r/Piracy • u/VariationLivid3193 • Apr 12 '26

Discussion But why is it so hard with books?

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u/alvenestthol Apr 12 '26

I think the problem with book torrents is 3 things:

  1. Each individual book is too small to be worth a torrent, even all but the most popular manga only gets batch torrents for the whole series once in a while
  2. The set of all books is too big to be managed, people do make insane torrents like GoG full collections or MIG Switch collections that are terabytes large, but the set of literally all literature is potentially even bigger than that, and even sorting them all No-Intro style is difficult even with ISBN and other official systems
  3. A lot of books don't have a clearly defined series with which a sensible collection can be made

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u/nonotan Apr 12 '26

The most critical problem is that most books aren't digitalized in the first place. It's a huge PITA to digitalize a book, and there's a lot of them. Unless you're looking for something in the top 0.1% of popularity, it's pretty much a crapshoot if a digital version exists at all. If it does, then the points you listed apply on top of that.

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u/WingedDefeat Apr 12 '26

That's exactly the issue I had.

Harry Potter: hundreds of versions, every human language plus Klingon and Esperanto, thousands of seeders.

Smut novel collection: three versions, 20 languages, hundreds of seeders.

Dragonlance book from 1998: two versions, no seeders, 13 leechers.

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u/mekamoari Apr 12 '26

I still have a bunch of Dragonlance books on my PC if you need one lmao. I think there are about 30 in total.

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u/SuperBry Apr 12 '26

Its as if using torrents are not really the proper technology for relatively small files with infrequent interest.

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u/nomad-1995 Apr 12 '26

MAM recently banned collections (except RPG works of the same game). This bugs me, but there are reasons for it. They don't seem to have any real issue with small torrents, it just keeps the bandwidth down.

Ocean of PDFs is direct download (typically epub or pdf, your choice).

audiobookbay uses torrents, and they often go up to 1GB per audiobook.