This article is from the Tolkien Newsgroups FAQ, by Steuard Jensen sbjensen@midway.uchicago.edu with numerous contributions by others.
For many aspects of Tolkien scholarship, it would be convenient to
have an electronic version of the books (this would make full text
searches feasible, for example). However, the Tolkien Estate has not
chosen to authorize any electronic versions, probably because of the
ease with which electronic versions can be illegally copied and
distributed. Therefore, there are no legal electronic copies of
Tolkien's writings. The moral issues involved are less clear (they
seem to depend on one's economic philosophy), but the general culture
of the newsgroups is pretty firmly against these unauthorized texts.
 
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