Talk:Ebook scene
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this article reads like crap, and contradicts itself (started in 80s, but first release was in 2000? wtf?)
Agreed, this article is among the worst I've seen on Wikipedia, from the bad grammar on. Good thing that it's also a trifle hard to find.
The dates don't seem to fit with the files I have here, which include numerous ebooks from 1999, and one from 1997. Note that I'm going by file modification dates, since earlier ebooks rarely included a "publication" date or any mention of who had made the ebook.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,38945,00.html This wired news article, last modified in Sept 2000, cites a Harry Potter book appearing online within a few days of its release. The last Harry potter book released before that date was released July 8th 2000, and the one before that in July 8th 1999. From the limited information available in the article, it seems likely it's referring to the 2000 release.
Another datapoint on this is Harlan Ellison's lawsuit over ebooks, which is documented in his page on Wikipedia as occurring in April 2000 on an existing usenet group for e-books.
The emphasis on scene groups also seems overdone. There are certianly groups, but focusing on them entirely misses the whole story. Indeed my experience with ebooks over the past 4 or 5 years has been that most of them do not seem to include all the trappings of files produced by organised groups as seen in The Scene (file_id.diz, prominant group names, etc).
More often they progress from OCRs that are posted as "UC" files on an irc channel, then modified by a succession of people, who increment a version number each time, occasionally mention their nick, rarely mention any kind of organised group, and upload it back, in a fairly organic process.
It's also pretty easy to find personal web pages and real names for many of these people. (There's doesn't seem to be a lot of lawsuites going around .. yet.) This is quite a contrast to the description on the Wikipedia page for The Scene ("The kinds of people involved in The Scene are extremely organized in their behavior and are very paranoid about their secrecy.")
The best example of this has to have been the release of the recent Harry Potter book in which lots of regulars (but not members of some pre-existing organised group from what I could see) from a book irc channel each took a chapter and edited it and stiched it together into a polished ebook within days. IIRC there was an article on Salon about it.
(Also, all the TLAs point to pages that don't mention the scene groups.)
Anyway, some suggestions for some more factual content:
* Get a rough count of the number of ebooks available on one of the popular irc channels. Hard to be accurate due to duplication, but it will probably be in the tens of thousands. * Maybe interview one of these people? Shouldn't be that hard. * Look up greation date/early posts in alt.binaries.e-book * Read the alt.binaries.e-book FAQ.
