Nerdiness in the time of virtual bookworms

A few years ago, I discovered a Russian website featuring free copies of a wide range of books, from the inspirational and self-help variety to crime fiction and erotica. Most were available in both Russian and English versions, and you could even choose among Word document, PDF, and HTML formats. My geeky heart skipped a few beats upon seeing that they had an astounding hoard of works in my favorite genres: science fiction and fantasy. Naturally, I feverishly downloaded everything I could, from classics by Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick to Neil Gaiman's latest novels. Luckily so, because I noticed that a good portion of the material posted there was sudenly taken down just a few weeks later. Up to now, I have yet to finish plowing through all my fabulous loot -- and I should add that I wouldn't have been surprised to find scores of typographical errors or annoyingly unreadable formatting, but lo and behold, the Word doc versions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy even had accurately reproduced illustrations!

I was first introduced to e-books when I got my first PDA. Pretty soon, I had read the first four Harry Potter books during my daily commute. Now, I have both Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Reader installed on my laptop, along with at least two other programs for reading graphic novels and poetry. Quite expectedly, I voraciously started scouting for hard-to-find films, old TV series, and rare tunes on P2P sites and file sharing forums too. Even when it comes to my own written output, my mindset is much closer to Cory Doctorow's (he has made the full text of ALL his novels freely available online under a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial use license) than to that of Harlan Ellison (he sued AOL when someone uploaded one of his books on a Usenet group without permission) -- though I admit that I'd enthusiastically wring the neck of anyone who has the gall to copy and paste one of my articles and claim it as his own.

Unauthorized distribution of e-books is a pesky problem for many authors and publishers, but for us bookworms in the developing world, they may be our only window to knowledge. The way I see it, we need to reframe the debate as a question of balance between intellectual honesty and respect for creative efforts, on the one hand, and broadening of market options as well as opening up access to cultural capital, on the other. My old-school side is still pretty sentimental about the unique, fragile tangibility of my analog book collection, but as long as electronic formats can help me meet my literary and research needs without breaking my budget, my fingers would be just as eager to scroll down on the mouse button as they are to lovingly turn a yellowing and dog-eared page.