Well, we kind of knew this had to be true, right? What normal person would waste the time and energy to figure out how to work eMule or BitTorrent? With the exception of Napster and a few others, most P2P programs are difficult to decipher at best, driving the average person to the store for their objects of lust. Not so with the nerd population, who represents by helping sci-fi literature stand atop the heap when it comes to book downloads - and I’d include superhero comics in with this as well.

And for SF writers and fans, the further question is, “Will it be any good to our chosen medium?” Like I said, science fiction is the only literature people care enough about to steal on the Internet. It’s the only literature that regularly shows up, scanned and run through optical character recognition software and lovingly hand-edited on darknet newsgroups, Russian websites, IRC channels and elsewhere (yes, there’s also a brisk trade in comics and technical books, but I’m talking about prose fiction here — though this is clearly a sign of hope for our friends in tech publishing and funnybooks).

Spread the word!