Pirating ebooks?

[schneefink]

I was talking about this recently and I'm wondering what you guys think.

Poll #20275

This poll is closed.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 38

It's okay to pirate an ebook when:

never
3 (7.9%)

you already own the ebook but it's on a different device
27 (71.1%)

you already own a physical copy of the book
17 (44.7%)

you used to own a copy of the book but don't anymore
4 (10.5%)

the library has a copy of the book
2 (5.3%)

the author is a terrible person that you don't want to give money to
16 (42.1%)

you can't afford to buy it
9 (23.7%)

you can't afford to buy it right now but plan to buy it once you can
11 (28.9%)

you can't buy it for technical reasons
21 (55.3%)

other (please explain in a comment)
8 (21.1%)

Comments

[melannen]

Also: it was offered to you by a friend, the equivalent of them passing you their physical copy;
You don't actually want to read it, you just need to look up that one quote/scene, and you can't find it on gbooks;
The publisher is a terrible person, and the author/editors aren't getting money for it anyway (I have zero shame pirating academic journals)
You paid for a copy, but the drm/formatting/editing issues make the Russian pirate site a better experience to read.

[schneefink]

I don't even consider exchanging ebooks with friends pirating if one of you got the book legally, and the other doesn't spread it to more people. (Of course it can be tempting not to ask where they got it from...)

And uh, nice of the Russian pirate site to at least clean up their ebook copies, I guess ^^

[melannen]

Well, I also include in that things like "uploaded to share with everyone in the chat room" or whatever. :p but it's technically illegal either way.


The pirate fiction websites aren't great, but some pro ebooks set a Really low bar. The websites tend to a) be really basic web-formatted, so they don't have, like, pagination or font issues; and b) be in a format where you could easily, say, search-replace to fix obvious unicode issues. Sometimes it's still easier.