Some college photostated those books and sell to student. They are making money using the illegal way.

what i dun like is those fake manga books...they are printed on A4 paper and the print smears,and the total series printed is double the original

for example: if Naruto is 55 episodes,fakes might have up to 100+ episodes,they are cheating and earning more than real books without consumers knowing that they are scammed in broad daylight

id rather go to the trouble to get real comics from Taiwan with good paper quality and in a far cheaper price while supporting the author directly...

I personally thinks that people who complains so much about price is fickle minded. Who's asking you to buy book every week/day? I am sure it's not that hard to save say RM50± per month (if you can eat 2-3 meals of fast food every month you have no excuse not being able to save that amount of money).

Photocopying... Most student do this isn't it? Not enough money (no income) + library has limited copies. I think as long as you are not selling them for profit, it's okay.

I am not sure about e-books as I don't read them. I don't like starring at the skrin for a 500+ pages book. (Unless it's some journal or papers with less than 20 pages, that's still okay. I read them between my break time in office.) And I love the fact that I can bring my book anywhere and read it in betweens my travelling/free time.

Bootleg printings has so much translation error and printing quality, makes me wonder why people are willing to spend money on it.

These are just examples:

1. Photostats:
I can guess this usually occurs to students, whereby the price of such books or materials of original quality would be quite expensive. So how do they solve this? Just photostat the original book content. By right, this is illegal, since it borders on copyright issues as well as disrespecting the nature of the book author(s) who had been writing materials for the benefits of the students themselves.

college textbooks are expensive costing around RM100-200 unless u manage to get original 2nd hand textbook... ^^ that's also depending on the condition...

2. E-Books:
Not all e-books are legal. Hence, by just a few simple keywords, you can find the entire book content of Harry Potter's novels or the next Indiana Jones's movie script. Going by the matter, Harry Potter's books are not even that expensive if you are a fan, and Indy's next movie script is not even supposed to be read if you are the series's follower. You can't really say "because I am their hardcore fan, I *MUST* READ IT!" because that is just wrong.

as for ebooks... well... not all the books u can get in ebooks... mostly u need to pay...  ^^ i support... but not much coz the ebooks are sometimes more expensive than the physical books.. since i had to pay in USD...

3. Illegally Printed Materials in Books & Magazines:
This is usually common in magazines, comics & mangas. How often do you find at any local book shop, whereby they are selling Doreamon mangas that were printed and translated into BM/English/Chinese, but it was not even legally authorized by the owners back in Japan? How do we know it was illegally printed? Check out the front intro of the book, they will just put in the name of the company printing it and translating it, but no authorization from anyone! The best thing yet, some of us had been buying it because: (1) they are cheap, and (2) if its in Japanese, we won't understand it. Those companies knows this, so they abuse the system of where the Japanese will not go to length and search all book shops in Malaysia and sue them, AND because they know that the locals in Malaysia will BUY them.

These are 3 examples, but I'm sure there are more like illegal reading via podcast, etc.

podcast is free... so i think u cant avoid this... apple itune can dl free podcast...

What do you think?

well....with e-book piracy around, popular authors are probably going to favour pushing the sales of their physical books more

looks like technology tried to make life easier for people, but it backfired

Nah, people I talked to still buy their ebooks from ebooks retailer. And more and more authors are also releasing ebook formats at the same time as their paperbook release. But then most of them I talked to are from the US and they are more advanced in using ebook reader compared to us. Plus 7bucks to them isn't that expensive.

ya lah still nice to hold the book and rifle through the pages yourself. But ebooks enthusiast will argue that it saves paper thus the environment plus cheaper depending where you buy it from in the net.

Just like many of you here, I've only ever photocopied books when I was in uni. Up until recently, all the books in my library are originals. However, that means that I actually read less than I would like to given the high cost of books in Malaysia and the unavailability (I had to place orders for some books I wanted through Borders and those cost me a bomb). I scoured Ebay to get a cheaper alternative to buying brand new books but the shipping charges meant that the difference usually wasn't that great (Ebay MY is HOPELESS when it comes to reading material).

After I discovered that I could get ebooks off the internet for free, I've had a much wider range available to me. I have no problems with reading ebooks - a book is a book is a book - although I must agree that there is nothing like holding the physical book in your hands and flipping through the pages.

One of my favourite authors supports piracy. And interesting viewpoint from him:-
http://www.newsweek.com/id/108715/page/1

(I think it is pertinent to add here that I own almost all of his books - in original hard copy).

You could try renting books...that's another cheaper alternative!

We rent out books for RM6 each, at Book X-Change