[Slight OT] TDPL in Russia

[Stanislav Blinov]

  27.08.2010 14:48, digited пишет:
> [heavy_ot]
> Piracy is not stealing - author actually loses nothing from it, and .torrent user
> is not guaranteed to buy a book if unable to download a .pdf
> Futhermore, .torrent distribution may be a good advertisement and help to find out
> if a russian-speaking coder wants to actually order a 1300+ rur book in english or
> not.
> [/heavy_ot]
Author may not lose anything, but she actually doesn't gain what she 
could, so yes, this is stealing. Pirates steal profit (and often 
prestiege as well), profit that may have paid off spent time, nerves and 
money. And torrent user is not guaranteed to buy the book if *able* to 
download a .pdf as well. It doesn't stimulate authors to share more of 
their thoughts and knowledge when they see all their efforts are simply 
taken away without any kind of thanks.
A book is not a car, you don't need to read it ALL before buying, and 
most modern authors and publishers provide samples so potential reader 
may see if the book is worth buying (btw, a whole chapter of TDPL was 
recently provided for all willing), so I don't see any reasons for 
advertisement here.


> as for me, i prefer paper books over reading from screen, but i'm not interested
> in d2. I won't buy tdpl in english because of questionable rate of
> price/usefulness for me, but i'll buy it on russian (for collection), if it will
> be translated and will have a reasonable price.
>
Here I agree that paper books beat any ebooks.
As for Russian translations - I don't like them since I've taken a look 
at translated GoF book on design patterns. Translations are unbearable 
far too often. Most of the time, people who translate such books are 
either totally incompetent in CompSci, or know little to know aspects of 
the particular area covered by the book. That leads to mistakes, 
inconsistensies, errors. And often, the translation itself is hardly 
readable compared to original. So I'd personally rather buy the book 
from original publisher (therefore giving my monetary thanks to the 
author) rather than pay additional sum for questionable work of 
translators and local publishers.

It's too bad I don't know any other language except Russian and English, 
because I fear that translation tendency touches not only English books.