change_instructions_navigator

On 2014-01-05, I joined the mobileread forum. At that time, I was just starting to work on automated EPUB generators for text in general and therefore appreciated that the people on the mobileread forum didn’t focus on reader hardware alone, but also had a fair share of technical discussion going on. On 2015-04-03, somebody called Ranwhp asked in the German section of mobileread forums if there is a way to download all German titles of the Patricia Clark Memorial Library at once, which led me to look into it. The Patricia Clark Memorial Library is a collection of e-books uploaded by mobileread members and hosted by the mobileread site operators. Patricia Clark was one of the uploaders which passed away, and in memory of her, the collection was named after her. The collection has no real stewardship nor curation except what’s required by the law and forum rules, which is why I would hesitate to call it a library. The individual uploaders take care of their own uploads only as long as they’re still interested in them and the licenses vary from Public Domain over Creative Commons BY-SA-NC (nonfree) to all rights reserved and distributed by mobileread with special, non-transferable permission, rendering the work of the contributors and the collection as a whole pretty useless for anything other than personal entertainment. For a downloader tool, such considerations were irrelevant, of course, so I started to develop one in order to help out Ranwhp and save him hours of manually downloading every single file. I myself did not have an interest in the ebooks themselves as I mostly do not read for entertainment purposes, I was primarily motivated by experimenting with client programming and EPUBs as found in the wild, to automatically read and transform them with code. The high quality of the XHTML page source code generated by mobileread’s forum software made it quite easy to follow the links and retrieve the actual ebooks, which is a good thing. On 2015-05-01, I <a href="https://github.com/publishing-systems/clients/tree/master/com.mobileread/mobileread_wiki_ebook_list_downloader1">released</a> the first version of my <a href="http://www.publishing-systems.org/downloads/mobileread_wiki_ebook_list_downloader1.zip">mobileread_wiki_ebook_list_downloader1</a> (<code>md5sum eff1b8a28a0a9af8f6d5982cf7150ca8</code>). In my post from that day, I pointed out that automatic downloads could be considered to be <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack">denial-of-service attack</a>s and conflicting with the mobileread terms of use, which I tried to avoid right from the beginning by an enormous delay of 5 seconds between each download, making the client a very friendly, cooperative client in contrast to some rogue crawlers out there on the web. As far as I can tell, this was perfectly well for mobileread staff. On 2015-05-11, Ranwhp provided his report on running my client: after 10 hours and 52 minutes, a total of 2728 files were downloaded with a zipped size of 1.8 Gigabyte. One day later, Ranwhp posted a link to Google drive where it was possible to download the Zip archive. On the one hand, his offer did not consider the legal obligations of the restrictive licensing of many titles from said collection, while on the other hand such an archive would save a lot of bandwith and server resources for mobileread. I immediately notified Ranwhp about the legal problems which might come with some of the ebooks, and he disabled the download link shortly thereafter. Until this point, no other members of the forum joined our conversation, and as soon as they did, they raised concerns about the legal status of the Zip archive in a friendly manner at first. Because of undiplomatic answers, lack of knowledge about copyright law and the assumption that the Patricia Clark Memorial Library would be 100% in Public Domain, things escalated quickly, as uploaders saw their rights violated. What followed was a long conversation about why a local, full copy of the library wouldn’t make sense and about the legal status of the collection, which are strange questions to discuss on a website dedicated to electronic reading. Some posts were quite constructive, other authors made clear that their approach towards media is set up in a way that prevents everything else from happening. However, this incident with the uploaders didn’t affect the downloader software at all, so I continued development and started other <a href="https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=262763">controversial</a> <a href="https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=268091">threads</a> about the technical quality of the collection. Then, for a long time, silence. On 2016-09-29, Ranwhp revived the original thread and published a link to <a href="https://github.com/IceflowRE/MR-eBook-Downloader">MR-eBook-Downloader</a>, another downloader for German titles of the mobileread collection. Again, I immediately mentioned that the developer of this tool should better have a delay in place between each download, so mobileread server resources wouldn’t get used excessively. One day later, the entire <a href="https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=258697">thread was deleted</a> without any explaination. I asked mobileread staff to provide an explaination or to restore the thread, but until now I did not receive an answer. Therefore I decided today that I’ll leave mobileread and not look at their stuff again. I’m not angry or something, it’s more that I’m utterly confused about what happened to that thread after all this time, and I don’t like that my time invested into posting goes to waste within the blink of an eye. For me, this is another glaring example for the broken web we inhabit, and that technology can never become better than what the mentality of people is prepared to allow it to become. This text is licensed under the <a href="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html">GNU Affero General Public License 3 + any later version</a> and/or under the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International</a>.