Docs Online Bulgaria

October 12, 2000 6:00 PM

Docs Online Bulgaria
It seems to make available the full text of many computer books for free -- Is this legal in Bulgaria?
posted by rschram (4 comments total)

i don't know what to make of this:
http://docs.online.bg/OREILLY/perl/search/lsrch.htm
did the site's autors read up on some of their books and write this, or is it from the o'reilly site?
posted by pnevares at 6:36 PM on October 12, 2000

All of those O'Reilly books are books from O'Reilly's CD Bookshelf series, a series of CD-ROMs that retails for about US$60-70 each. The rest of the books are commercial, too. This sort of thing is definitely against the law, but pretty popular among cheap techies. Go check out #bookwarez on Efnet for a glimpse into one of the weirdest pirating scenes around.

But really, O'Reilly is one of the few publishing companies doing truly good work. And Tim has a weblog. So don't rip them off.
posted by waxpancake at 7:08 PM on October 12, 2000

The search would normally be provided to a legit buyer by a locally running java server on port 6018. When you put the cd with the books in the drive, it would start up automatically. Pretty clever...

...unlike these d00dz. The search doesn't actually work (try it!). It still tries to connect to localhost:6018 and fails. Looks like they just copied the files off the CD. So don't be too impressed.
posted by smackfu at 8:09 PM on October 12, 2000

And here's another handy link from China!
posted by lagado at 8:15 PM on October 12, 2000