It is fascinating but slightly disturbing to look through the e-books available for free through hacker websites. The offerings are linked to what is available on respectably capitalist sales sites, of course – the most popular are rarely well-written, generally non-fiction, books that purport to tell the ambitious and the desperate how to change their lives in some way. Lots of IT, medical and engineering textbooks, some body-building, some comics, some rabble-rousing (it is interesting to see the books on global conspiracies, especially the AIDS ones).
However, the hacker sites are not desperately trying, as are the commercial sites, to push a lot of current fiction. Since the hacker sites represent the (or merely a?) buyer's side of the market, whole genres and areas drop out – some of the more elaborate sites (hagioteam, xpressionsz, bookwarez) reflect something a bit different: what seems to be the equally desperate, but perhaps more sensible, desire to know how to get ahead, to gain power and money in the world through technical or secret knowledge. Especially the Russian websites: there is a sense of trying to catch up with what must still feel like a tidal wave of change, the wrenching chaos being yanked from one dominant set of ideologies to another one. It's an attitude one frequently sees in the faces of international students: the understanding that there is nothing casual about doing a university degree, and there is nothing fun about it either – it is a survival technique, and it would be impossible to work too hard at it, to do it too quickly. The feeling that one must amass valuable information and take it home, before everything falls apart....
It does make me slightly uneasy, because it suggests that many of the things I care about are unimportant, peripheral, even invisible to a larger public. Carefully constructed sentences, fine, expressive writing, thoughtful reflection, the hope for revelation – all swept away by an avalanche of textbooks, and idiot's manuals, which are of course textbook guides to textbooks.
Of course, I'm probably reading too much into these sites. They are run by individuals, who have merely individual tastes and desires – although the above sites evidently operate through a number of participants, that doesn't mean their collections reflect the demands of a vast part of humanity. A counter-example is fictionbook.ru, which is so elaborate and yet aimed at pure enjoyment – a vast, carefully organized collection of science fiction and contemporary literature, put together by someone who has a gourmand's taste for extended series (the kind of thing that needs numbering).
And, of course, there is the first site I got to know a year or two ago, which has recently reappeared in a new avatar – the brilliant, abrasive German radical site, textz.com. Although textz does have more of a pedagogical quality – the choices don't appear to represent what people demand, but what someone (a highly intelligent, but highly opinionated, someone) thinks they ought to want.
Actually, what all these sites have in common: they aren't trapped in the value systems and disgusting habits of most commercial publishers – and that is perhaps their most refreshing quality....
As for me, I'll return to Jonathan Carroll's Outside the Dog Museum, with its fine writing, expressive revelations, etc. etc. I may be unimportant to the culture of the world, but at least it's not trying to eradicate me, or the likes of me. Not yet, anyway.
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