27.08.2010 14:48, digited пишет:
[heavy_ot]
Piracy is not stealing - author actually loses nothing from it, and .torrent
user
is not guaranteed to buy a book if unable to download a .pdf
Futhermore, .torrent distribution may be a good advertisement and help to find
out
if a russian-speaking coder wants to actually order a 1300+ rur book in english
or
not.
[/heavy_ot]
Author may not lose anything, but she actually doesn't gain what she
could, so yes, this is stealing. Pirates steal profit (and often
prestiege as well), profit that may have paid off spent time, nerves and
money. And torrent user is not guaranteed to buy the book if *able* to
download a .pdf as well. It doesn't stimulate authors to share more of
their thoughts and knowledge when they see all their efforts are simply
taken away without any kind of thanks.
A book is not a car, you don't need to read it ALL before buying, and
most modern authors and publishers provide samples so potential reader
may see if the book is worth buying (btw, a whole chapter of TDPL was
recently provided for all willing), so I don't see any reasons for
advertisement here.
as for me, i prefer paper books over reading from screen, but i'm not interested
in d2. I won't buy tdpl in english because of questionable rate of
price/usefulness for me, but i'll buy it on russian (for collection), if it will
be translated and will have a reasonable price.
Here I agree that paper books beat any ebooks.
As for Russian translations - I don't like them since I've taken a look
at translated GoF book on design patterns. Translations are unbearable
far too often. Most of the time, people who translate such books are
either totally incompetent in CompSci, or know little to know aspects of
the particular area covered by the book. That leads to mistakes,
inconsistensies, errors. And often, the translation itself is hardly
readable compared to original. So I'd personally rather buy the book
from original publisher (therefore giving my monetary thanks to the
author) rather than pay additional sum for questionable work of
translators and local publishers.
It's too bad I don't know any other language except Russian and English,
because I fear that translation tendency touches not only English books.
