Early in his undergraduate years at Indiana University, Joseph Ruesewald said, he had trouble finding the required titles for a couple of his classes at the local bookstores. When he tried ordering the books online, he learned it would take too long for delivery.
Having come of age in the era of Napster, Kazaa and other file-swapping networks infamous as bazaars for pirated music, he knew exactly how to obtain the books - if not in his hands, at least for his computer's hard drive.
Over the semesters, downloading books free and reading them on his monitor became routine, he said. He learned to adjust the screen color to off-white to help reduce eyestrain and depleted his university printing allotment by running off hundreds of pages at a time. "It became an alternative to going out and looking for the books in stores," said Ruesewald, 21, who just graduated from the university's school of informatics. He emphasized that he had sought alternatives to downloading books without permission by turning to publishers that allow readers to view a book's pages one at a time. And he confesses a sense of guilt over playing the role of a "leech."
But "as a student, I was pretty broke and couldn't really afford $100 textbooks," Ruesewald said.
Other recesses of the Internet are also rich in illegally traded literature. A visit to an Internet Relay Chat network revealed a multitude of titles being offered or sought every second. Usenet groups also draw a steady flow of visitors, like Steven Audette of Verona, a town in central New York known for its casino rather than its literary establishments. Audette said he had downloaded about 2,000 titles, including some duplicates in varying formats.
For classics he visits Project Gutenberg, a vast legal repository of mostly older works for which no copyright is in effect; he uses Usenet to download current publications illegally.
http://www.iht.com/articles/523243.html
Wish these things were so prevalent when I was in college :/
