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It's actually not that easy for most books, because most books aren't popular enough to sustain a torrent. A PDF of a book is usually tens or hundreds of megab
by username223 8y ago
It's actually not that easy for most books, because most books aren't popular enough to sustain a torrent. A PDF of a book is usually tens or hundreds of megabytes, which is too big to get through most mail servers. Mass-sharing an ebook takes just enough work that it won't happen for anything that's not a best-seller.
- frosted-flakes 8y agoWhat are you talking about? Ebooks are tiny. It's just text.
- miki123211 8y agoMass sharing a scanned book, particularly one that was not OCRed, indeed usually takes too much work. EBooks, or rather most of them, are tiny epub files with little to no images, 5mb maximum. There are sources distributing ebooks at scale, libgen.io is a prime example, the ebooks channel on IRC highway and myanonamouse, a private ebook and audiobook torrent tracker that some people apparently use also exist. There are rumours of private collections spanning millions of titles that fit on a single, albeit large, hard drive.
- username223 8y agoGotcha -- an epub/mobi of a novel is tiny and easy to host. I was thinking of more design-heavy books with figures and images, which tend to be much larger.
- miki123211 8y agoStill, if people torrent audiobooks (and they do), then eBooks, even with figures, can't be that bad. I've seen hosted collections of audiobooks ranging in the gigabytes and they were not best sellers. No reason why you couldn't do that for ebooks.
- username223 8y agoThanks for the warning. I've published a ~100MB niche ebook, and thought of publishing another. Now I need to reconsider.