FINDING ILLEGAL E-BOOKS

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Some people steal books for fun. Others steal books to avoid paying for them. But no matter what the motive, you'll find that the Internet may be the biggest library in the world, with books available from eBay, newsgroups, and all the popular file sharing networks.

BUYING COPIED BOOKS ON EBAY

More than 20 million items are bought and sold on eBay at any given time. Just as bootleg DVDs and CDs often sneak into swap meets, copied books (as well as movies, music, and software) turn up regularly on eBay. It's surprisingly easy for somebody to sell a CD stuffed with hundreds of bootleg computer books (as shown in Figure 11-4).

Figure 11-4: Many people download books from the Internet and then resell them on CDs through auction sites like eBay.

When a CD with nearly 100 books sells for as little as $15, it's obvious that somebody's selling copies without permission from the authors or publishers. Some sellers avoid postage costs by simply emailing copied e-books to the winning bidder. The buyers apparently don't know that they can download the books for free just as easily as the seller did.

Obviously, eBay prohibits selling illegally copied goods, so it regularly follows-up on removal requests and searches for keywords that signal possible copyright violations. But when a complaint stops an illegal auction, the seller simply signs up for a new account under a different name and sells the same goods with a slightly different description to avoid detection. No matter how hard eBay tries to police its auctions, it can't catch everybody breaking the law.

STEALING BOOKS FROM NEWSGROUPS

The most popular e-books on newsgroups generally cover technology, fantasy, science fiction, and mechanics. Files posted on newsgroups often consist of properly spelled names sorted by subject with details on the book's format.

Here are the most popular newsgroups for finding e-books:

alt.binaries.ebook This is not widely used, but it occasionally receives a misplaced post.

alt.binaries.e-book The main repository for e-books, this newsgroup receives a constant flow of new and older e-books. Everything from bestselling fiction to older classics to complete collections of science fiction authors is posted. (It was a post in this newsgroup of Harlan Ellison's short stories that brought about Ellison's suit against America Online.)

alt.binaries.flood Many people collect works by certain authors, and the flood newsgroup is for people who "flood" a newsgroup with hundreds of books by a certain author or dealing with a certain subject. The flood inevitably pushes everything else off the newsgroup, so books posted here don't last very long before another flood replaces them.

alt.binaries.mathmad Books on math and physics show up here, although they're usually crossposted to alt.binaries.ebook, as well.

alt.binaries.palm Books formatted specifically for the Palm's small screen appear here, usually in PDB format for the Palm's popular eReader program (http://www.palmdigitalmedia.com).

alt.binaries.rpg Fans of role-playing games post books and games in this active group. Back issues of Dragon Magazine are popular, as well.

alt.binaries.technical This huge repository is usually stuffed with computer books, but technical material of any kind shows up: repair manuals for Briggs & Stratton small engines, laser printers, and cameras; military field guides; certification exam study guides; and other bits of technical viscera. College textbooks occasionally turn up here, as well.

alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.audiobooks Books on tape appear here as MP3 files. The resulting files are quite large and are broken up into a long string of posts. Most downloaders rely on PAR and PAR2 files (covered in Chapter 10) to retrieve any posts they miss.

STEALING BOOKS FROM FILE SHARING NETWORKS

Although most people use file sharing networks for stealing music, e-books can be readily found just by typing in the name of an author or the title of a particular book, as shown in Figure 11-5. These are ten of the most popular authors, whose works you can find on many file sharing networks:

1. Stephen King (Misery, The Shining)

2. J.K. Rowling (the Harry Potter series)

3. Terry Pratchett (The Colour of Magic, Wyrd Sisters)

4. Tom Clancy (Red Storm Rising, Patriot Games)

5. Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

6. J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings)

7. John Grisham (The Client, A Time to Kill)

8. Iain M. Banks (Complicity, Inversions)

9. Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting)

10. Douglas Coupland (Generation X, Microserfs)

    
    Figure 11-5: The works of popular authors, such as Stephen King, can be found on practically any file sharing network.

Besides searching for author names or book titles, you can often find e-books on a file sharing network just by searching for terms such as e, ebooks, or pdf, as shown in Figure 11-6.

Figure 11-6: A search on Kazaa turned up nearly 2,000 books that cover a wide variety of topics.

Some additional terms to use for searching include topics, such as Java programming, or the name of specific publishers, such as No Starch Press or O'Reilly. When searching for e-books, many file sharing programs give you the option of restricting your search to specific types of files, such as audio, video, or text, as shown in Figure 11-7. By narrowing your search to text files, you can just search for e-books without the distraction of seeing video or audio files.

Figure 11-7: File sharing programs can limit a search to a specific file type, such as video or text.

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