4 ms·

I've never heard of books being online for free. I would guess you'd only find maybe the top 100 bestsellers on bittorrent, or limewire. I doubt most of the b

• commieneko 16y ago
  The other day I downloaded a single torrent that had nearly 1500 science fiction novels in it. The intersection between this torrent and the titles in my bookcases was about 75% (40+ year old collection.) I did spot checks for torrents of random non sf titles, not to download, just to check availability, and the hit rate, with minimal searching, was about 50%. A little googling also found Mega-whosis downloads for lots of titles, including a large collection about half the size of the torrent I downloaded previously. A spot check for technical books, some within the year, turned up about a 40% success rate. The older the book, the more likely I was to find a copy, down to about 5 years or so ago. Older tech books are available, but only titles that are big names in their fields. I did find one rather nice torrent listing older science books. I would say that the online book piracy movement is rolling along pretty well. And this is in support of people willing to put up with the awfulness of reading on a laptop or desktop screen. IMHO, the iPad is _really_ nice for novels, short stories, comics, and manga. Less good for highly formatted technical and illustrated books; but still better than using a laptop.
• jacobolus 16y ago
  This is incorrect. Vast numbers of books have been on Usenet for at least two decades, and that was hardly the earliest internet book “piracy”. Pick an arbitrary “book people want” and it’s quite likely to be online.