150 gigs of ebooks, categorized

Seriously? The link provided on reddit is some server some guy found that happened to have credentials listed on bugmenot. Nearly every book on the list is of dubious copyright status (e.g., do they have permission to redistribute it?). Essentially, it's a warez site.

Seriously? We're discussing warez sites on HN now?

Half you people would throw a tantrum if some site published 0days or shared logins for your webapps. But it's OK if it's just someone else's books?

That's not a valid comparison. Approaching everything under the sun with the same copyright approach is untenable, even the greedy music industry and others (e.g., see Hulu) are no longer totally following this approach. A lot of these companies have found that the strong "I won't give you a single bit of my digital goods if you don't pay" idea, is unpractical and not good for business. In fact, new web apps do distribute shared logins, on reddit or elsewhere, to get traction, e.g. see this story from just a couple of days ago http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ckcbr/mizage_a_....

That point aside, your comparison is still invalid. Money earned from a webapp goes directly to the developer. However, authors, especially of academic books, which is the kind that is mostly on this site, make very little money from each book sold, just ask a professor who wrote such a book. The books are mostly for academic prestige. Publishers, who still live in a world of their own, try to sell these books for unbelievable amounts, generally $50-$75 a pop. My company buys me (almost) any book I want, but when I was a student in a different country I suffered a lot because of this; we used to Xerox books for almost all our courses.

This is not an endorsement to steal any intellectual work. Just a thought that things are not so simple.

P.S. For an additional exercise to see why the simplistic approach fails, look into the intellectual battle between poor countries like Brazil and US pharma companies on AIDS IP. Would you say it's stealing in that case, too? Now, work backwards.

Just to play devil's advocate (and examine it rationally rather than legally), what exactly is the problem here? Libraries allow multiple people to read the same book. I'm sure you've loaned books to friends. Is it that it's OK for more than one person to read a purchased book, as long as it doesn't happen simultaneously? What if two people read a library book at the same time? Is that stealing? What if this site implemented some DRM that only allowed a book to be read by one person at a time?

This site isn't doing something wrong, merely something illegal.