Stealing Books - Easy!

Here's another brief bit from one of my favorite blogs, TechCrunch. Although the Kindle, Amazon.com's brand-new e-book reader (about which we have blogged extensively) sells books in the proprietary, locked MobiPocket format, the writer points out how easy it is to download book files from any of the myriad BitTorrent sites (where all those illegal file copies--music, movies and, yes, books, too--can be found if you're not worried about being tracked by the RIAA or any of the other organizations dedicated to chasing after data thieves).

Now, there are a number of sites, like Project Gutenberg, where files exist for any number of out-of-copyright/public domain titles. These files can be downloaded for free and used as the reader chooses. They are often posted in multiple formats like .txt (Text only), .pdf (Adobe Reader), .doc (Microsoft Word) and .Lit (Microsoft Reader). The Kindle can read text and Word files and the other two are easily converted into one or the other of these formats and they can then be added to the Kindle via the dedicated email address that comes with every Kindle account.

However, the BitTorrent sites have files for lots of books, including plenty of brand-new copyrighted titles, that can be downloaded just as easily, converted to whatever format seems best and loaded onto the Kindle via that same email address.

It's easy. It's quick. It's convenient. It's free. It's also completely illegal--but we haven't seen that stopping too many music collectors or movie fans now, have we? Are book readers more honest and law-abiding than music and movie fans? There's no real way to know until some deep-pocketed publisher, or a publishers enforcement organization, starts tracking downloads and suing everyone in sight. Perhaps it won't come to that but Amazon has given all those downloaders a way to put their files, legally obtained or otherwise, on a handy portable reading device.

Maybe that Attributor story I did a while back, the one about a company whose service tracks content appearances on the net, begins to make a lot more sense. I wonder what they charge?

- John