Are We About To Enter The Age of Book Piracy?

theodp writes "The speed with which the 4MB e-mail hoax purporting to be the new cookbook from the Naked Chef streaked across the Internet suggests to Slate that a new, disquieting era for the publishing world may be in sight. Indeed, the latest Harry Potter tale made the rounds on the Web just hours after the book went on sale, its 870 pages apparently scanned in and distributed by rabid fans. The old argument that no one likes reading on a computer has pretty much eroded. Just because publishing people can't conceive of book piracy doesn't mean it can't happen."

Comments

Re:We have standards

[tomstdenis]

And they are searchable

It's called an index. My god are people really this stupid? I want to know what euclids algorithhm is, I flip to the back, look for euclid and goto the page.

I mean honestly how do you think people read texts before computers? Read every page looking for one particular element?

As for convenience, with a laptop you have to worry about batteries dying, software working properly and generally a laptop is hella bigger than a few paper back books.

As for your comment about researchers. I'd think most don't just scan paper anymore. LaTeX is fairly popular for academic submissions. LaTeX documents can be converted to many popular formats such as html, PS and PDF.

Tom