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The problem of course being that you bypass supporting Batoto. But a few weeks ago there was an Adblock Plus update which mentioned that they now allow some ads through; ones that are non-intrusive and generally nice... would be worth looking into?

An interesting way to prevent (direct) leeching would be to cut the images in two vertically then display them side by side (using CSS you can easily make it look correctly) per page. Just thinking out loud here, but it might actually load faster (because of async), and there's no effort needed by the groups. The bot would either rip both half images and display them one after the other, or only load a single one (resulting in both cases in an unreadable manga). It would also be computationally expensive to stitch them together.

The problem is that you would either need to convert the entire DB which would also increase its size (700 gb of images, plus the overhead of an extra image file) and make it annoying for storage... or you would need to split the images at runtime. That would then increase server load and potentially slow down requests. Hmmm.

This is probably a good time to say that ebooks and real books are. not. the. same. Apart from the obvious tangible-physical-papery angle, there's so many differences between ebooks and real books that you just can't compare them. Some of you above say "I prefer real books" at the same time as "I haven't actually used an e-reader"... Hum, ok, I guess. Right.

• You can copy ebooks.
• They don't weight anything.
• You can put hundreds of them in your pocket. Thousands. Tens of thousands. (Can you read that much??)
• You have to buy a $100 or $200 device to read them.
• You can (sometimes) read them in the dark. (This is actually awesome. Flashlight under the covers? Nah, I got an ebook.)
• You can spill your coffee over some of them (the Kobo is kinda waterproof, not sure about the others)
• You can access the web on some of them. I always find it cool that I don't have to carry a dictionary around (or get up to go to the computer) when I read a book in a foreign language, or in old English.
• If the device breaks, the books are intact.
• They cost less than real books.
• You can't throw them at your girlfriend. This gets really annoying sometimes.
• You can't display them on your bookshelf.
• You can't read two at the same time. (Maybe that's not so bad.)
• Ebooks suck for study.
• If you get stuck in a dark forest at night... you still need matches to light up a real book. An ebook will probably have some kind of light or LED anyway.
• Ebooks don't smell. And we love both the smell of new books and the smell of old books.
• You can't eat ebooks. (I'm not kidding.)
• You don't have to turn the page on an ebook. Ever had that terrible moment when the end of the scene is on the next page and you fumble turning the page, or your hand is numb, or you skip a page? That doesn't happen on an ebook.
• You can't easily skip pages, or seek through, or go back a chapter and a half, or corner a page... in an ebook.
• You don't have to plug in your real book. You can try, but the results may vary wildly.
• You can't have sex with an ebook. (Sorry kids...)
• Receiving two books for a birthday can be awesome (if you're the right kind of person). Receiving two ebooks less so. Receiving two ereaders just sucks.
• If you really don't like a book (read: abhor) you can perform mad surgical operations on it using blunt objects. All you can do to an ebook is Shift-Del it.

I have two ereaders, I read ebooks on more than four devices, and my bookshelf contains about 800 paper books, which is much more than the number of ebooks I have read. I enjoy reading both, but you just can't beat the look on the face of the regular kids when you stroll out of the library with a 15-high pile of books on your hands. This for me is the real win. : )

of him — surgery

You can find my age all over the interwebz, but not here.