Do you know where to find illegal e-book content?

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Slite

As long as publishers will not understand that e-books should be available in multiple formats, without DRM and cheaper than paperbacks. There will be a pirated version of just about any book out there.

Simple as that

Wrong. As long as there is something that you can copy and redistribute, there will be pirated versions. And I use copy in a very liberal sense. This can also mean a physical copy...

[Adoby]

A few months ago I decided to see what was out there. So looked at isohunt and used google and downloaded some, quickly had several 1000s of ebooks. A lot was duplicates, some I already had read, but still most likely it was more than I ever would be able to read in the rest of my life.

That was when I decided to get a ebook reader.

I quickly found out that most of what I had found was unreadable on my ebook reader, and I started to investigate different converters. While spending time on that I bought some ebooks that I was interested in.

Now I find that most of what I read is either paid for or available legally for free.

A few books I couldn't find any other way, so I downloaded and converted. Rather fun to fiddle with css and margins and stuff, but idiotic if I put a value on my time. But it is actually rather nice to read a book that you have formatted yourself. That adds another (small) dimension to reading a book.

I have easy access to a LOT of pirated stuff, but still most of what I read is perfectly legal. Free or bought.

I have not bought anything with drm. Will try hard to stay clear...

[Krystian Galaj]

Originally Posted by Stuart Young

I was chatting to Alex recently, regarding e-book piracy. An it got me thinking, how many of you Mobileread(ers) actually know where to get illegal e-book content from? No, this thread isn't for trading links, etc! However given the fact devices like the iLiad are now available, I'm sure we'll be seeing more about this type of content theft in the news.

I wasn't looking for it for a few years, as I have enough of public domain books to read, but about a week ago I thought I'd look around, to see how easy it is to find, starting from zero.

First phase, searching with Google. Within 10 minutes, I found two links.

One - a home page of an e-books scanning group with an irc channel, and guidelines on how to use it, how to ask bots for books, how to download books through DCC. I got onto the channel with chatzilla, tested everything, downloaded a few books to check. No authorization required, save for Identify to NickServ on irc channel. No need for any passwords or belonging to any "secret" group. A *list of files* I downloaded from one of the file serving bots on the channel was 79MB of pure text. One can issue a !find command to a specific book, with a few search terms, and the bot responds with a list of books it has matching those terms. One can also ask a channel ot (which has lists of all bots stored) with a @search command, and get bck a zip file with search results. If I was looking for a specific book, I would go there.
Luckily search engines for books on legal sites are already better than this, faster and look better - but payment methods aren't

Another one - an archive of all books uploaded to several irc channels over the course of years. On a webpage, one of the rapidshare-like sites, many of which showed up over past years, the type with user accounts. The whole archive is on a specific user account. It has 7 years of ebooks, each year in a folder, each month in a subfolder, each day in subfolder of the month. Each day is a zip file, containing about 100 of ebooks - typical size of the zip for a day is 100MB. If I was a collector, I would go there. I could start leeching then, and it would probably take me a month or two, with a good connection, to make a mirror. And this mirror would be 250 GB - zipped. Again, no authorisation of any kind is required to get it all.

Well, there was no second phase, I stopped looking.

Of course, most of the books come in multiple versions - original scan, proofreading versions, etc. so there are many duplicated in this. I've seen 10-15 versions of a single scan in the years past, with progressively less and less errors.

I don't know if the publishers are doing anything to chase such initiatives, but they're huge and practically in plain sight.

[Ken Maltby]

What I find odd about DRM in general, (at least the legal approach in the USA),
is that they go after the breaking of the DRM, not the piracy. This is odd to me
because for the end user breaking the DRM, he has to have purchased the DRMed
eBook in the first place. Breaking the DRM on an eBook you have purchased, can
hardly be considered piracy.

Luck;
Ken

P.S. In other words, you only need to break the DRM, for eBooks that
you have purchased. If you are breaking DRM you are buying eBooks.

[Mr.Hughes]

yep I have downloaded books in the past, but only books i actually owned in print that there were no ebook versions of. things have changed lately, but we still need more publishers to release ebook versions of books at the same time the print book is released. I know authors are a bit ... jumpy .. about taking up this new medium but ebooks are surely the future, and more authors need to see this! they are worried about their books being "out there" and anyone can read them regardless of wether they paid for a copy .. well guess what .. libraries have been letting people do this since forever!

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by Mr.Hughes

what .. libraries have been letting people do this since forever!

Perhaps you believe it. At my country that isn't true since a year and half, more or less, and it was one of the last countries where it happened. Each time a library lends a book, pays some money to author, so perhaps it's free for you, but not for the library or the author.

[Mr.Hughes]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

Perhaps you believe it. At my country that isn't true since a year and half, more or less, and it was one of the last countries where it happened. Each time a library lends a book, pays some money to author, so perhaps it's free for you, but not for the library or the author.

I stand corrected, I wasnt aware that royalties were being paid to authors for library use. is this the case in the uk or the states? I thought the libraries just paid for their copy of the books, and that is all ?

[Mr.Hughes]

http://www.bellvillelibrary.org/publ...or-their-books

well damn, it looks like there is a licence fee after all!

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

What I find odd about DRM in general, (at least the legal approach in the USA),
is that they go after the breaking of the DRM, not the piracy. This is odd to me
because for the end user breaking the DRM, he has to have purchased the DRMed
eBook in the first place. Breaking the DRM on an eBook you have purchased, can
hardly be considered piracy.

Luck;
Ken

P.S. In other words, you only need to break the DRM, for eBooks that
you have purchased. If you are breaking DRM you are buying eBooks.

Not strange at all. One question that usually doesn't appear at discussions about piracy/copyright infringement/whatever is: books don't float on the air; books arrive to darknet because people who have obtained them "legally" (purchase, contests, ARCs) put them there. So, if you stop breaking DRM, it's difficult books arrive to darknet

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by Mr.Hughes

http://www.bellvillelibrary.org/publ...or-their-books

well damn, it looks like there is a licence fee after all!

I know it because there was a big discussion here about it when EC said Spain had to put that fee.

[donovan1983]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

In other words, you only need to break the DRM, for eBooks that you have purchased. If you are breaking DRM you are buying eBooks.

It's rather sad that we even have to resort to breaking the DRM on ebooks. There should be no DRM in the first place. I'm hoping that soon the publishing companies realize that DRM is hindering more than helping them. I think it will take more incidents like the Nineteen Eighty Four debacle with Amazon a few months back to start pushing consumers to demand removal of DRM. Consumers do not like to find out they thought they "purchased" an item but that it's really on lease to them.

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

Not strange at all. One question that usually doesn't appear at discussions about piracy/copyright infringement/whatever is: books don't float on the air; books arrive to darknet because people who have obtained them "legally" (purchase, contests, ARCs) put them there. So, if you stop breaking DRM, it's difficult books arrive to darknet

The Harry Potter books have always been readily available in ebook form despite never having been released in electronic form. Many, if not most, pirated versions of ebooks come from scans of the actual paper book. DRM has done absolutely nothing to stop ebook piracy. If anything it has probably increased piracy since pirated ebooks (like other pirated media) don't have artificial and idiotic restrictions on them like DRM'd media does. The music industry seems to slowly be coming around to the fact that people will purchase content when it's at least as easy and convenient as the pirated stuff and has no artificial restrictions. In a few years I'm sure the book publishing industry will be forced to come around too.

[happy_terd]

I think they keep a lot of them on the internet somewhere.