Are those Legal or Pirated Copies?

[Market Mutant]

I was looking for eBooks on Mod_Perl and PHP, suddenly I found 200 books on
some site for download including pretty much the whole collection of IT
books in borders. They are not out of dated books. Many are in 2003, still
in bookstores. They are in PDF, and CHM format, and some P** format which I
can not read.

I remember I use to read a book called 'Thinking in Java' for free, because
the auther put it there.

Are nodays, all technical books are free online? The quality of the ebook
shows me that they are not scanned by originally from the publishing house.

 

[Jochen Buennagel]

Are nodays, all technical books are free online? The quality of the ebook
shows me that they are not scanned by originally from the publishing house.

99% of those are illegal pirate copies. Many are taken from the CD
accompanying many books, but a lot of them are ripped from
safari.informit.com (a subscription of which is highly recommended!)

Jochen

 

[Matt Garrish]

I was looking for eBooks on Mod_Perl and PHP, suddenly I found 200 books on
some site for download including pretty much the whole collection of IT
books in borders. They are not out of dated books. Many are in 2003, still
in bookstores. They are in PDF, and CHM format, and some P** format which I
can not read.

You could always be a good boy scout and tip off the publisher(s) about the
site. And if you really need a book and can't afford to go buy one, take a
trip to your local library...

Matt

 

[Robert]

I was looking for eBooks on Mod_Perl and PHP, suddenly I found 200 books on
some site for download including pretty much the whole collection of IT
books in borders. They are not out of dated books. Many are in 2003, still
in bookstores. They are in PDF, and CHM format, and some P** format which I
can not read.

I remember I use to read a book called 'Thinking in Java' for free, because
the auther put it there.

Are nodays, all technical books are free online? The quality of the ebook
shows me that they are not scanned by originally from the publishing house.

I would let the publishers know.

 

[Jochen Buennagel]

I would let the publishers know.

My guess is that the publishers already know. Maybe not about this
specific site, but eBooks of all major IT publishers are all over the
Peer-2-Peer networks such as eDonkey. The publishers are in the same fix
as the movie or the recording industry.

Their big advantage is, that books are a bitch to read on screen and are
expensive to print yourself (compared to burning a downloaded music CD).
Because of this, many people who download the books will go on and buy
them if they find them useful - maybe even some that wouldn't have
bought without the download.

Anyone working for a publisher who can confirm/contradict this?

Jochen

 

[Malcolm Dew-Jones]

Adams-Blake Company ([email protected]) wrote:
: And yes, there is anecdotal evidence to show that free e-books have helped the
: sale of pulp-paper books...

I beleive that. When I have a problem and ths solution involves reading a
book, I typically read the book in the book store. If I keep coming back
to the same book (i.e. I find it useful) then I know its worth while to
buy the book.

 

[Lothar Scholz]

My guess is that the publishers already know. Maybe not about this
specific site, but eBooks of all major IT publishers are all over the
Peer-2-Peer networks such as eDonkey. The publishers are in the same fix
as the movie or the recording industry.

Their big advantage is, that books are a bitch to read on screen and are
expensive to print yourself (compared to burning a downloaded music CD).
Because of this, many people who download the books will go on and buy
them if they find them useful - maybe even some that wouldn't have
bought without the download.

It's my opinion that most IT books are bad rewrites of already
available handbooks and so on. And a lot of books are very confusing
to read. But all of them bring money to the publishing companies.

I doubt that they want eBooks as a quality assurence way for customers
who hate it to spend money (i find this books overpriced) on bad
books.

 

[Matt Garrish]

Their big advantage is, that books are a bitch to read on screen and are
expensive to print yourself (compared to burning a downloaded music CD).

That's certainly part of it, but you're also forgetting that most publishers
use sgml to structure their data, and with a little help from Omnimark to
quickly convert over to html you have yourself a potential cash cow (well, a
new, very low-cost stream of income from the book at any rate).

Matt

 

[Jochen Buennagel]

That's certainly part of it, but you're also forgetting that most publishers
use sgml to structure their data, and with a little help from Omnimark to
quickly convert over to html you have yourself a potential cash cow (well, a
new, very low-cost stream of income from the book at any rate).

I'm not forgetting that, and neither are they. The Safari Tech Bookshelf
(http://safari.itknowledge.com) is proof of that.

Jochen

 

[Jochen Buennagel]

It's my opinion that most IT books are bad rewrites of already
available handbooks and so on. And a lot of books are very confusing
to read.

Glad you said "most", because the above certainly doesn't go for works
such as "Refactoring", "Design Patterns", "The Pragmatic Programmer",
(rest of my bookshelf ommitted for brevity's sake).

I doubt that they want eBooks as a quality assurence way for customers
who hate it to spend money (i find this books overpriced) on bad
books.

Of course tech books are more expensive than Harry Potter and its ilk,
but if you take into account, that the actual printing cost is only a
small part of a books cost (and most tech books are produced to much
higher quality than fiction titles), and that the one-off costs of a
book (typesetting, editing, proofreading etc.) will have to be paid for
from the MUCH smaller number of copies sold (due to very limited
readership because of highly specialized content), and you'll be amazed
that a tech book costs ONLY twice as much as a fiction hardback of
comparable size.

Jochen

 

[Matt Garrish]

I'm not forgetting that, and neither are they. The Safari Tech Bookshelf
(http://safari.itknowledge.com) is proof of that.

My point being, however, that in a perfect world publishers would prefer
that you buy electronic and not paper because the margins are much higher on
the electronic versions. I'm sure they hope that you will buy both a paper
and electronic version of their product (as they usually encourage you to do
in their books), but I've yet to find a publisher that would prefer printing
in paper over electronic. One of the major hurdles (aside from the fact that
many people still prefer to read from a book) is reliable rights management,
and that's part of why publishers are hesitant to move away from paper. You
don't want to "go electronic" only to find out that everyone is sharing your
electronic product and no only the "paper" people were paying for it.
Depending on the content, there's also the fear that your data will be
stolen by someone else (namely a competitor).

As to your comment about publishers already knowing, the redistribution
(peer-to-peer) isn't widely seen as a huge problem (in my experience) as
it's largely limited to technical books (you'd have to ask someone in that
particular field about their concern). No one, however, wants to see their
material posted for free on the internet when they're charging for access at
the same time. I'm sure that the Safari people would be happy for any help
in shutting pirates down, as I don't imagine they have the resources to be
constantly searching the Web for abusers (although you never know if it's a
big part of their business).

Matt

 

[Brandon Blackmoor]

Are nodays, all technical books are free online?

Troll.