The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by zhwj:

I've read pirated e-texts of SF and fantasy. Quite a lot of them, actually.

It all started with a reading assignment - a number of classic novels, like Moorcock's Behold the Man and Simak's Waystation. The rest of the class was reading n-th generation photocopies of 80s-era translations; I pulled the English editions off of some textz server hosted in Russia, mostly because it would have taken me days to get through each of the translations.

I found lots of other books in that archive. Over the next few months I downloaded etextz of a couple dozen Dick novels (the following year they came out in translation), Le Guin, Bester, and a bunch of other writers, none of whom were in the uni library (the nat'l library downtown had some of them, but at the time I couldn't afford the deposit required to get a borrower's card).

But that was a few years ago. I don't do it any more - not for English books, at any rate (well, I did look up an English ebook of Old Man's War when that came out in Chinese to check which parts got bowdlerized). Vast quantities of Chinese fiction have such small print runs that after less than a year, practically the only copies available are online, although the increasing popularity of online auction houses have made used copies much easier to obtain.

I did get something for nothing - there's no way I would have purchased print editions of all the books I read online - but I definitely would have made good use of a local library, if I'd have had one available. And I'd seriously consider subscribing to a service that would give me access to online versions of books that I can't get in print. The way the world is connected these days, it's kind of silly that you still need to get your hands on a physical object in order to consume information.

The New York Times took a look at the assembly-line reproduction industry, as did the Asia Sentinel. Some interesting quotes about volume and cost in there: The fastest of the workers here, most of whom labor in "art factories" outside Dafen, paint more Van Goghs in a month than the impoverished artist (who sold only one) did in his lifetime (about 800). The best can brush out 30 a day, says Shi Fei, an artist, gallery owner and art assembly line factory honcho who employs 12 "students" who earn about 200-300 yuan a month, plus room and board for their art assembly-line skills.

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