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Free Books Online
gaijin99 writes: "Kinda old, but Baen Books is letting any of their authors put up their books, for free, online. They are putting them up at the Baen Library No strings attached, downloadable in many formats. Apparently it got started when author Eric Flint said that online piracy didn't matter to book sales. Challenged to prove this, he got Baen to build the 'Free Online Library.' His position is that it will improve the sale of his books. Only six authors right now, but it looks good."
Rich
BugBear
Ignorance is curable. Stupid is forever.
True. Many of my friends collect hard covers, and the key word is collect. They buy the big fancy book partly just to have it sit on the shelf and look pretty.
I on the other hand already have over a thousand books and don't need them to be bigger. I prefer small and portable over large and clunky.
I do dislike how they sell the books, with the hardcovers being the ones the author makes money off of. I'd much rather buy the paperback that I find convenient and tip the author an extra buck or two.
Many authors are offended if people wait for the paperbacks, but excuse me, it's not worth the extra $20 for a bigger, less useful book, just to make a little more money for them.
Publishers, as they stand today, sure.
But Baen's webscription is run by the publisher. They supply the editors, match the authors with the cover artists, help market things, and take care of the financial side. That'll always be useful. The only difference is that they won't be absolutely required so they'll have to compete for the market.
And even the paper pushers won't go out of business. It's just that instead of paying the paper tax to be able to read, I'll buy the book online and buy a poster to go on the walls. They'll adapt and survive. Some at any rate.
It'll be quite a while before paper isn't the best for some things. (Even books, in many settings.)
Money can be exchanged for peanuts. :)
I actually don't want liner notes, or cover art. I still want to support the artist, but CDs are such a pain. I immediately rip (to mp3) any that I do get and toss them into a box where I leave them.
So I don't buy CDs, or rather, I do, but want to stop. That's why the idea of tipping the artist directly is so great. I can pay 1/4 of what I would have for the CD and the artist gets 4 times as much (easily). So if I spend the same ammount I can get four times as much music, and the RIAA doesn't get a dime.
Why waste the money buying a paper book that you don't want?
Go to fairtunes.org and tip the author. If you want to tip the full cover price, I'm sure they'd love it, but if you want to tip maybe a 1/4 or so (because all you're paying for is the words) then that's fine too.
If the author isn't listed, then tell some friends because I think they only tip once the ammount is over $50 or so.
That's a much better way than buy paper you don't want, supporting a system that you don't need.
Someone--no, not just someone--the head of a well-known publishing company and its authors--is clued?
what a concept. This may revolutionize my book-buying tendencies. I wonder if BookPeople has a Baen publishing section (wise-ass reply, "look in sci-fi/fantasy")
I'm impressed beyond words. This is great. After the gloom and doom of the MPAA and RIAA repeating their tired arguments from the betamax time-shifting trials 20 years later, it's wonderful to see that some people who are at the head of their corporations 'get it'.
Now, if only they had a better webmaster...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
King is a money grubbing asshole.
Baen is willing to show the consumer is books, and let them choose to pay if they think it's worth while.
King wanted people to pay by the chapter, and not see the goods until after they paid. H's also a jerk, he wanted to charge paper prices for something that cost him less, so he'd make like ten times as much as before, without giving anything back to the customer. And then he cancelled the project, screwing the people who had paid.
We'd laugh at someone selling MP3s for CD prices, why is it reasonable that King wanted to change paper prices for an ebook? Especially since King has his head up his anus and wants people to pay twice for another copy of the bits, despite just wanting to read it in a new place. That may be correct under a strict interpretation of copyright law, but it makes no sense if you understand how the electronic media works.
But, to answer the other part of the question, yes, I am supporting Baen. (Webscriptions, not in paper.)
I think it's a great idea. If you go there to read the book, and you like it, chances are you'll wanna go out and buy the actual book so you're not tied to the computer when reading it. If I saw a book online, I'm not gonna sit there and read the whole thing... I'll read maybe a chapter or two, then I'll go buy it if it's any good.
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Join
I'm a native German speaker, so you don't have to translate it for me. But what is it supposed to mean in the context of
Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences!
Germany = Nazi-Germany?
Or is it a quote?
He said as he was caught using Napster to download the latest Metallica single
Rich
I can only say for computer reading (not PDA books) that it is very difficult to sit there for hours on end and read the text on the screen. The text starts to blur (and from the little that I read on this site) I found it very difficult to read (there wasn't really any space between the lines and it just made it all jumble together).
It is a wonderful idea, and I appauled the creator, but for now I will stick to Amazon and the library.
I agree with most others that reading books online isn't as convenient as paper versions at the moment, but it will one day be. There is even the possibility of a book with paper (or very much paper like) pages that can change it's text. That may seem a bit far out now, but in 20 years it could very well be a reality.
And I am willing to pay the same amount for the online book as I would pay for the physical version. Of course with such great advances as we have even now, I get to read the book first and decide how much I would like to pay for it.
So I ask again, where is the link to pay for these books?
Another thing to do if you support this experiment with free (-as-in-beer) information is to write a review of one of these books on The Assayer, which is a nonprofit site I run for user-submitted book reviews with an emphasis on free books. All reviews are copyleft licensed, and the site is noncommercial.
All ten of the Baen books are now listed (so far without reviews) in the site's literature section.
One of the main arguments people have made against free books is that without a publisher, you have no filter in place to get rid of the junk. The Assayer aims to disprove that argument by providing a forum for people to discuss which free books are good and which are bad.
</self-promotion>
By supporting Baen in this experiment, you'll also be helping encourage publishers to take the next step, which is to publish books that are free-as-in-speech, or at least partially free-as-in-speech, e.g. using OPL with the A&B options that prevent other print publishers from selling the same book in print. Until they take that step, there's always the possibility that publishers will make free-as-in-beer books not free again. This has happened with about 30 Macmillan computer science titles. You'll find them all listed on IPL as if they were free, but when you click on the link, you get a message saying they're no longer available for free.
You also have to realize that the publishing industry really doesn't know how this is going to play out. They'll try stuff and see if it works. They'll try antibooks. They'll try lame stuff like putting books online, but only with every single page as a bitmap, so that it's completely impractical to read them. (iUniverse, Dorling Kindersley, and Electric Press do this.)
The Assayer - free-information book reviews
Find free books.
...told his publisher it wouldn't make any difference to sales if the paperback and hardcover were published simultaneously, because they were bought by two disjoint sets of readers.
Though skeptical, they tried it, and surprise! it was so.
Unfortunately, I forget who the publisher was, though I suspect Doubleday. He wrote about it in one of his many essays.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
Been there, done that, got the CD (Me First and the Gimme Gimmes "Have a Ball"). However, let's assume that absolutely no one would be willing to pay for a commercially available work that they could easily get for free online. So suddenly Weber has thousands of people downloading and reading "On Basilisk Station", but not paying him any money. But there's a catch.
There are something like 9 or 10 Honor Harrington novels that Weber's written. Only the first one is available for download. This means that those people who enjoyed "On Basilisk Station" and want more will wander to their local bookstore or amazon.com and start forking over cash. People who, if not for the freely available copy of "On Basilisk Station", might never have located his books in the first place.
It's a win-win situation. Customers get a free book with no obligation. Authors get a means to expand their audience and (hopefully) sell more of their other books.
OK, I hereby nominate you for a '+1, funny.' But seriously, a lot of people think that the user's right to modify the content is the main point of open source, so they think open-source books are therefore a stupid idea. Actually, open-sourcing a novel (I don't think it's been done yet?) wouldn't mean you could modify the version the author distributed. It's like Linux. You don't get to modify the version of the kernel that Linus distributes unless he decided to let you.
And when it comes to nonfiction, it can make a lot of sense to allow people to fork off their own versions.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews
Find free books.
great idea. let's make the teachers do even more work. it's not enough that they have to handle 30 to 40 inattentive, disobedient, ritalin-addled children for six hours a day for less money than they could make working at mcdonalds. let's force them all to buy computers with their tiny income, and do more work when they get home.
are you in human resources?
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Only two downsides to the Rocket device are the slow bootup time (close to 10 seconds) and the extra weight. It's just a little too heavy to hold for a long time.
I've already complained to Amazon that they only support the Microsoft reader, of course. There's even a bit in their FAQ where they say they don't support handhelds yet. Oh, joy.
Duane
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Napster has been responsible for most of my recent CD purchases. Tired of getting burned by CDs with two good songs and 10 terrible ones, I'd drifted away from modern music, but then Napster came along, and I got to preview all the music for a download. I ended up buying CDs of groups I never would have listened to otherwise, or had only heard one or two songs by them on the radio.
I'd chalked up the whole "Harry Potter" thing to the "Latest cool thingine" style craze that brought us Pokemon. Then I stumbled across the first three books in text form on Usenet. Yes, I read the first three for free, but I got addicted to books I NEVER would have read otherwise. I bought the fourth book, will be buying the rest of the series as it comes out (Unless it starts to suck) and will probably take my little sister to see the movie when it comes out.
Bottom line is, having books and music available online has caused me to buy MORE instead of less.
Heck, I even ended up buying the hard copy of an O'Reily book I already had in the Perl CD Bookshelf because I wanted a hard copy to mark up, dog ear and bookmark instead of having to fire up my browser every time I wanted to look up a code snippet.
And now I've read the first chapter to Black on Black and look forward to perusing it on my Palm during my next flight.
www.matthewmiller.net
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
.....Bruce Eckel at http://www.bruceeckel.com . All his books are free on the net. I downloaded "Thinking in Java 2" and started printing it out at work a chapter at a time, 2-up, double-sided on A4 and storing it in a ring-binder. After about 3 chapters, I was sick of the inconvenience, so went out and brought the book (a very worthwhile investment, I might add).
I suspect a LOT of people have done the same thing, and Bruce seems to be doing OK as a result. He makes some very good comments about it halfway down the page at http://www.bruceeckel.com/notes.html , worth reading.
I really don't see e-books taking off until we get those high resolution, paperback-sized flexible e-paper things. The reason books have lasted so long in their present form factor is convenience, which e-books currently don't have.
Since when have musicians stopped making music??? Look! There's Brittney Spears, and Eminem and... Oh. I see your point.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I wrote a PostgreSQL book at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/awbook.html. The book is online, but I sold 2,155 print copies in the first month. Clearly having it online has helped book sales.
As I look up on my bookshelf, amongst no less than 30 O'Reilly books (geek bragging :) I have Using Samba. If you take a look at that link you will notice that there are two links off of it, one in HTML and the other in PDF format. This should not be a surprise to most /.ers. O'Reilly has been big on this for some time.
Still, I began reading Using Samba online, and after reading much of it I grabbed the book because it was so useful, sure, I can load it into my palm pilot, but that is a pain in the ass. I suppose I could print it out too, but I prefer dead-tree form.
The other advantage to this is of course that when I am working on a server I don't have the book with me on location, so I fire up a browser and read.
I also purchased The Unix CD Bookshelf. I already have Unix Power Tools in dead-tree format, but being able to search the HTML version is very handy. Sure, I know where to get the warez version of this CD, and maybe the purchased edition comes with Unix in a Nutshell as a bonus, but I bought the set because it was valuable to me, and I support O'Reilly. Does having books online increase readership? I certanly think so, my friend who has both of the O'Reilly CD compilations that he got from Warez Ftp has not read them, well, he claims he read Building Internet firewalls, and TCP/IP Network Administration. But then again, he also claims that he read Running Linux in one day and grokked it all (yet he can't seem to use a bash prompt very well...)The truth is, he hardly got anything out of the online versions, I do, but I mainly use the online material for reference, not for general reading.
There is no doubt in my mind that O'Reillys decision to place some of their books on the web for download (or in plain HTML on CD) has greatly increased my purchase of their books.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
How horrible your life must have been without "libraries" or "record stores" in your town, so that you had to turn to the web before you could read a book before purchasing it or sample a CD before buying it.
You're ignoring the fact that libraries and record stores are only filled with the products put out by the same companies which are fighting mp3s/ebooks. He had to turn to the web because he was sick of all the substandard material being produced by the major record companies and publishing houses.
In addition I have been reading alot of literature lately, which for either popularity or political reasons isn't readily available in the states. I have to read it online or go to certain lengths to get it. Other examples might be people who are not near a library or one of the record stores which allow you to listen to music before you buy it. Some of us have to walk in the snow or ride a bus if we want to go somewhere. We're not all priveledged enough to have a car, or tastes and interests that are convieniently in the majority, like you apparently are.
-The Wicked One
These books are free as in "free beer" but not free as in unfettered. The GNU Free Documentation License covers GNU manuals, but I don't see anything similar on the Baen site.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
"If you had the equipment to burn the CDs and print the labels on them (if you were so concerned about appearing cool) you would be a damn fool to pay the money for the CD."
And yet, though I have the equipment to burn CDs and print labels on them, though I make heavy use of Napster, I continue to purchase CDs. Lots of CDs. I'm a bit insulted at being called a fool.
I want to give artists I enjoy money. The artist is alot more likely to create more music if I'm paying him. Purchasing a CD is a convient way to do this. (Sadly, musicians see very little of that money, but that's a different problem.) A CD also marks someone as a real fan.
I have a fairly technical group of friends. They all have easy access to CD burners and high quality printing. They make heavy use of Napster. They uniformly purchase lots of CDs.
Sure there are people who will happily leech this free content. But if these people don't feel ethically bound to pay up, why will they pay up if it isn't available for free legally? The risks of copyright infringement for an individual are negligable. Sure enough, some people have always built up libraries of copied tapes. You're not losing potential revenues if they weren't going to pay anyway.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Publisher x publishes "Expensive Science Book" by Prof Copyright for $180
Publisher y publishes "Dear Science" by Prof Grabbinmoney for $180
"Open Source Science" released
Publisher z publishes "Open Source Science" by O.S.Community for $60
Publisher x publishes "Open Source Science" by O.S.Community for $50
Publisher y publishes "Open Source Science" by O.S.Community for $40
Publisher z publishes "Open Source Science" by O.S.Community for $30 and includes the book on a CD
Publisher x publishes "Open Source Science", "Free Mathematics" and "GNU Computer programming" as an omnibus edition for $60
The price differential with the copyright books is now so big that people are flocking to use "open source science" so
Publisher x publishes "Expensive Science Book" by Prof Copyright for $80
Publisher y publishes "Dear Science" by Prof Grabbinmoney for $80
See, competition leads to lower prices and more choice. And even though the original copyright books were not competing at first, in this example, the open source option caused a big enough price differential to drag their prices down as well (although admitedly, this wouldn't necessarily occur)
Rich
This is a method of publicity, yes--but then, Baen considers its entire Webscription program itself to be little more a method of publicity, as low as the prices are that it charges--and there are those better-known authors who are incensed at having to sell their books so cheaply (and without DRM copy-protection to boot).
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Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
A counterexample: I've had a few thousand dollars in sales of my book, which is available as a free download. (A few more k$ and I'll have made back my investment in printing!
The Assayer - free-information book reviews
Find free books.
Yes, it is a great idea, but I guess you just don't have the imagination to see it.
First, nobody was talking about making anybody do anything. I feel certain that there are a lot of teachers who are passionate about their subjects and would love to contribute to such a product.
Second, if the Schools could get away with paying less for text books, they'd have more money for, yes you guessed it, more teachers or higher teacher salaries.
While you might be able to find some odd case where a professional teacher makes less than someone in management at a McDonald's, by and large, the average teacher earns a great deal more than the average burger flipper. Heck, I'd take the low-end teaching job over the McDonald's managers job, which might, possibly be comparable in salary, any day of the week. Fast food restaurants work exempt employees long hours. The work is no fun and you have to ride heard on a bunch of inattentive, disobedient, ritalin-addled teenagers for 16 hours a day.
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I'm working with a group at Rice University that is putting some of our textbook content online. It's only reached a useful state this summer, and online texts are currently being used as a supplement for two ELEC courses here.
We've got our own DTD (although are trying to borrow from existing stuff like the Dublin Core elements when possible) to do page markup for educational content, and XSL+CSS stylesheets to turn that into XHTML+MathML that browsers (well, currently just Mozilla; soon IE too we hope) can read.
Wish I could give you a URL, but all the good stuff is being restricted to on-campus access right now.
There's also a couple universities working on a similar system, and a company doing the same sort of thing (although aimed more at corporate training). It's an idea whose time has come; it's just a question of who gets there first.
Legal: http://www.freesfonline.de/
l
Mostly Illegal: http://www.lib.ru/lat/ (yes, it's in russian. Some of their stuff is in English, tho. Look for authors you know, modulo transliteration (Ray Bradbury -> Rej Bredberi))
Also, Google turns up some great stuff, if you just put in the title of the book and the author: the search "Bullet In The Brain" Tobias Wolff turns up, in the first 20, http://www.wam.umd.edu/~shaner/stories/bullet.htm
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
First up, a general comment: the best thing about this Slashdot article is not the free books at the other end (I'm not planning on reading any of them -- no time for it at the moment) but rather the remarkably clueful commentary about why giving away free e-books is a good idea. Read it. I doubt I'll read anything else more interesting than it today.
But now, in direct response to the previous poster, advances in publishing technologies (like laser printers and CD burners) are not going to put authors and musicians out of business. They might put publishers out of business eventually, but that's just the nature of change. On the other hand, maybe publishers will just change what it is they do and become marketers rather than manufacturers.
But authors and musicians, as the article on the site points out, are in no danger of being replaced by machines. If people want to read books and listen to music, then someone needs to be writing the books and composing and playing the music. If there are enough people willing to part with enough money to create a market for books and music, then the market will arise one way or another, with "copyright" or without.
At the moment, all remuneration for copyrighted works is done retrospectively: the artist or author has already done all their work by the time you pay for a CD or book. If this scheme breaks down because of rampant "piracy", then it may eventually mutate into a scheme whereby artists and authors start with loss leaders, making some works available for free, then saying "there's more where that came from if enough people send me money".
There's a technological hurdle to overcome here, of course. It can't work without extraordinary ease of communication and payment. We've basically got the former now, but not the latter. The payment technologies which do exist still haven't quite managed to be killer apps. Reading the author's book is pretty easy, but getting him a payment easily is another matter. When it becomes as easy as tossing a coin in a busker's hat, the economics of the information-based markets will change almost overnight.
When such technology manages to break past the widespread-acceptance barrier, my prediction is that the giant faceless corporations of the entertainment industry will be badly undermined by the fact that new artists will get a much better deal in the free marketplace than by signing up with them. The publishers will find their supply of new talent cut off, and eventually have nothing new to sell. Their reduced dominance may persuade lawmakers to stop extending their copyrights retrospectively and making draconian "protective" laws. Then what will they do? They'll actually have to start providing a service to artists and audiences, or nobody will notice their passing.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Whoa! Look out, Amazon!
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You know, it isn't pirating. Someone isn't scanning/typing books in and giving them to someone else... It's nothing like Napster because the books are voluntarily placed there by the creators of that piece of work. By the way, I thoroughly enjoy reading, especially some older Drangonlance books, etc..
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Join
Very true. However, electronic texts have one very distinct advantage, which has only been tangentially touched on:
Ease of transport.
I have a number of books on CD. (Most are reference books, although I have Project Gutenberg's archives on a pair of CDs, courtesy of Walnut Creek.) True, they're not as convenient as paper books, but they're terrific when I need to travel; much lighter and more compact than stacks of books.
Or, for a more common example: I am a Perl programmer, and therefore lazy. Occasionally I need to refresh my memory on some syntax issue.* I could walk across the room, pick my copy of Programming Perl out of the bookcase, flip to the index, flip to the correct section, and read. However, it's much easier for me to grab my Perl CD Bookshelf, click, click, click, done. Same for Design Patterns.
Other posters in this story have mentioned PDAs much more skillfully than I can, so I won't go there.
* Amazingly, despite Perl's clean and elegant syntax, I still need to look up the meaning of simple expressions like "$[=$.".
In particular I thought that elementary or middle school math books might be a perfect candidate. Math concepts don't change wildly, and the structure seems pretty straightforward...concept, examples, problems... I even started working on an XML DTD to define this.
Anyone else think this might be useful?
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Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
There are several readers available, many of which are freeware or open source. Http://www.palm-press.com/ has more info, as does
http://www.peanutpress.com and there's even a Slashdot article on it
Don't forget:
http://www.memoware.com/
http://www.tomeraider.com/
www.matthewmiller.net
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Bottom line is, having books and music available online has caused me to buy MORE instead of less.
Yes, but that's only because the existing technology/medium is not sufficient for your needs. Wanting to read a book at night without staring at the radiation from a CRT or handheld display and also the desire to keep a book in your bookshelf to impress the chicks; but those are the reasons you bought the book - not some moral obligation you felt to pay a usage fees.
Books will continue to hold this advantage for a while. The same is not true for CDs, etc. If you had the equipment to burn the CDs and print the labels on them (if you were so concerned about appearing cool) you would be a damn fool to pay the money for the CD.
It would be very foolish for the music industry to assume that people downloading music for free will always automatically want to buy it if it turns out to be good.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Netlibrary has a bunch of free books on their site - 'though I think most of them are just from project gutenburg.
Forget free though: Anyone interested in cognitive science can get access to all the MIT press books in cognitive science* at netlibrary (in encrypted downloadable and web form) for just $120 (students) or $240 (everyone else) by going to cognet.mit.edu. It also includes access to the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences, and The New Cognitive Neurosciences 2nd Ed, and everything else they say they offer (the "community" aspect is non existent though - it basically consists of announcements {talks, seminars}, and interesting links.
*(includes hundreds of books in: neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, AI {genetic algorithms, computational intelligence, neural networks, etc}, linguistics, culture, evolutionary biology, and several other topics).
Amigori
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Books are a great alternative to video games.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
"Light and Matter Physics" High School/Community college level.
"Handbook Of Applied Cryptography"
"Numerical Recipes in {c, fortran}"
"The Scientist & Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing"
"Using Z"
"The Red Book"
etc. I'm sure there are a ton of others.
GNUArt is an organization which approach consists of GPL'ing Art under virtual forms.
The difference with what's happening here is that if these books were GPL'ed, they'd not only be free of charge but they could also be reworked by anybody prior to being distributed once again for free. Well, you know the GPL, don't you ?
Anyway, even if they only made these books free as in free beer, it is a good thing that these authors accepted to take whatever some might call a "risk".
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
but those are the reasons you bought the book - not some moral obligation you felt to pay a usage fees.
I've purchased CDs from MP3.com for that very reason. I want to support the artists whose music I like. I've downloaded entire albums from mp3.com, yet I still paid for them. Now I'm sure there are a lot of kids out there that download stuff for free and never give it a second thought. But they usually don't have the tons of cash it takes to buy the CDs anyway, I know I never did. It's the post-college crowd that will be more likely to pay I think.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The next step is to put our money where our mouths are. If you read these books and think they're any good, go buy them.
Prove to the publisher that this sort of experiment is good for them, and we'll see more of it. Don't just post to /. and say you like it.
Just my $.02
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brave little toaster
"Remember, don't try this at home until the statute of limitations has expired."
I googled the three Drake titles, and got copyrights of 1997, 1998, and 1999 (not in that order).
Most of his work doesn't push my buttons, and in fact I didn't even bother finishing his overhyped Lord of the Isles, but I heartily recommend his old novel Birds of Prey. SciFi meets ancient Rome, kind of thing. That one really ought to be made into a movie.
If you like Birds of Prey, then try his Vettius and Friends, which is a collection of short stories set in ancient Rome (sans SciFi, with a couple of exceptions), including a wonderful man vs. shark story that purportedly predates Jaws.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Honestly I haven't heard a thing about any of these authors, and right now there's only 5 or 6 of them listed on this webpage, and only 2 or 3 books per author. Have these guys been rejected by major publishing companies and this is their way of getting their names out?
Now if these guys are popular artists and people have heard of them I apologize. But I've worked in some libraries for quite a few years and I can't judge whether or not these guys actually have a popular following yet... maybe this is their way of grabbing 15 minutes of fame =)
But they usually don't have the tons of cash it takes to buy the CDs anyway,
This comment illustrate what's the biggest fallacy on 'piracy'. Fact: most people have a limited budget to buy CD / software. Therefore, counting every 'pirated' product as a lost income for 'IP producers' is wrong; since if there was'nt any 'pirating' means available, most people would not have bought more. Therefore the theoretical loss is zero, nil, nada, zilch.
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