![]() News groups like alt.books 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. A visit to a group called ''#Bookz'' on the Internet Relay Chat network revealed a multitude of titles being offered or sought every second. Other recesses of the Internet are also rich in illegally traded literature. ![]() Computer and technical books that can cost as much as $100 in print are also a mainstay. Even the official audio-book versions read by the authors or celebrities are easy to come by. Yet a quick survey conducted with peer-to-peer file-sharing software revealed the digital availability of dozens of titles currently on the New York Times best-seller list, including ''The Da Vinci Code,'' ''The South Beach Diet'' and, of course, hundreds of copies of any Harry Potter title. Each page must be scanned, run through optical character-recognition software and proofread before the complete work is uploaded to a network or transferred directly to a recipient. The activity is all the more striking because making a book available online is as cumbersome as ripping a CD is effortless. While the music industry's effort to quash the trading of pirated songs over the Internet has attracted far more headlines, the unauthorized sharing of digitized books is proliferating in news groups, over peer-to-peer networks and in chat rooms. And he confesses to 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,'' Mr. 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. Ruesewald, 21, who graduated from the university's school of informatics last month. ''It became an alternative to going out and looking for the books in stores,'' said Mr. 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. Over the semesters, downloading books free and reading them on his monitor became routine, he said. Having come of age in the era of Napster, Kazaa and other file-sharing 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. When he tried ordering the books online, he learned it would take too long for delivery. 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.
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