This taper decided to stop releasing his masters after having found them converted to mp3...and you know what? Most people in the comments encouraged him to stop, because mp3 is useless. If you write a book, would you like that I spread it with mistakes? Just like mp3...
1. If the taper wants to retain control of his recordings, the answer is not to release them. If he wants to share the recordings with the world, he will have to accept that nobody is required to obey his rules.
2. Releasing recordings as mp3s does not create a mistake. If it is converted to mp3, it does not cause the singer on the recording to sing a wrong lyric, or the guitarist to play a wrong chord, so perhaps your analogy of a 'book' is not the best.
I myself certainly prefer flac when I can get it. But I cannot always find the things I want in flac. So if the recording is something I MUST HAVE, and it is a high-bitrate mp3, I will accept that, as I CANNOT HEAR THE DIFFERENCE. And I do not re-upload mp3s to share on the net. They are for my personal use only, or to give to friends who, like me, cannot tell the difference, and who have no interest in the trading community.
If it is a recording I want, and I can only find it in mp3, I will download it, and if or when I find a flac upgrade, I will download that to replace the mp3 version.
All the bitching in the world will not stop people from converting stuff to mp3s.
That is the same problem the record labels and musicians are having. Once they release a CD, there is nothing they can do. It is no longer in their control.
I understand where you are coming from, and as I said, I prefer to have lossless formats, too, but if you are going to insult people for posting links of mp3s, you will wind up insulting at least 75% of the people on this forum.
Not only that, the people who post mp3s are in many cases people who have only discovered links that have already been posted by other people. They may not be the one who encoded it to a lossy format, so all you end up doing is pissing people off.
Complain if you want, but insulting people will accomplish nothing.
Just my opinion.
Peace.