This is very shortsighted. People are motivated by wealth. Paper books cannot be copied for free but ebooks can, same thing with music. The creators must be compensated or the content that you enjoy would cease to exist.
I've had similar thoughts, and my conclusion is that most copy-able assets should be copy-able. The real value is in discovery and curation, which may be sold as a subscription. Many companies already realize this, and DRM requirements are set by 1 stockholder who pushes for it and nobody can give a good reason why it would hurt paying customers.
The subscription model seems generally good for the consumer but terrible for the creators. As a customer, I really like the Bandcamp model. I can't directly speak for the creator side of things but I feel like that would get them a far better cut.
Never thought of it from the creators perspective. Thanks for giving me a new problem to solve during quarantine! I'm 100% certain there is an ideal system to manage every human problem, it's just a matter of investigation.
How is it terrible for creators exactly? I don't quite know what you mean. Streamers often complain about the "always on" nature but that seems more related to having to handle building engagement as well. Patreon is a popular enough that there are several clones for whatever content they exclude to help their image ranging from taboo porn to extremists.
The payment stream seems peripheral to the deal they get. Creators get screwed in publication models as well. The best deal I can see in a "Netflix" style package is a bit tracky in having a maintainer cut and a time weighted service by the consumers under the logic that if 1 work is why you are there it deserves the share more than anything you don't consume while among N works each matters a bit less. More content grows the pie but it is fixdd share. Heavy users pay the same as light but that is because metering and surprise bills are too stressing and loses customers combined with a marginal real cost.
I ment subscription to service like Spotify or Netflix. Direct subscription to streamers is something I do often, but that doesn't work for music and movies.
Currently, I hardly ever buy ebooks (maybe like 1-2 per year), mostly because I hate DRM and the hassle that comes with stripping it off. A monthly 4$ subscription to a store where all books of the world are available would make the industry see a lot more of my money. Surely that would be good for the creators.
How on earth would any author make money from you paying $4 a month? Why don't we pay all computer programmers $10 an hour, that's pretty much the price equivalent of paying what you ask.
Music was being made LONG before there was a music industry.
Creating value and collecting a portion of the value created are completely different skill sets. You can't put them together by just saying it MUST BE SO. That's the "central committee" approach and history has shown that while it appears attractive, it will more likely destroy it all.
Very few content-creators get a fair royalty. DRM is mostly about publisher wealth, not creator wealth.
I think selling books for 25 cents etc. can result in massive sales. There is a middle-ground between selling overpriced editions with small changes in between, and outright piracy. Digital formats allow large-scale distribution, so pricing copies for under a dollar makes piracy not that attractive, when following the law and your conscience comes so cheap.
But somehow publishers want it all - the large scale distribution possibility of the digital medium, and the margins of the print medium.
You need to consider perceived value, most of the books I buy are $9.99-14.99 and if I saw a new book come out for $0.25 my first reaction would be Wtf, then probably: did a child write this?
Maybe a middle ground, like what Louis C.K did. He was selling his videos for $5 at one point, if I remember correctly - directly from his website, cutting out the middlemen. Yes, one can buy it and send it to all their friends, but the price is low enough that many people would just buy it..
honestly, having given it much thought, i don't think this is actually the case.
all i can say in a short comment on my reasoning is:
1. works of art done for love or the need to share are peices of content probably worth spending very valuable time on
2. works of art created for money are inevitably optimising for wasting your life - films and books are dragged out to series that largely go no where, vacuous music and media is created in the hope of getting you to spend money, not expanding your mind and adding to the value of society
3. historically this doesn't really seem to have been an issue. if you are good you can make money out of commissions and guest appearances or signed copies etc. this is not perfect, but it certainly makes it more likely money will go to the creator rather than a distributor. - note also the current system is far from perfect and many creators suffer from its failures today
4. nothing is done in isolation: inevitably you created your thing based on what you learned from others and opportunities society gave you.. but most importantly the value comes from other people need, NOT your creation - ability to write code is not valuable, removing someones problem is.
5. controlling and restricting the ability for other to create as they are not creating how some right holder wants seems drastically counter productive and greatly slows progress and de-motivates people who could be adding to society.
6. if we got better about respecting what others had contributed to our ideas (as we felt less need to hoard them) then overall i think people would be worried less when its someone else take on their idea that "makes it big". if thre was less ot be gained financially, it would remove incentives for deceit.
i suppose in summary, i think that you should create out of love and because you think that thing needs creating. if all "for profit" inventions and art were to vanish from existence, i don't actually think we would be missing much. there is no race we are trying to win with progress and there is no final state to get to.
Let me get this straight, the author has a bad experience with one website selling ebooks, so they decide they’ll never buy ebooks ever again?
In real life, this would be the equivalent of getting one bad meal at a restaurant chain in a city you’ve never been to before, so you stop eating at that chain anywhere else, despite positive experiences in the past.
I think it would be more like deciding never to eat in any restaurant anywhere.
The headline says that he won’t ever buy ebooks, then lists good places to buy ebooks. I guess he is exaggerating for effect?
But it’s true, nobody should accept DRM. Here is the statement of the publisher who sells my gnuplot book:
“We believe that when you buy a book, it belongs to you. That’s why we use no ‘digital rights management’ or anything else that interferes with your rights. You can make as many personal backups as you want, and use the book on any number of your own devices. If you lose your files, you can just download them again, forever.”
Unless I missed something, the author states they never had issues with other services but they don’t say they intend to keep buying ebooks despite one bad experience.
One would hope the author is exaggerating but I have seen a number of people in my life be this irrational. I’m inclined to take the title as is given any lack of evidence to the contrary.
You raise a valid point, but I have had a similar experience and I think ebooks indeed are in their golden age of piracy right now, like movies before Netflix came along or video games before Steam.
Libgen has everything and it's so much easier than dealing with online retailers and Adobe's bullshit. If you know stores that sell DRM-free ebooks I'd be very interested.
I’ll leave finding DRM-free ebooks as an exercise for the reader. There are a number of small publishers offering their books without DRM. Some genres are easier than others.
Tor went DRM-free many years ago. I know their catalog is on Amazon.
Sorry, I just realized that question was poorly stated. It misses an important point: there has to be a decently sized catalog. It doesn't need to rival Libgen, but it should be something that covers most of your bases. Sorry for kinda moving the goalposts here, but right now, most of the time, looking for a particular book you can't get your hands on it DRM free without going to Libgen. That's the thing which has to change.
It is worth pointing out that Libgen doesn’t have everything, just a portion of books that have been digitized by publishers. For older and now out-of-print books, or for genres like poetry where only a few authors are ever given the ebook treatment, you won’t find that content on Libgen unless someone does the work of scanning it. And even if someone does scan it, you’re going to just get a PDF or DJVU file, not a beautifully formatted EPUB for your e-reader.
I have been a Libgen user and contributor for many years now, but I find myself simply buying more and more physical books, since so much of what I want to read is not available on Libgen or anywhere else digitally.
I think the author typically pirates e-books and the one time he tries to purchase one, he has this experience and decides he will continue to pirate them.
So really it's like if someone usually takes food off the hot plate at a restaurant to steal it, and the one time they sit down and pay it's a shitty experience so they decide they're going to keep stealing lol.
> Paying is always a worse experience than stealing, until you get caught.
Nah.
Take netflix for example: you pay your subscription and you get to watch movies. ez pz.
Now take the pirating route: you have to find torrents, such torrents have to have seeds, you need disk space, you need a torrenting app, you might have to leave your computer turned on for a long time etc etc.
Netflix is sucessful because they managed to make paying better than pirating.
Popcorn Time exists, and it's just as easy as Netflix. Much better catalogue too. It also downloads while streaming, so if you have to stop in the middle, you can more easily pick back up where you left off because it's already downloaded. Also you can then share this downloaded file with whomever you want because it's DRM free, but you can't send a Netflix movie to someone else, which was the author's main quibble anyway.
Much better UX for movies with piracy, even with Netflix, which is a great service.
I don't think the writer of this blog post would accept "Netflix for ebooks." Netflix still has DRM, and you definitely don't own any of the content you watch on Netflix. For someone whose whole point is that they won't buy anything but a DRM-free epub to load into Calibre, I doubt that a such an alternative (which already exists, by the way, in the form of Kindle Unlimited, Scribd, or any number of library apps) would be an acceptable solution.
That's only because sharing movies isn't as easy (files are quite large) and law enforcement goes after pirates.
If piracy sites could flourish without being disturbed, it would be absolutely impossible to compete with them. And this is the exact situation you have with book piracy.
If that were true, Netflix would not have been the success we know. When the user experience of buying anything is easier than the illegal counterpart, that's how you win over piracy.
Please see my reply to the other respondent about Popcorn Time.
Regardless, my broader point is a complete rejection of the idea that "businesses should just make getting X easier than piracy" is a reasonable point to make at all. The onus is not on the business.
Do you know what else is an easier experience when you steal? Clothes shopping. The UX is much better when you just walk in to a clothing store, pick out what you want, and then walk out. No waiting in a queue to checkout, no receipts, etc. etc. Clearly the onus is on clothing stores to make the experience of paying for the good easier than just walking out with them, right?
What about restaurants? Wouldn't it be so much nicer if you could just go in, sit, eat your meal, and then not have to pay? No having to deal with tipping, splitting the bill, arguing over charges, etc. Just walk in, eat, and leave. Clearly then the onus is on restaurants to make the "paying for your meal" experience easier than dining-and-dashing, right?
Who else would the onus be on then? Ultimately if you don't like something that's happening to you, then it's on you to address it. The cops most likely aren't going to give a shit about someone seeding a torrent of your pdf, and while publishers haven't completely recouped sales since the advent of internet piracy, services like Spotify have definitely slowed the bleeding.
I find the "it's 2020" statement strange in more than one way.
Yeah, ebooks are higher tech than paper, but I find the experience to be worse than paper.
I have no problem reading long-form content on a screen, but I'd rather be reading a long scrolling HTML page than a "paged" ePub or PDF.
I just set up an Obooquity server on my network so I can access my eBooks from any device, and I dislike the experience. FWIW, I dislike physical eBook readers and mobile eBook reading apps too.
DRM aside, I feel like "it's 2020", and the fact you have to flip pages to read eBooks to be somewhat ridiculous.
Just an assumption on my part, but the 2020 statement might be referring to the current state of the world, i.e., thanks to ongoing quarantines in many places, it’s easier to buy e-books than physical ones.
That is, until there's a piece of content he wants that's not available from one of those vendors.
The problem with those vendors really comes down to selection, and they have a smaller selection. Like it or not, if there's something highly desirable and current, and he _must_ have it, he's going to have to deal with the inevitable pains of DRM, or resort to piracy.
I'm sure the bean counters at content producers have done the calculus of losing a certain percentage of prospective paying customers vs. convenience, and have decided that certain inconveniences are worthwhile.
When you are treated like a thief (and get additional harm like being forced to install spyware) because you did the legal thing and purchased a book you know that you are in the wrong side of the lane.
Same happened with music (Sony had rootkit bundled in their CDs), DVDs (the FBI warning screen), games and so on. You get punished if you try to be a good behaving customer.
There's a hepaing of hyperbole on there, but my experience with buying ebooks is very similar - Aside from buying from e.g. pragprog, who don't do DRM.
When pirating books, I download it, put it on my ereader, and read it.
When actually purchasing books, I need to install Adobes proprietary DRM-program, open the book in there, unlock it with my account, then use the Adobe program to transfer it to my tablet.
Not a huge hassle, but pirating just works, and offers an experience that's infinitely more pleasant.
Which is a shame, I should add, because I want to pay for the culture I consume, but vendors, copyright, and publishers try their best to make that process as wonky as possible.
If you're willing to buy from Amazon and use a Kindle it works pretty easily. One-click purchasing, automatic downloading to your reader, and suchlike.
(That's if you're willing to hold your nose about having DRM at all, the remote deleting of books, Amazon's near-monopoly and so on - personally I don't buy any ebooks I'm not willing to lose)
I prefer not to use Amazon, and currently use a reader other than a Kindle.
I do believe my reader has the same ease-of-use if I purchase books from the company selling it. Might be only if buying things using the reader itself, not sure.
Seems to me that all (major) ebook retailers try to lock down the files in one way or another. So yeah, if the chances of having a bad experience buying ebooks are high, I can see why "just download it and be done with it" is a compelling offer.
I'm all for finding ways of letting authors survive, or better yet thrive. But the current market seems to cater to the publishers, not the authors (cf: movie industry, music industry) so I don't even feel all that bad about that.
To stay in the allegory: if it was common practice and somehow widely acceptable for restaurants to use boatloads of laxatives during food preparation, but they only told you so after you asked to see the manager, would you judge the people who just outright refused to eat out any longer? The stress of finding a laxative free restaurant would simply outweigh the benefit from eating out.
It's not that the retailers are trying to lock them down, they'll happily sell DRM free books. However, publishers in particular tend to be sticklers for DRM, and won't sell on your platform if you don't implement it as an option.
There are books I'd buy today if they weren't published by publishers which only distribute with DRM. If it isn't desirable enough in that case to justify buying a dead tree version, I just pass entirely.
> Let me get this straight, the author has a bad experience with one website selling ebooks, so they decide they’ll never buy ebooks ever again?
It may be hyperbolic, but I basically feel the same way, because I had more or less the same thing happen: I saw a book I wanted to buy, it said EPUB; there was absolutely no indication that there was DRM, that I'd be required to install Adobe software, or anything. I bought the book, and after paying for it, was told about all this.
I was so furious I emailed them immediately and demanded my money back (which they complied with). But it certainly put me off buying e-books from random websites -- I haven't even thought about doing it since.
> In real life, this would be the equivalent of getting one bad meal at a restaurant chain in a city you’ve never been to before, so you stop eating at that chain anywhere else
well, supposedly a chain will sell the same dishes everywhere.
If you don't like the menu of a certain chain, what's the point in trying at another location?
It's gonna be the same menu.
------
Coming back to the article: my advice would be to download that illegally. If in order to use your legally purchased content you have to go through illegal means (and become a pirate anyway) you might as well save those seven euros.
Torrent is probably illegal, yeah. Regular downlpad might be legal-ish (protected by court) based on the intent - to simply read a book like a book, without unrealistic expectations.
More like he already has a political stance on ebooks and he just used this one example to further his political agenda.
There's a reason why companies put customers through all this garbage and the reason is because I can easily pirate these books. So the story isn't as one sided as this guy makes it out to be. It's a contentious issue between customer rights of ownership and piracy.
Well it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, who started it? Customers pirating or companies adding DRM to their products?
I would wager that there's a good number of people who pirate things for the simple reason of them not wanting to pay for anything. This is the catalyst.
I think the author mentions it is the first time he buys an ebook.
Also if you think the problem is systemic ("it seems that all the restaurants in this chain behaves this specific way I dislike") then you might as well move on and don't try your chance a second time.
I agree your experience has been shit, but work that an author spend months or years of their life on has to have some sort of protection. People need to get used to actually paying for digital services, but they won't when the experience is as bad as this. Companies can not make dealing with their drm more difficult than working around it.
Was the author reluctant to buying the book? He bought it. He just doesn't want to have to use Windows and a whole suite of awful software because of the DRM.
Really? The 1st paragraph is just about his friend trying to borrow the book, and noboby having it, and the author eventually buying it. Is the problem that people are trying to borrow books from their friends? This has been going on for centuries.
> The advertised format was epub, an open standard, useable on a large number of supports. But surprise-surprise, to get the file, I needed either a specific kind of tablet ... or to use Adobe [] spyware.
How is this not bait-and-switch fraud? OP should file a complaint with their local business regulator.
I am surprised by this comment; the article seemed clear that the author didn't mind paying for the book. Their issue was that the book was advertised as an EPUB file but then came wrapped in proprietary DRM.
Their title is literally "I won't buy ebooks anymore". They've stated their intent to only pirate books. And they bought it with the intent of giving copies to their friends in the role as a "library". If they had stated a preference to only buy DRM-free books that would have been different but they literally link to a book pirating website in the article.
There's definitely a demographic of that culture that comes across as having a very angsty, "hack the planet damn the man" attitude. A surefire way to stoke that anger is to involve them in any kind of process that results in profits being generated.
Zealotry is great when you've got ample time on your hands, but some folks have work to get done and bills to pay, i.e. the authors who's books OP is stealing...
> Is this communication style a function of being involved in FSF, or does FSF just naturally attract very angry people?
I agree that the article was poorly written. But you seem to be implying here that people involved with the FSF, as a whole, tend to be angry. I’m not at all sure that that’s true.
> It's not unreasonable that people should be compensated for work that they've spent months or years of their life working on.
Sure, agreed. And downloading unauthorized copies of ebooks from shady web sites, like the one mentioned in the article, isn’t a fair solution. But, for example, buying only ebooks withoutDRM from legitimate sources, and otherwise buying paper books, is one possible fair solution without DRM where writers and publishers do get paid.
Sometime last year, I was researching the OPDS spec and the upcoming release. I found that it’s all linked to DRM ultimately. Check the Readium specs if you’re interested.
I was so disheartened to see DRM being pushed with an open standard. It’s the whole EME thing again.
We have downloadable music existing without DRM. Music industry tried before and failed. I pay an extra price for FLAC-quality downloadable content without DRM on it. And I hope that the movie industrie will take this road some day, too.
BTT, there are a lot of books where you aren't forced into DRM. DRM creates real world issues for customers, as the shut down of DRM servers in the past showed.
If you put DRM on your book, I won't buy it. It's as simple as that. Which doesn't mean I illegally download it from "somewhere on the interwebz". I simply won't read it at all.
I used to collect physical books, but there are so many new and novel stories out there that I don’t reread most of them. So it’s a waste of space to keep 98% of them around anymore. Purging them was cathartic.
Click on my kindle icon for "store", find book, click buy, have it seconds later. Alternatively, go to amazon.com and find book, click buy, shows up on my kindle seconds later.
Kindle has definitely made it as friction free as possible. The lock-in used to be moderately annoying, but I have a phone that can natively handle other formats (not to mention the kindle app), so I just don’t care anymore.
Yeah, Amazon's ebook buying experience is about as seamless as one could ask for. I do not think the ebook buying experience has anything to do with why paper books are still around.
Considering the author already strips the DRM from the purchased e-books and also apparently knows about Z library, a simple solution seems to be the buy the e-book, ignore it and then download the same e-book from Z library.
I also feel the frustration though. I won't buy e-books unless it either has no DRM or if I know I can strip it easily afterwards.
The author usually gets <5% share from the book price. I guess it's much better (although not legal) to just skip buying the book and send a donation directly to the author.
Most of the "eBooks" from Z-lib and archive.org I've downloaded are nothing more than poor-quality scans of paper books converted to ePub via PDF+OCR. They're not even worth getting. The eBooks I rent via Overdrive or Kindle, though, were actually prepared specifically for that format.
A poor experience with what sounds like a poor distributor, and, perhaps by extension, a poor and limiting DRM, should not be considered representative for an otherwise neat format (.epub).
If sales are done right, the experience is seamless, as the author himself finds to be the case with other distributors.
Doesn't sound like the author is gonna stop reading ebooks, just that he's gonna pirate them (he mentions how easy it is to get a DRM-free book on Z Library).
> Having DRM on books is a fucking dystopia nightmare that shouldn't even be a thing and I hope that the EU will pass laws to nuke them from orbit
Learn polish ;)) there is no DRM on polish ebook sites. You just pay and get links to PDF/EPUB/MOBI formats of ebook. There is only watermark protection, example site: https://virtualo.pl/ebook/heban-i150038/ but it is similar in all publishing houses.
Yes, I have been a Linux zealot once. I have been a "no DRM here" zealot once.
I am now running Windows 10 + WSL and I begrudgingly accept if I want to support the authors while reading on an eReader I need to accept the DRM'd ebooks. I am getting too old to struggle with being a zealot. There are better things to spend my time on.
DRM-using publishers tend to pay authors less than non-DRM ones do, and certainly less than you can donate to them (I assume the full price of the book). So if your intention is to support authors, pirating and finding a way to pay the author in a different way is more efficient.
I don't mind buying ebooks, movies, music but it has to be simple. With DRM is less good, but even DRM, as long as it's simple. I had the same experience as the author with a book I bought in Spain; they had ebooks so I bought this one. The process was so convoluted and annoying (and only worked on Windows which I don't have here) (also; I am a technical person/programmer; how is a 'normal' person supposed to do this?) that I definitely won't buy again from them.
I think unlike the author though, I was not attempting to remove the DRM; the process of getting to read the book with DRM was many steps (downloading adobe crap, etc) and the endresult was something with DRM that could be opened in another Adobe program but no-where else.
The most annoying part is books 'disappearing' or becoming unreadable like what happens on Amazon; like there are books that I bought which are limited to n devices (all mine and my account!) or they just suddenly cannot be read anymore (and cannot be downloaded again). What else can I do then just download illegally?
I buy ebooks largely out of convenience. I’ll be laying in bed and want to continue the The Witcher. There are plenty of pirated copies of this but I’m not going to trouble myself so I just buy this thing I’ll spend weeks falling asleep in front of.
Occasionally I’ll try to get something from the library but it has a seven week waiting time on it. Forget it. I buy that then also.
Sometimes I want to remove the DRM from something, I buy a fair amount of ebooks I should be allowed to make this call.
In the past I’ve used caliber to do this.
Unfortunately the DeDRM plugin is broken on Catalina. As far as I can tell you have to boot macOS into safe mode and disable SIP to get it working.
The eBook market kinda sucks. Not every book is available, for example a friend and I wanted to read Inca Gold as sort of a joke together. He bought the book used in hardcover, this particular novel is not available in the Kindle Store. I clicked the notify publisher they should publish this as an ebook link then I found a copy floating around on the web.
The other thing is pricing. eBooks cost much more than regular books and I can not understand why except because it is convenient. Frankly the device is convenient. Not a lot about the systems that support ebooks feels convenient.
Even supporting services like Goodreads feel clunky and stale at this point.
I largely blame Amazon for half hearted support of kindle. Their flagship device has a micro usb on it.
Yeah. DRM sucks if you want to lend your bought content, or if you're hoping to have it around for long periods of time (e.g. 10 years+). When I buy electronic copies of Xbox games, I'm under no illusion that I will be able to play them in 10-20 years. I see them as long-term rentals. I've made my peace with that because I have an entire library of games, movies and music on media like floppy disks, VHS, cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs, that I never felt the need to use again and are cluttering up my basement. If I get nostalgic about some content, there's always an electronic copy around somewhere on the internet, usually legal and available for a few bucks.
Having said that, I do agree with the shitty ergonomics and usability of DRMed content. If someone went out of their way to pay for a book or a movie, they aren't the kind of people to go and pirate that - so don't punish them.
I only "buy" (1) ebooks to read on the plane. You can't practically (2) loan ebooks and I like to share them with my friends.
(1) You don't actually buy them, you lease them.
(2) For example; Kindle books can only be loaned for 14 days. I guess if you vacationing on the beach, you could probably read it that quickly. Most people only have some weekend or evening time.
Not OP, but my children seem to have a "Kindle Activity Detector" and suddenly want to play whenever I sit down to read. They're only children once, the books can wait.
But, hey, I finished Worm and that's about a million words!
Are you me? I could have written the exact same blog article! I have the same experience this month, I ended spending hours to be able to use an e-book I bought, and I also finally needed to convert it multiple times, install shady software, etc.
I didn't find an online shop meeting these criteria:
* really big catalogue (of the size of Fnac.com, etc.)
* EPUB with no DRM
I also sent an email to the (French) publisher/editor of the book to narrate the awful user-experience. Maybe you can do the same ;) If enough readers contact the publishers to say they won't buy ebook anymore with such a poor user experience, it might help.
Yes, pirating media is often easier than buying media that compensates the author and distributor. Didn't we all know that?
DRM and other protection instruments are widespread in digital media and I don't think a good answer to this problem has been found yet, which addresses ease of access & use and also adequate compensation to creators.
We still want an equivalent to physical ownership of media but that's applying old thinking to a modern technology, so frustration is understandable. Truly owning digital media is increasingly rare concept. Being able to sharing individual media items more so. Typically we merely rent temporary access through a defined ecosystem. I don't know what the answer is, beyond acknowledging the limitations of both physical and digital media and not expecting the best of both worlds to be possible.
It is essentially a proverbial greed trap the same as the music industry encountered already. They can in fact get more but they need to let go of the impossible first. DRM asks for the product to be viewable to the end user while not being copyable when fundamentally being viewable is being copyable. It is a hint of a fundamentally insane world view.
Take a look at digital distribution stores for games that give people a fuss-free experience. Access a well organized catalog & help pages, discussion forums, wikis, etc. Keep track of your library, always get latest version, download anytime anywhere in the world from fast servers any number of times. That really made a huge impact on game piracy.
What a typical "illegal download site" that tries to bombard you with ads, puts a bunch of silly restrictions on you and then starts to nag for money to lift those restrictions.. what a pain.
Books aren't games. Books have a way smaller file size, so fast downloads aren't as attractive. They aren't software, so there is a severely reduced security risk. Something like offering the 'newest version' just doesn't apply, most books have a few errata at most. If you think there is some equivalent service you could provide for books, I think you have to give some examples specific to books. In regards to organized catalog: why wouldn't people use the catalog and then just pirate it anyway?
And are you really arguing that 5 books a day or 1 MB per second (when most books are less than 10 MB) are a limiting restriction and that people would actually buy more than 5 books a day? Hell, there are even other sites without these restrictions. Genesis library as far as I know only shows ads. If you think this is even remotely a pain, I think you're pretty out of touch with the average consumer.
Books are different, therefore you can't offer people an easy, simple, convenient ebook store that doesn't screw you over with excess prices and proprietary windows-only software and DRM? Yeah, with that kind of attitude it's kinda hard to compete with Z-lib or whatever. Just like with games. Torrenting used to be too damn convenient compared to all the legal offering, because the legal offers were just crap.
The problem isn't that illegal channels are too easy, the problem is that the legal channels are (seemingly deliberately) terrible. That's exactly what prompted the blog post we're commenting on, and that's what also keeps me from buying e-books.
What? It was you who was explicitly mentioning additional services (e.g. always getting latest version) which just don't apply to books.
If your argument is convenience tops everything: again, the best possible, most convenient book store would be just like genesis library, except that you'd have to pay (and maybe see a single ad banner less).
> most convenient book store would be just like genesis library
Great! So let's start there. That's already 100% better than what the current bookstores are doing (a few small publishers aside). That alone would solve my and the OP's problem, and I'd be open to buying ebooks, but I guarantee people will also enjoy the additional features once you get them to use the platform. I would certainly like to browse a curated catalog with tags, user reviews, a discussion section, thematic sales, etc. Just as with games. As with digital storefronts for games, you could always go find similar resources outside the platform, but having it all in one place is incredibly convenient and engaging.
>Truly owning digital media is increasingly rare concept. Being able to sharing individual media items more so. Typically we merely rent temporary access through a defined ecosystem. I don't know what the answer is, beyond acknowledging the limitations of both physical and digital media and not expecting the best of both worlds to be possible.
I think within 5-10 years digital media like ebooks, games, movies etc will transition to being represented by ERC-721 tokens which brings with it the benefits of physical media (permanent ownership, sharability, etc) while also being easy to store, transport, read digital items. The main benefit is that you can buy your ebook/game/movie in one store/ecosystem and even if that system goes out of business your purchase will still be valid at other stores and platforms. You own the item itself and are not renting it from a certain store.
Stores sell commodity items all the time. There are a large range of products that are identical in price amongst all of the stores today.
This even exists to an extent today with video games with Steam allowing you to purchase gift copies and sell them to others as a later time. Humble Bundle also allows games to be bought and sold to an extent. If you search there are lots of sites out there that sell Steam keys too. Steam doesn't just compete on price, they offer unique features such as their community features, existing userbase, and easy to use item markets as well. There are ways existing merchants entice you to buy commodity products today even if they have to sell them at the same price as other stores.
This model will likely be more fair to the content creator as they will likely get a larger portion of the profits, thought this is completely up in the air.
An interesting use case for selling modern digital commodities are things like $SOCKS (https://unisocks.exchange/) and Saint Fame (https://www.saintfame.com/). The price is dictated by the market itself instead of individual sellers.
>Stores sell commodity items all the time. There are a large range of products that are identical in price amongst all of the stores today.
A second hand store does not compare to a store selling new goods. Physical used goods are at least in some ways inferior and it's quite costly to resell them.
>This even exists to an extent today with video games with Steam allowing you to purchase gift copies and sell them to others as a later time
But you can't resell used games, that's the important point. It doesn't matter who buys the key, if you play the game, the author has been paid for your specific copy. If resale is allowed, a single purchase of the original good could be played by potentially 100s of consumers (sequentially) without a single additional cent for the author.
>An interesting use case for selling modern digital commodities are things like $SOCKS
I don't understand how books/games are comparable. These seem to have some actual commodity, which can't be easily shared, backing them.
>But you can't resell used games, that's the important point
Well, yeah, I said to an extent not exactly the same. That's also why I made my post. It is possible now.
>If resale is allowed, a single purchase of the original good could be played by potentially 100s of consumers (sequentially) without a single additional cent for the author
This argument applies equally to physical console games (Used copies sold at Gamestop and ebay) and physical books (Libraries and second hand bookstores). Those mediums didn't get destroyed by the reselling of the item after it was used.
Digital goods are always in perfect condition and can be trivially resold, while reselling physical goods takes way more effort, is mostly semi-locally restricted and the good gets damaged after usage.
e.g. if some guy from the other side of the world wants to sell their physical book to you, it's very likely cheaper, faster and more convenient to just buy a new copy.
It's like the difference between e-mail and mail. It's conceptually the same, but the lack of barrier causes it to behave completely differently.
This idea has been around for a while, it was trialled during the early days of digital media services when they were trying to preserve the level of DVD and Blu-Ray sales. But it didn't take off widely. It seems to have hung around as Walmart's Disc to Digital, but stopped at the end of last year.
The key difference is that ERC-721/NFTs are a neutral platform not owned or controlled by anymore. Those systems were run by a corporation that could pull the rug out from under you at any time which means no company in their right mind would risk their success building on a system that could be turned off or used to coerce them at any time in the future. You can build on top of ERC-721 since you know it will be around in the future and it's stable, like HTTP before it. Neutral systems are a prerequisite for large groups of stakeholders to cooperate.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] threadThe payment stream seems peripheral to the deal they get. Creators get screwed in publication models as well. The best deal I can see in a "Netflix" style package is a bit tracky in having a maintainer cut and a time weighted service by the consumers under the logic that if 1 work is why you are there it deserves the share more than anything you don't consume while among N works each matters a bit less. More content grows the pie but it is fixdd share. Heavy users pay the same as light but that is because metering and surprise bills are too stressing and loses customers combined with a marginal real cost.
Currently, I hardly ever buy ebooks (maybe like 1-2 per year), mostly because I hate DRM and the hassle that comes with stripping it off. A monthly 4$ subscription to a store where all books of the world are available would make the industry see a lot more of my money. Surely that would be good for the creators.
The authors where I am the only reader won't make on writing alone either way.
Creating value and collecting a portion of the value created are completely different skill sets. You can't put them together by just saying it MUST BE SO. That's the "central committee" approach and history has shown that while it appears attractive, it will more likely destroy it all.
I think selling books for 25 cents etc. can result in massive sales. There is a middle-ground between selling overpriced editions with small changes in between, and outright piracy. Digital formats allow large-scale distribution, so pricing copies for under a dollar makes piracy not that attractive, when following the law and your conscience comes so cheap.
But somehow publishers want it all - the large scale distribution possibility of the digital medium, and the margins of the print medium.
all i can say in a short comment on my reasoning is: 1. works of art done for love or the need to share are peices of content probably worth spending very valuable time on 2. works of art created for money are inevitably optimising for wasting your life - films and books are dragged out to series that largely go no where, vacuous music and media is created in the hope of getting you to spend money, not expanding your mind and adding to the value of society 3. historically this doesn't really seem to have been an issue. if you are good you can make money out of commissions and guest appearances or signed copies etc. this is not perfect, but it certainly makes it more likely money will go to the creator rather than a distributor. - note also the current system is far from perfect and many creators suffer from its failures today 4. nothing is done in isolation: inevitably you created your thing based on what you learned from others and opportunities society gave you.. but most importantly the value comes from other people need, NOT your creation - ability to write code is not valuable, removing someones problem is. 5. controlling and restricting the ability for other to create as they are not creating how some right holder wants seems drastically counter productive and greatly slows progress and de-motivates people who could be adding to society. 6. if we got better about respecting what others had contributed to our ideas (as we felt less need to hoard them) then overall i think people would be worried less when its someone else take on their idea that "makes it big". if thre was less ot be gained financially, it would remove incentives for deceit.
i suppose in summary, i think that you should create out of love and because you think that thing needs creating. if all "for profit" inventions and art were to vanish from existence, i don't actually think we would be missing much. there is no race we are trying to win with progress and there is no final state to get to.
In real life, this would be the equivalent of getting one bad meal at a restaurant chain in a city you’ve never been to before, so you stop eating at that chain anywhere else, despite positive experiences in the past.
The headline says that he won’t ever buy ebooks, then lists good places to buy ebooks. I guess he is exaggerating for effect?
But it’s true, nobody should accept DRM. Here is the statement of the publisher who sells my gnuplot book:
“We believe that when you buy a book, it belongs to you. That’s why we use no ‘digital rights management’ or anything else that interferes with your rights. You can make as many personal backups as you want, and use the book on any number of your own devices. If you lose your files, you can just download them again, forever.”
One would hope the author is exaggerating but I have seen a number of people in my life be this irrational. I’m inclined to take the title as is given any lack of evidence to the contrary.
True, but then the author also says "So I bought it. For the first time in my life, I bought an ebook".
So I can't tell what is going on.
Libgen has everything and it's so much easier than dealing with online retailers and Adobe's bullshit. If you know stores that sell DRM-free ebooks I'd be very interested.
Tor went DRM-free many years ago. I know their catalog is on Amazon.
I have been a Libgen user and contributor for many years now, but I find myself simply buying more and more physical books, since so much of what I want to read is not available on Libgen or anywhere else digitally.
So really it's like if someone usually takes food off the hot plate at a restaurant to steal it, and the one time they sit down and pay it's a shitty experience so they decide they're going to keep stealing lol.
It's very hard to get caught and prosecuted for piracy though, which is why the "experience" is so much better.
Nah.
Take netflix for example: you pay your subscription and you get to watch movies. ez pz.
Now take the pirating route: you have to find torrents, such torrents have to have seeds, you need disk space, you need a torrenting app, you might have to leave your computer turned on for a long time etc etc.
Netflix is sucessful because they managed to make paying better than pirating.
Popcorn Time exists, and it's just as easy as Netflix. Much better catalogue too. It also downloads while streaming, so if you have to stop in the middle, you can more easily pick back up where you left off because it's already downloaded. Also you can then share this downloaded file with whomever you want because it's DRM free, but you can't send a Netflix movie to someone else, which was the author's main quibble anyway.
Much better UX for movies with piracy, even with Netflix, which is a great service.
But while it's widely known, it's still less easy to use than netflix.
Regardless, my broader point is a complete rejection of the idea that "businesses should just make getting X easier than piracy" is a reasonable point to make at all. The onus is not on the business.
Do you know what else is an easier experience when you steal? Clothes shopping. The UX is much better when you just walk in to a clothing store, pick out what you want, and then walk out. No waiting in a queue to checkout, no receipts, etc. etc. Clearly the onus is on clothing stores to make the experience of paying for the good easier than just walking out with them, right?
What about restaurants? Wouldn't it be so much nicer if you could just go in, sit, eat your meal, and then not have to pay? No having to deal with tipping, splitting the bill, arguing over charges, etc. Just walk in, eat, and leave. Clearly then the onus is on restaurants to make the "paying for your meal" experience easier than dining-and-dashing, right?
“So I bought it. For the first time in my life, I bought an ebook, because it's 2020, so why not.”
Yeah, ebooks are higher tech than paper, but I find the experience to be worse than paper.
I have no problem reading long-form content on a screen, but I'd rather be reading a long scrolling HTML page than a "paged" ePub or PDF.
I just set up an Obooquity server on my network so I can access my eBooks from any device, and I dislike the experience. FWIW, I dislike physical eBook readers and mobile eBook reading apps too.
DRM aside, I feel like "it's 2020", and the fact you have to flip pages to read eBooks to be somewhat ridiculous.
The problem with those vendors really comes down to selection, and they have a smaller selection. Like it or not, if there's something highly desirable and current, and he _must_ have it, he's going to have to deal with the inevitable pains of DRM, or resort to piracy.
I'm sure the bean counters at content producers have done the calculus of losing a certain percentage of prospective paying customers vs. convenience, and have decided that certain inconveniences are worthwhile.
Same happened with music (Sony had rootkit bundled in their CDs), DVDs (the FBI warning screen), games and so on. You get punished if you try to be a good behaving customer.
When pirating books, I download it, put it on my ereader, and read it.
When actually purchasing books, I need to install Adobes proprietary DRM-program, open the book in there, unlock it with my account, then use the Adobe program to transfer it to my tablet.
Not a huge hassle, but pirating just works, and offers an experience that's infinitely more pleasant.
I'm very comfortable with pirating, but if I actually end up benefitting/consuming the product I try to find a way to pay for it.
(That's if you're willing to hold your nose about having DRM at all, the remote deleting of books, Amazon's near-monopoly and so on - personally I don't buy any ebooks I'm not willing to lose)
I do believe my reader has the same ease-of-use if I purchase books from the company selling it. Might be only if buying things using the reader itself, not sure.
I'm all for finding ways of letting authors survive, or better yet thrive. But the current market seems to cater to the publishers, not the authors (cf: movie industry, music industry) so I don't even feel all that bad about that.
To stay in the allegory: if it was common practice and somehow widely acceptable for restaurants to use boatloads of laxatives during food preparation, but they only told you so after you asked to see the manager, would you judge the people who just outright refused to eat out any longer? The stress of finding a laxative free restaurant would simply outweigh the benefit from eating out.
There are books I'd buy today if they weren't published by publishers which only distribute with DRM. If it isn't desirable enough in that case to justify buying a dead tree version, I just pass entirely.
It may be hyperbolic, but I basically feel the same way, because I had more or less the same thing happen: I saw a book I wanted to buy, it said EPUB; there was absolutely no indication that there was DRM, that I'd be required to install Adobe software, or anything. I bought the book, and after paying for it, was told about all this.
I was so furious I emailed them immediately and demanded my money back (which they complied with). But it certainly put me off buying e-books from random websites -- I haven't even thought about doing it since.
well, supposedly a chain will sell the same dishes everywhere.
If you don't like the menu of a certain chain, what's the point in trying at another location?
It's gonna be the same menu.
------
Coming back to the article: my advice would be to download that illegally. If in order to use your legally purchased content you have to go through illegal means (and become a pirate anyway) you might as well save those seven euros.
Obligatory XKCD: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/steal_this_comic.png
I failed to do this after getting food poisoning once, thinking it was just bad luck/one bad restaurant in the chain, and I soon regretted it.
There's a reason why companies put customers through all this garbage and the reason is because I can easily pirate these books. So the story isn't as one sided as this guy makes it out to be. It's a contentious issue between customer rights of ownership and piracy.
There's a reason why customers pirate and the reason is because companies put customers through all this garbage.
I would wager that there's a good number of people who pirate things for the simple reason of them not wanting to pay for anything. This is the catalyst.
I think the author mentions it is the first time he buys an ebook.
Also if you think the problem is systemic ("it seems that all the restaurants in this chain behaves this specific way I dislike") then you might as well move on and don't try your chance a second time.
"Affording the hassle of a bookshelf" is a thing nowadays, but I chose to indulge in that kind of luxury.
How is this not bait-and-switch fraud? OP should file a complaint with their local business regulator.
It's not unreasonable that people should be compensated for work that they've spent months or years of their life working on.
Zealotry is great when you've got ample time on your hands, but some folks have work to get done and bills to pay, i.e. the authors who's books OP is stealing...
I agree that the article was poorly written. But you seem to be implying here that people involved with the FSF, as a whole, tend to be angry. I’m not at all sure that that’s true.
> It's not unreasonable that people should be compensated for work that they've spent months or years of their life working on.
Sure, agreed. And downloading unauthorized copies of ebooks from shady web sites, like the one mentioned in the article, isn’t a fair solution. But, for example, buying only ebooks without DRM from legitimate sources, and otherwise buying paper books, is one possible fair solution without DRM where writers and publishers do get paid.
I was so disheartened to see DRM being pushed with an open standard. It’s the whole EME thing again.
BTT, there are a lot of books where you aren't forced into DRM. DRM creates real world issues for customers, as the shut down of DRM servers in the past showed.
If you put DRM on your book, I won't buy it. It's as simple as that. Which doesn't mean I illegally download it from "somewhere on the interwebz". I simply won't read it at all.
If that wasn't true, dead-tree books would be as rare as Compact Discs.
Not heard of a 50 year old epub or pdf yet, wonder if it will ever happen ;)
So pros/cons of each method.
It does need to be charged occasionally, though.
I also feel the frustration though. I won't buy e-books unless it either has no DRM or if I know I can strip it easily afterwards.
See Charles Stross: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/03/reminde...
A poor experience with what sounds like a poor distributor, and, perhaps by extension, a poor and limiting DRM, should not be considered representative for an otherwise neat format (.epub).
If sales are done right, the experience is seamless, as the author himself finds to be the case with other distributors.
Doesn't sound like the author is gonna stop reading ebooks, just that he's gonna pirate them (he mentions how easy it is to get a DRM-free book on Z Library).
Learn polish ;)) there is no DRM on polish ebook sites. You just pay and get links to PDF/EPUB/MOBI formats of ebook. There is only watermark protection, example site: https://virtualo.pl/ebook/heban-i150038/ but it is similar in all publishing houses.
I am now running Windows 10 + WSL and I begrudgingly accept if I want to support the authors while reading on an eReader I need to accept the DRM'd ebooks. I am getting too old to struggle with being a zealot. There are better things to spend my time on.
You can download the DeDRM tools from https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/ linking to github, no crazy sites involved.
Ps.: Funnily enough, my device is actually called a Not-eReader. It's lovely because it doubles as an emergency HDMI monitor.
Nobody does that, of course.
I think unlike the author though, I was not attempting to remove the DRM; the process of getting to read the book with DRM was many steps (downloading adobe crap, etc) and the endresult was something with DRM that could be opened in another Adobe program but no-where else.
The most annoying part is books 'disappearing' or becoming unreadable like what happens on Amazon; like there are books that I bought which are limited to n devices (all mine and my account!) or they just suddenly cannot be read anymore (and cannot be downloaded again). What else can I do then just download illegally?
Occasionally I’ll try to get something from the library but it has a seven week waiting time on it. Forget it. I buy that then also.
Sometimes I want to remove the DRM from something, I buy a fair amount of ebooks I should be allowed to make this call.
In the past I’ve used caliber to do this.
Unfortunately the DeDRM plugin is broken on Catalina. As far as I can tell you have to boot macOS into safe mode and disable SIP to get it working.
The eBook market kinda sucks. Not every book is available, for example a friend and I wanted to read Inca Gold as sort of a joke together. He bought the book used in hardcover, this particular novel is not available in the Kindle Store. I clicked the notify publisher they should publish this as an ebook link then I found a copy floating around on the web.
The other thing is pricing. eBooks cost much more than regular books and I can not understand why except because it is convenient. Frankly the device is convenient. Not a lot about the systems that support ebooks feels convenient.
Even supporting services like Goodreads feel clunky and stale at this point.
I largely blame Amazon for half hearted support of kindle. Their flagship device has a micro usb on it.
Thankfully a lot of sellers are selling books without DRM. I just bought a number of political books from Haymarket and Verso and that was the case.
Either I buy it without DRM, or I don't buy it.
Almost there with spyware, too. Creative Cloud is next on my list to replace.
https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools
Having said that, I do agree with the shitty ergonomics and usability of DRMed content. If someone went out of their way to pay for a book or a movie, they aren't the kind of people to go and pirate that - so don't punish them.
(1) You don't actually buy them, you lease them.
(2) For example; Kindle books can only be loaned for 14 days. I guess if you vacationing on the beach, you could probably read it that quickly. Most people only have some weekend or evening time.
But, hey, I finished Worm and that's about a million words!
This is disingenuous and doesn't bring much food for thoughts at the table.
Is the outrage porn card being played to garner attention for something else ?
I didn't find an online shop meeting these criteria:
* really big catalogue (of the size of Fnac.com, etc.)
* EPUB with no DRM
I also sent an email to the (French) publisher/editor of the book to narrate the awful user-experience. Maybe you can do the same ;) If enough readers contact the publishers to say they won't buy ebook anymore with such a poor user experience, it might help.
DRM and other protection instruments are widespread in digital media and I don't think a good answer to this problem has been found yet, which addresses ease of access & use and also adequate compensation to creators.
We still want an equivalent to physical ownership of media but that's applying old thinking to a modern technology, so frustration is understandable. Truly owning digital media is increasingly rare concept. Being able to sharing individual media items more so. Typically we merely rent temporary access through a defined ecosystem. I don't know what the answer is, beyond acknowledging the limitations of both physical and digital media and not expecting the best of both worlds to be possible.
We all know that it doesn't have to be that way.
> DRM and other protection instruments are widespread in digital media and I don't think a good answer to this problem has been found yet
DRM is the easiest of problems to solve: just remove it.
Now contrast the experience with something like Zlib.. oh hey: https://i.imgur.com/494nZjd.png
What a typical "illegal download site" that tries to bombard you with ads, puts a bunch of silly restrictions on you and then starts to nag for money to lift those restrictions.. what a pain.
And are you really arguing that 5 books a day or 1 MB per second (when most books are less than 10 MB) are a limiting restriction and that people would actually buy more than 5 books a day? Hell, there are even other sites without these restrictions. Genesis library as far as I know only shows ads. If you think this is even remotely a pain, I think you're pretty out of touch with the average consumer.
The problem isn't that illegal channels are too easy, the problem is that the legal channels are (seemingly deliberately) terrible. That's exactly what prompted the blog post we're commenting on, and that's what also keeps me from buying e-books.
If your argument is convenience tops everything: again, the best possible, most convenient book store would be just like genesis library, except that you'd have to pay (and maybe see a single ad banner less).
Great! So let's start there. That's already 100% better than what the current bookstores are doing (a few small publishers aside). That alone would solve my and the OP's problem, and I'd be open to buying ebooks, but I guarantee people will also enjoy the additional features once you get them to use the platform. I would certainly like to browse a curated catalog with tags, user reviews, a discussion section, thematic sales, etc. Just as with games. As with digital storefronts for games, you could always go find similar resources outside the platform, but having it all in one place is incredibly convenient and engaging.
I think within 5-10 years digital media like ebooks, games, movies etc will transition to being represented by ERC-721 tokens which brings with it the benefits of physical media (permanent ownership, sharability, etc) while also being easy to store, transport, read digital items. The main benefit is that you can buy your ebook/game/movie in one store/ecosystem and even if that system goes out of business your purchase will still be valid at other stores and platforms. You own the item itself and are not renting it from a certain store.
This even exists to an extent today with video games with Steam allowing you to purchase gift copies and sell them to others as a later time. Humble Bundle also allows games to be bought and sold to an extent. If you search there are lots of sites out there that sell Steam keys too. Steam doesn't just compete on price, they offer unique features such as their community features, existing userbase, and easy to use item markets as well. There are ways existing merchants entice you to buy commodity products today even if they have to sell them at the same price as other stores.
This model will likely be more fair to the content creator as they will likely get a larger portion of the profits, thought this is completely up in the air.
An interesting use case for selling modern digital commodities are things like $SOCKS (https://unisocks.exchange/) and Saint Fame (https://www.saintfame.com/). The price is dictated by the market itself instead of individual sellers.
A second hand store does not compare to a store selling new goods. Physical used goods are at least in some ways inferior and it's quite costly to resell them.
>This even exists to an extent today with video games with Steam allowing you to purchase gift copies and sell them to others as a later time
But you can't resell used games, that's the important point. It doesn't matter who buys the key, if you play the game, the author has been paid for your specific copy. If resale is allowed, a single purchase of the original good could be played by potentially 100s of consumers (sequentially) without a single additional cent for the author.
>An interesting use case for selling modern digital commodities are things like $SOCKS
I don't understand how books/games are comparable. These seem to have some actual commodity, which can't be easily shared, backing them.
Well, yeah, I said to an extent not exactly the same. That's also why I made my post. It is possible now.
>If resale is allowed, a single purchase of the original good could be played by potentially 100s of consumers (sequentially) without a single additional cent for the author
This argument applies equally to physical console games (Used copies sold at Gamestop and ebay) and physical books (Libraries and second hand bookstores). Those mediums didn't get destroyed by the reselling of the item after it was used.
e.g. if some guy from the other side of the world wants to sell their physical book to you, it's very likely cheaper, faster and more convenient to just buy a new copy.
It's like the difference between e-mail and mail. It's conceptually the same, but the lack of barrier causes it to behave completely differently.