting ebooks which he then uploads here so that anyone can download and read them free of charge.

When someone provides something to you for free, you take it how they give it. This is not DRM or silly restrictions like that: this is simply stating that the giver has the right to decide when and how to give you the gift.

If you think having to take a little bit of time to decide "I want this book," rather than downloading a massive torrent that you would only read a tenth of is too much trouble, then that's your prerogative. That doesn't mean the uploaders need to follow your wishes.

As a reader of ebooks - rather than a bulk downloader - I have no problem. I can still download an entire series much faster than I could read the first volume.

Originally Posted by Superlucky

Backed. Should we really be looking a gift horse in the mouth? Fifteen seconds to download a (free!) product that takes days to consume doesn't seem that outrageous to me.

None of this has anything to do with what's being discussed.

Unless Harry and the other uploaders suppose they have some rights over the public domain titles they prepared, regardless of whether they worked 10 minutes or 10,000 hours, the resulting eBooks are also in the public domain and anybody can do with them anything they wish... as Harry, in fact, already stated.

Vaguely emotional/moralistic appeals do not change that fact.

- Ahi

[HarryT]

Nope, we certainly claim no rights over anything, and if you want to set up your own download site, please go right ahead and do so. We choose not to provide that capability at MR, however, for the reasons that have already been stated.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Nope, we certainly claim no rights over anything, and if you want to set up your own download site, please go right ahead and do so. We choose not to provide that capability at MR, however, for the reasons that have already been stated.

Which is fair enough.

Though, to be frank, I would expect a lot of Mobileread uploaders to completely freak-out about any such attempt.

- Ahi

[bill_mchale]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

Convenience, mostly. I can see how downloading a large group of Public Domain books at once, instead of having to hunt around for individual titles, would be nice. Sure, you may not be interested in all of them, but it's a lot easier to sort through the collection once you have it on your local PC than to try and sort through various sites looking for specific stuff. As you say, book downloads are not very big so grabbing a large set wouldn't take up that much bandwidth.

Umm, I am not sure how it would be easier to download a block of books and then sort through them with whatever tool you have than using the fairly decent web interfaces that PG, Manybooks and others have set up. I will grant that finding books in M.R. is a bit more hit and miss (i.e., it helps if you know exactly what you are looking for).

In any case, if one really wanted to bulk download, it wouldn't be that hard to write a web crawler to access some of these sites (Though I suspect it would violate the terms of service on at least a few of them).

--
Bill

[DixieGal]

Boys! Boys! You are being silly again!

Torrents are everywhere on the web, I've seen 'em and avoided 'em. So go fetch them if you want them. I personally want to ponder, pick and choose, as opposed to having a torrential download of books with no sort of decicion-making involved. I've no need for all of those books clogging up my computer, when they are out there anytime I want one.

As for the uploads section here, well, do we have to do the tired argument again about what our rights as members are? Remember, we really have only the right to leave. This is not a publicly governed forum, but is instead privately owned. And the owner can do as he pleases without asking, although Alex is a sweetie and usually asks anyway.

Now, stop this arguing and go outside and play. It's too nice of a Friday to be cooped up in here arguing.

[bill_mchale]

Originally Posted by ahi

The utility I see in bulk downloading is that the download-prep time (which, per book, is considerably longer than the actual downloading) can be avoided.

Downloading one by one is like loading 200 files onto your liseuse, one at a time, unplugging and plugging back in the USB cable after each book.

- Ahi

What prep time? The only prep time for me to download books is to decide what it is exactly that I want to download. Then I click on the link and the book is available in in 30 seconds on my computer. Sites like feedbooks, manybooks and M.R. often have descriptions of the book that help me decide if its something I would like to try. Lots easier than having 200, 2000 or 30,000 books sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to decide what exactly it is that I want to read.

Ultimately, I think bulk downloads of this sort only displace the "preptime" from download to actual reading time.

In any case, I actually quite enjoy the process of choosing a book to download and read from the legal free sites. Reading little synopsis or maybe a chapter of the book to see if it piques my interest. Its kind of like book shopping but cheaper .

--
Bill

[Jellby]

I guess some people would appreciate some pages being added to to Wiki, in the manner of the Notable eBook Uploads page, that would collect in a succint and ordered way the works of particular authors or genres.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by ahi

None of this has anything to do with what's being discussed.

Unless Harry and the other uploaders suppose they have some rights over the public domain titles they prepared, regardless of whether they worked 10 minutes or 10,000 hours, the resulting eBooks are also in the public domain and anybody can do with them anything they wish... as Harry, in fact, already stated.

Vaguely emotional/moralistic appeals do not change that fact.

- Ahi

It has everything to do with what I was discussing.

The question is not whether someone has the right to download public domain books in torrent form if they desire, but whether people who upload public domain books have the obligation to provide those books in torrent form for those who wish to download them as torrents.

The existence of the right does not create the obligation.

Anyone can do as they wish with public domain material: That includes putting them in torrents, uploading them so they can only be downloaded individually, or even printing them out - slathering them with almond butter -and rubbing the printouts all over their bodies.

As Harry has said, someone could go through and download every book on MR and put them in a single torrent; and that would be fine. However, the majority of uploaders on MR have come to the consensus that MR will not provide books for bulk download and that's fine, too.

The purpose of the public domain is to prevent others from limiting what you can do with content - not to enable others to impose their vision of how you should provide content on you. Anyone can put MR public domain content in a torrent: no one can force someone else to do so.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by bill_mchale

What prep time? The only prep time for me to download books is to decide what it is exactly that I want to download. Then I click on the link and the book is available in in 30 seconds on my computer.

That prep-time, minus the 30 seconds. If you are downloading a few dozen books, it starts to get a bit silly that you are spending more than half your time clicking like a monkey over and over again... when it would take a fraction of the time to get a "The Complete Mobileread Library" torrent and specify the subset of it you actually want to download.

Originally Posted by Lemurion

It has everything to do with what I was discussing.

The question is not whether someone has the right to download public domain books in torrent form if they desire, but whether people who upload public domain books have the obligation to provide those books in torrent form for those who wish to download them as torrents.

The existence of the right does not create the obligation.

I'm not sure when you got the impression that anybody here disagreed with that.

I don't.

- Ahi

[DixieGal]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

... printing them out - slathering them with almond butter -and rubbing the printouts all over their bodies ...

FINALLY a justification for going back to pbooks!

[ahi]

Originally Posted by DixieGal

FINALLY a justification for going back to pbooks!

Suddenly, I feel like we don't know each other well enough...

- Ahi

[BlackVoid]

What if MobileRead goes out of business? What if I want to bulk download for this possibility?

By the way, there are many download managers, but unfortunately the one I have tried could not bulk download from MR. Anyone know about a DL manager that can handle it?

[ahi]

Originally Posted by BlackVoid

What if MobileRead goes out of business? What if I want to bulk download for this possibility?

By the way, there are many download managers, but unfortunately the one I have tried could not bulk download from MR. Anyone know about a DL manager that can handle it?

If you are on linux, wget is always an option.

Would be hard to include the ones hosted off-site though... where the download is just an HTML redirect page.

- Ahi

Ps.: There is a windows version of wget also that you could get.