February 28, 2011
Pirates!
by Melville House
Last night I committed a crime: I stole 12 of Kurt Vonnegut‘s novels.
After reading David Carnoy‘s recent article about the vast ease and availability of pirated eBooks I wanted to see how easy it really was. It was incredibly easy. The quality was very good. I had not used The Pirate Bay before and I didn’t have the necessary software to download the bit torrent or view the eBooks on my computer. To figure out the process, download the software, and steal the books took about five minutes. Downloading the novels themselves took about one second.
As Carnoy points out, eBooks are tiny files in comparison to audio of video. Downloading thousands of popular Kindle titles takes a matter of minutes. One of the popular downloads is a library of 2,500 Kindle titles that were rated five stars. I did not download this file so I don’t know how long it takes. However long it is, is the amount of time in which a publisher of popular mainstream books loses a customer, perhaps forever. I feel nervous even talking about the process, since the rate of familiarization and frequency of these downloads corresponds directly to a potentially catastrophic moment in the publishing industry.
Carnoy quotes Scott Turow, the president of the Author’s Guild:
[Piracy] has killed large parts of the music industry….Musicians make up for the copies of their songs that get pirated by performing live. I don’t think there will be as many people showing up to hear me read as to hear Beyonce sing. We need to make sure piracy is dealt with effectively.
The commenters in Carnoy’s article (on, of course, the CNET tech website) seem mostly unsympathetic to the publisher’s or author’s plight. Several see the act of downloading thousands of free books to an eReader as no different than going to the library. Publishing optimists, like Neil Gaiman, believe that pirated books actually increase sales. Few seem to agree with Mr. Vonnegut who writes in Deadeye Dick that:
There are several recipes in this book….I have tinkered with the originals, however—so no one should use this novel for a cookbook.
Any serious cook should have the reliable originals in his or her library anyway.
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13 Comments
I’m no expert, but your research on this seems incomplete. Downloading using Bit Torrent is a two-stage process. You appear to have only executed the first stage, downloading the torrent file. Yes, it takes only a second to download a torrent file, but a torrent file does not contain the target file (in this case the 2500 e-books books). The torrent is a tool that instructs your computer how to download the target file. That second stage of the download can actually take many hours.
I’m no expert, but your research on this seems incomplete. Downloading using Bit Torrent is a two-stage process. You appear to have only executed the first stage, downloading the torrent file. Yes, it takes only a second to download a torrent file, but a torrent file does not contain the target file (in this case the 2500 e-books books). The torrent is a tool that instructs your computer how to download the target file. That second stage of the download can actually take many hours.
Since Nathan mentioned that “The quality was very good”, we may suppose that he actually did download those books (though not the 2.5k set, as he also mentioned).
I see your point. It remains unclear to me, however, what novels he downloaded in “about a second”. He also states “Downloading thousands of popular Kindle titles takes a matter of minutes.” I don’t think that’s an accurate assessment of the amount of time it takes to download a file of that size via a torrent. It is more like hours, no?
I see your point. It remains unclear to me, however, what novels he downloaded in “about a second”. He also states “Downloading thousands of popular Kindle titles takes a matter of minutes.” I don’t think that’s an accurate assessment of the amount of time it takes to download a file of that size via a torrent. It is more like hours, no?
I see your point. It remains unclear to me, however, what novels he downloaded in “about a second”. He also states “Downloading thousands of popular Kindle titles takes a matter of minutes.” I don’t think that’s an accurate assessment of the amount of time it takes to download a file of that size via a torrent. It is more like hours, no?
I see your point. It remains unclear to me, however, what novels he downloaded in “about a second”. He also states “Downloading thousands of popular Kindle titles takes a matter of minutes.” I don’t think that’s an accurate assessment of the amount of time it takes to download a file of that size via a torrent. It is more like hours, no?
p.s. the 2.5K download took almost 9 hrs
p.s. the 2.5K download took almost 9 hrs
The file of such size I download from http://www.torrentoff.com almost for 15 minutes, not for hour!
The file of such size I download from http://www.torrentoff.com almost for 15 minutes, not for hour!
Yes. I downloaded 12 novels by Kurt Vonnegut using Miro and then opened them using Calibre. Like I said, it took only a few seconds to steal and start reading the 12 books.
I don’t know how long it takes to download a whole library since I didn’t try it. HOWEVER, I wasn’t writing to precisely define the speed of the downloads, I was writing to emphasize the speed at which book publishing will collapse if people start regularly ripping off thousands of books in… a relatively short amount of time.
Yes. I downloaded 12 novels by Kurt Vonnegut using Miro and then opened them using Calibre. Like I said, it took only a few seconds to steal and start reading the 12 books.
I don’t know how long it takes to download a whole library since I didn’t try it. HOWEVER, I wasn’t writing to precisely define the speed of the downloads, I was writing to emphasize the speed at which book publishing will collapse if people start regularly ripping off thousands of books in… a relatively short amount of time.