why can't i just keep my disc?

From a practical point of view, it's because we're trying to cut down on the expense and workload of sending out free discs to anyone and everyone who asks. We aren't comfortable with charging money for this, so the alternative is to enlist the help of participants to make the most of a smaller number of circulating discs and to spread postage costs around.

From a philosophical point of view, we're a big fan of peer-to-peer arrangements. This is why we always serve our releases via BitTorrent rather than a direct download: instead of a provider-and-consumer model, we like to engage our readers a little bit. Think of the sneakernet as BitTorrent-via-snailmail: to receive something you have to share something back, too.

why don't you carry anybody else's translations?

At the moment this happens to be the insani sneakernet, not the Haeleth sneakernet or the Mirror Moon sneakernet or ... any other kind of sneakernet. We're just trying out the system to see whether it works well enough to meet our needs and the needs of our readers. That being said, we do also include some games from the al|together festival.

In the future we may expand the sneakernet to cover other groups' releases. If you are a representative of a visual novel translation group who feels that their work is up to our standards and wishes to have their releases included in the sneakernet, feel free to get in touch with us. However, note that we will not consider including releases distributed in a way which contributes to piracy (i.e. we insist on patch-only releases for full-length commercial games). You may also be asked to "seed" the sneakernet with some number of your discs.