[p2p-research] lightfoot book sharing ?

[Andy Robinson]

You'll actually find that most commercially available ebooks and audiobooks,
and a fair number of other books (often in text or PDF format), find their
way pretty swiftly onto BitTorrent sites such as Piratebay fairly regularly,
often as big bundles of related books.  This includes fairly obscure stuff
that's hard to get - for instance, a lot of audiobooks which have never been
commercially released, but were produced at some point for disability
purposes.  What's a bit weird is that academic and research-related works
vary rarely appear in this way - despite widespread digitisation of journals
and of many of the more recent books.  In principle it would be fairly easy,
though rather time-consuming, for someone with access to go through all the
back-issues of a journal to which they have access, grab copies of all the
articles, and put them up in a bundle on bittorrent; or to copy page-by-page
a book on ebrary or similar, to which they have complete access, and put it
up similarly; or failing these, to use a scanner to make a copy of a book
and then make it available.  There may be technical issues but not
particularly difficult ones.  (To my knowledge most of the digitised
versions are not copy-protected, at least nothing that a screenshot capture
program can't beat, and the PDFs from journal sites are straightforwardly
copiable, though someone doing this on a wide enough scale may have to be
careful with whether things have identifying information embedded in them
which would allow copyright owners to trace the source of the distributed
copy).

I suspect the reason it isn't done is threefold: easy-enough availability
for most people who need them via library subscriptions and interlibrary
loans, limited demand among people who don't have access (i.e. who aren't
university lecturers, research students or hangers-on with university
library access), and likely low rates of demand making ongoing torrents hard
to sustain.  One way I could see demand rising, is if someone took the time
to collect a lot of works on a similar topic, such as to build up a fairly
comprehensive library, and then put the whole thing up as a single file -
hence saving potential users the time in gathering readings as well as
acquiring them.  That it hasn't happened, I think has to do with the
potential number of people interested being a lot lower than for (say)
bundles of popular sci-fi novels or complete works of bestselling authors.
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