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                         Underground eXperts United

                                 Presents...

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        [ Personal Essay: Bookwarez & Text File Scene ] [ By DIzzIE ]


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A Personal Essay on the Bookwarez and Text File Scene

BY: DIzzIE   [c]opyleft 2002

0000oooooooOOOOOO()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()000000000oooooooOOO

This is a little essay on my introduction to the psychedelic world of
text/bookwarez, as well as my experiences and recollections of it. So let us
start by how I first came about this uncanny treasure chest...

It all started in the mid 1990's when I was living in Gothenburg, Sweden. I
used to go with my dad to his workplace every weekend, usually on Saturday
around mid-day, and come home Saturday night, in order to catch old reruns
of Mission Impossible or MacGyver. The main reason I went with my dad was
because I did not have an internet connection at home, and as a growing
young lad in the new technology era, when I was without a modem I was like
the junkie that hung around in the park down the street from my flat was
without his twelve hits of meth a day....
     Having surpassed my school reputation as a class clown, into the more
apt role of class sociopath, one of these Saturday nights found me searching
the internet for prank ideas, as April Fools was soon approaching. I visited
many-a-website, and had soon accumulated around 500pages of print outs
dealing with pranks and general social monkey wrenching.
     Well, one link led to another, and soon I found myself reading things
like versions of the infamous  Anarchist'c Cookbook. Obviously, my
misanthropic little mind had a series of orgasms over these great little
files of destruction, and I hungrily began to look for more. My search terms
in altavista were no longer 'prank files' or 'fun pranks,' but were now
'anarchy texts' and 'how to make bombs." Once again, after following more
pathways of endless links, I came upon a most wonderous site, anarchy-
online.com. This site had all sorts of files on how to make explosives from
bleach, how to master the arts of fake IDs, an array of survivalist files,
and, of course, links. One such link, was to an ezine named CATS-lash. A
Canadian based anarchy zine that had all sorts of text files published
monthly, ranging from the popular subject of voice mail box hacking, to
backyard booby traps. I became intrigued, and the long-sedated hamsters had
suddenly took their first wiff of the glue bag and begun to run in their
previously-rusted wheels. I began dreaming up my own ideas and usually
testing them out mildly, contacted the zine owner, and became an official
writer for the zine. This lasted for several issues, until to my dismay, the
zine ceased to create new issues. This had been my first active
participation in the text file scene.

After CATS-lash ended, I wrote text files individually, generally on general
mayhem topics such as how to have a wild night on halloween or how to make
makeshift weapons such as hiding a knife in your watch belt. The first major
file I remember writing was probably around 1999; after a particularly
charged argument with the parental units, I retired to my room to write How
To Kill Your Parents: The Complete Guide. Soon, my journeys led me to
discover more and more websites that had vast collections of knowledge, some
of the most memoriable ones were the Temple of the Screaming Electron
archives (totse.com), anarchy-online.com, textfiles.com, and parazite's
archives ("aka motherfukin undesirable content"). Soon, I stumbled upon a
swedish text file group known as the Underground eXperts United (uxu.org).
By this time I had written a healthy dose of underground how-to's and
submitted some to uXu. I hung around with them for some time, writing a
handful of files, but eventually stopped as the editor wanted me to "move
on," with my writing, to regress to philosophical musings, rahter than
practical how-to scam/mayhem files. Hence, I slowly drifted away from uXu
and progressed to write more files on my own. I submitted them to some of
the online storage banks like textfiles.com and parazite's archive. A
craving for a wider range of readership, as well as for more texts by others
to fuel my own knowledge, as I had by this time, successfully sucked the
marrow out of most text websites, and had accumulated over 200megabytes of
texts from websites, as well as about 80 of personally written texts, I
began to look for more knowledge resources.
     Along comes a comrade whom I have known since third grade who tells me
about a file-sharing type program by the name of Hotline. After an initial
rejection, a general curiousity took over, as happens with any new idea
presented to the mind of man, and I began exploring Hotline and the servers
it had to offer. Soon I found various servers that were dedicated to text
files; hundreds and hundreds of files that I hadn't seen on the web! I
downloaded/read more and more files, and much like a crack addict, hungered
for more and more gold. Upon signing on to one Hotline server, in the
agreement (a file that shows up upon connection to most hotline servers,
varying with each server), was a recommendation to visit the channels #bookz
and #bookwarez on a program called IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Having
previously, briefly used this program for chatting with friends from middle
school, I was vaguely acquainted with the workings of this program.

So I downloaded a newer verion of mIRC, an IRC client for Windows, connected
to Undernet, and joined the channels (#bookz & #bookwarez). Once again, a
brain-orgasm encompassed the inner linings of my skull with the sweet cum of
knowledge. Lots of people had books they were offering, books that were sold
at the bookstore, copyrighted books that I could get for free! Holy shit!
All this knowledge right here, in a text file, without the need of dragging
my ass to the bookstore, waiting in line, and interacting with live people.
This was great!
     I gathered up the texts I had collected in my early website days, and
started serving books and texts in the channels. My server became quite
successful, serving about 500 texts a day. Then, after some time serving,
people began to worry about the texts I was offering, they including manuals
on besteality, necrophilia, murder, and the like....Eventually I was banned
by the prudes on Undernet, but luckily found a place on another IRC network:
nullus.net, and later dalnet. Both of those places took me in, and thus I
began getting more and more involved in the bookwarez scene. I learned all
about scanning books and using OCR (optical character recognition) programs
such as Omnipage and FineReader (downloaded for free, of course ;) ). There
were all sorts of texts on the servers people had: old, copyright expired
public domain books, new bestseller and scifi books, scanned comics,
magazines, audiobooks, certification manuals, computer books, howto files,
political manifestos, and oh so much more to drive the curious mind to
perpetual ecstacy.
     Yet all was not well in bookwarez land. There was more and more
attention being paid to bookwarez on the part of law enforcement officials,
more and more articles appearing in magazines about copyrighted works of
bestseller's such as J.K.Rowling's Harry Potter series, appearing online for
free.

And what have I to say about the haters of the bookwarez scene?

Fuck You.

I have been around in IRC chatrooms for a long time, and have heard a
variety of opinions about bookwarez. Many have said that they never even
bother to go to a bookstore since they found #bookwarez, while as many, if
not more say that they still go to the bookstore as much, for nothing can
replace the feel of an actual book; while others go to the bookstore to
merely buy books to scan and perhaps return them in a week, with the cover a
little bent ;) .
     Obviously, I am a stingent supporter of the bookwarez scene. I believe
that ebooks, especially free books, provide a greater access to those who
are in countries/areas which are far away/don't sell books the person may
want to read, hence all one has to do is log on to the net and find the book
in #bookwarez or on newsgroups. I also believe that knowledge should be
free, and to all of you who say that the author is getting cheated: 1) many
people usually do buy the books, and just like having an ebook version, and
2) Stephen King on book piracy: "I really don't have any response to the
pirating of books, other than to point out that the practice predates the
internet by roughly 2,000 years. I am not even sure it is a bad thing." -
Yahoo! Internet Life December 2001

     Finally, I believe that everything should be free, that all money
should be abolished, but that's another essay.....

P.S.  Final Thoughts on the bookwarez/ text file scene:

* The bookwarez/text file scene today (2002): The text file scene thrived in
  the 80's and early-mid 90s and has now mainly degenerated into how-to
  files such as "how to defeat cd copyright protections" and "how to rip
  dvds," or into poorly written bomb text files that are usually stolen from
  the now largely outdated anarchist cookbooks written by people such as
  Jolly Roger back in the day. Yet there are still many thriving underground
  zines around, many of which are cataloged at scene.textfiles.com
* On the other hand, the bookwarez scene is constantly growing. Every day I
  see more and more books getting scanned and posted on newsgroups and
  distributed on IRC. Every day more and more books are added to the vast
  treasure chest of knowledge that has been assembled. More bounty is added
  daily, and that makes me happy.

--sign this file and show your eternal support for the bookwarez/text file
  scene.

Signatures:
=====
DIzzIE (North Carolina, USA)

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 uXu #608              Underground eXperts United 2002              uXu #608
                      1991-2001 uXu ten years 1991-2001
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