I pirate all my books now, except for the ones sold with no DRM as epub.
I would like to reward the authors, but I refuse to allow the publishing industry to get away with this bullshit. If the authors choose to publish their books DRM-free as epubs, I will (and do) happily buy them.
Baen sells thier ebooks DRM free if you get them direct from baen.com. They used to distribute CDs full of DRM free ebooks, back when Jim Baen was still alive. Handed 'em out at cons with instructions to copy and share. You can still find ISOs of them online.
From the outside, the blockchain is just a giant bunch of transactions. No company like a Amazon or Visa has a clear picture of what those transactions are about.
Now in the times of lightning, there is not even a transaction for the payment of a book. Payments are bundled into channels. Individual lightning payments do not leave any trace on the blockchain.
> No company like a Amazon or Visa has a clear picture of what those transactions are about.
That's where you're probably wrong. If the NSA can listen to anyone on the planet through their phone, they surely have the data that exchanges are legally obligated to collect in terms of validating all users by their government documents, aka the place 99% of bitcoin users probably get their coin.
The rest is just mapping it all together and correlating the remaining blank accounts with the piles of other data they've got on each person, which I'm sure they're easily capable of. A bitcoin transaction and a book download coming from a the same IP at roughly the same time are surely mappable to a physical person.
There are plenty of anonymous (even decentralized) P2P market places for trading crypto for cash, bank transfers, or other agreed upon forms of payment.
I have over 2x my fiat savings in crypto and none of it could easily be traced to my real identity.
Just last week I walked into a random "crypto exchange service" in the city I was visiting and sold them USDT and walked out with $10k in cash. No kyc. They didn't even ask my name. They were buying and selling for only 0.5% commission.
It’s cool that you got cash for the USDT that you had but that had very little to do with my asking somebody that wants to only buy books with Bitcoin what payment processor they used to get the Bitcoin that they have.
This is interesting. Every mention of buying a specific good in a specific context with Bitcoin in particular is a valuable moment to learn about each other’s cash and USDT holdings.
I don't understand the reason for your sarcasm. In your original reply, were you not asking for an anonymous way to obtain Bitcoin, so that one could then use it to buy books?
My reply described how it's easily possible to convert USDT to fiat because I assumed it was obvious that the process is similar in both directions and can be done for any common form of crypto, including Bitcoin.
Your anecdote about your exchanging the USDT that you held for cash in your city is has virtually zero bearing in the average consumer. Not everyone has the access to piles of non-KYC no-questions-asked cash and asserting otherwise is an embarrassing pivot to distract from your strange brag about your net worth.
Also your story begins with you holding USDT. I am assuming that you were able to amass your entire crypto fortune without ever involving a bank account or debit card, because otherwise your answer to my question would likely be “Visa or Mastercard” when it comes to how you came to possess any crypto assets in the first place.
You bragged about money laundering in a thread about ebooks buddy. “I have access to a Hawala” is not constructive to the conversation in the slightest.
You're confusing me with someone else. Do you see the irony in complaining about unconstructive comments with a reply that is so obviously wrong and unrelated to the parent? Awful tone and childish argumentation to boot.
You're almost there: the parent didn't describe money laundering, they described a legal conversion. It's your prerogative to reflexively interpret privacy concerns as criminality, but it isn't useful for a constructive discussion.
I learnt that Cryto ATM withdrawal limits have grown significantly in the last few years.
It’s a bit of a shame that you’re primarily interested in my posting style, not payment processing, crypto or the publishing industry.
As a fun observation, when you see someone discussing something inane like buying ebooks, it’s actually pretty odd for a stranger to hop in and volunteer details about how much money they have and to brag about how they knowingly pay a premium to avoid KYC when handling cash.
For example, if a stranger walked up to you on the street and interrupted your conversation with “I totally know a guy that’ll take any amount of cash you’ve got and give you untraceable crypto or vice versa, no questions asked” without volunteering any other information, you’d be better off being suspicious of him rather than the person being skeptical of that guy.
If you think GP is talking about “Bitcoin ATMs”, can you point me to one that will dispense $10,000 cash from USDT, not Bitcoin without any KYC?
Maybe unpopular opinion, but I worked at "mega-coorporations" and nobody cares what you buy. You are just a number in a system that at most uses your buying history to suggest you books to buy.
> that at most uses your buying history to suggest you books to buy
There you have it. And beyond that, the corporation will sell the data to whoever if profitable. They will abuse them any time there is anything to gain.
I think getting recommendation of similar books to read is a feature rathen than a bug. If you ask your friend to recommend a book the first question they'll usually ask is 'what kinds of book do you like'. Either that or you get recommended whatever NYTimes says is the bestseller (which may not match your taste).
> uses your buying history to suggest you books to buy
So they do care and intend to use the information to practice psychological tricks and deception to make me buy more things (probably not just books) and also sell it to others who want to do the same. No thanks!
Right now we are seeing video games disappear after only a few decades. When the business model is for the copyright owner to issue restrictive licenses, most information will eventually disappear. DRM further exacerbates the situation.
Moreover this is inherent in the nature of a capitalist system itself - it's Schumpeter's creative destruction at work. It is normal, regular, and otherwise healthy for all businesses to eventually end.
But if that business was the only entity with the right and ability to copy, distribute etc. - then the creative work they produced is highly likely to disappear, lost to us forever.
It's tragic enough that the early history of video games may simply disappear. That future generations will have no idea how it all got started. With copying and distribution cheaper and easier than ever before, we're somehow still at risk of losing this era of history.
It's far, far, FAR scarier to think of this happening to the repository of human knowledge contained in BOOKS. The future which is now unfolding is a sort of permanent, rolling version of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, where the collective wisdom of the human race just sort of fades away over time. Where we lose the ability to learn from our past, because we've lost the ability to make an enduring recording of it.
Ironically, with technology, we have unlocked infinite, practically free distribution of copying and information. It can be done with a keystroke. The problem lies in our legal, political and economic systems - the iron boot has become so heavy it's crushing the larynx of the past and future alike, in a way never before seen in human history.
DRM is bad, most of us agree on this. Also, copyright laws were written for bygone era where things didn't move so fast. I think it's the case of the "lawful" not being aligned with "ethical".
But the tragedy of games disappearing? There's more than 30 games released on Steam _each day_, let that sink in. Writing and publishing books has never in history been so easy. A vast majority of these are archived and easily available to anyone, in many more magnitudes of scale than our capacity to consume them.
In fact, I'm seeing the opposite of your claims, with Meta and OpenAI publicly admitting of breaking copyright laws while training their LLMs, and also the widespread movement for self-proclaimed librarians hoarding books, ROMs and other software in terabyte scales. I'm not passing judgements about any of this, just saying that copyright law is not always strictly applied and the iron boot is more like a fluffy slipper when it comes to availability of historical content.
There was a recent article about 87% of "classic" games no longer being commercially available - well that's still above the Sturgeon's law ("ninety percent of everything is crap"). Why would anyone expect publishers to offer content that is only interesting for historical reasons? For games that are still relevant, there is an added effort to run them on modern systems and to offer customer support.
No one is saying publishers have to offer content which is not commercially interesting. My contention is that if we want to preserve knowledge we need to put it in the public domain after a while, maybe several decades, or at least be very generous with exceptions for archival. This is consistent with copyright law until it was subverted in the modern era. At this point it looks like Disney has successfully lobbied for permanent and perpetual copyright.
- I'm sending a message to publishers that physical books are in demand (not the case)
- I have to deal with the physical book (giving it away to a charity shop is probably the solution, but it's still hassle)
- It doesn't solve the problem - publishers still think everything is good. Only by depriving the publishers of revenue until they start respecting their customers can we solve this.
And I think my attitude is a lot less entitled than the publisher's. If I pay for something, I should own it, not have it subject to the publisher's whims. The attitude that they can disrespect their customers and keep control of the book even after it has been purchased is more than entitled. It should be illegal.
Strictly speaking, there's nothing stopping anyone from making a website listing authors of books and how to pay them. And strictly speaking, there's nothing stopping pirate sites from taking said website and embedding the relevant author donation info next to a torrent/DL of the book they wrote.
Publishers wouldn't be able to take down the list website, as it's perfectly legal to send authors money. Publishers wouldn't be able to take down the pirate sites either, because they've already been trying for decades and can't win the whack-a-mole.
I like Peter Watts' approach with Blindsight. He directly provides a variety of DRM-free (including plain old HTML!) versions of it and has licensed it under Creative Commons, and he accepts donations to the "Niblet Memorial Kibble Fund": https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
I had thought he decided to distribute this way specifically as a response to how much publishers kept from commercial sales, but I can't seem to dredge up a source confirming that at the moment.
I mean it doesn't sound like you are doing anything to do what you say you would like to do though?
Generally if I say I would like to do something but I can't be bothered it's because I don't actually care about it at all and I'm just saying that as part of my complicated get away routine.
I believe what you probably really mean is you would be ok with rewarding the authors if it was convenient and met your requirements. Then you wouldn't pirate and the author would be paid as part of your purchasing in the way you wanted.
on edit: sorry, I see it wasn't you that made the original comment, and you were just pointing it out.
" I'm sending a message to publishers that physical books are in demand (not the case)"
Bullshit. While I agree with your point of view otherwise, this attitude is indefensible. To validate your "piracy," you have the simple option of paying for the physical book in order to provide the author at least a pittance. But your objection to that is that you might imply demand for physical books? Are you fucking kidding? Supporting physical books is A PUBLIC SERVICE. Because the fact is that many people DO prefer physical books, for the very reasons that you're railing against. They can't be taken away. If people don't demand them, they will disappear and we'll all be subject to yet another rental scam. That includes YOU.
WTF dude. You lost a lot of us right there, and need to re-think your value system.
The only time I wanted physical books obsolete was in college, because I hated carrying 10lb of textbooks in my bag. I've had a full bookshelf for a decade since then and can't imagine a world where I have thumb through a stupid Kindle menu to see my collection.
I have the reverse. I used to have around 2000 physical books. Every time I moved (and I moved a lot) I'd pack them all up into boxes, move those stupidly heavy boxes, unpack them all. I'd almost never read them. They were just expensive wallpaper. Now I have thousands of ebooks on my hard drive and I carry them all with me when I wander the planet.
That's like saying bicycles are obsolete and we can move on.
Furthermore, it doesn't matter if they're "obsolete." In the case we're replying to, they provide a non-revokable mechanism to reward the author if you decide to "pirate" the E-book. Complaining that it sends a misleading signal that physical books are still in demand is a weak, ridiculous excuse for stealing.
Authors either need to sell something people want or get pirated.
It seems very obvious there is no moral or ethical justification for copyright/DRM or any other way of giving control over the replication of information. The author has at best only a legal right to money, and often bad law needs to be fought with civil disobedience (which is perfectly morally justifiable).
If an author/creator wants to get paid by people who disagree with DRM and the "licensing" of books/content they need to offer something for the money that those people want, or accept and attract donations.
Exactly. I hate it when people pretend the question is not on the table. The author+publisher chimaera has made a conscious decision to give me the finger. Well, fsck you too!
I haven't pirated lately because there's enough great content I can get on reasonable terms. But if I'm put in a situation where the publisher says "my way or the highway", I'm gonna go option C every single time, and feel no remorse whatsoever.
How is piracy not proof that people want the product?
You’re complaining about the terms they offer, not the product. If you’re not clear on that point, it’s no wonder the position is so garbled.
Maybe the author doesn’t want to get paid by people who dislike DRM. That doesn’t give anyone the right to take their content without paying. The principled answer is to refuse to read works from these authors.
The product is the totality of what you pay for, not just the content of the book unless the terms of the transaction give you full rights to the content of the book with no strings.
> Maybe the author doesn’t want to get paid by people who dislike DRM.
That’s fine and as I stated those people shouldn’t / won’t pay them.
> That doesn’t give anyone the right to take their content without paying.
This is exactly what my original comment addressed and you ignored:
I contend that there is absolutely no moral or ethical problem with copying information and no valid moral or ethical basis for giving creators exclusive rights or “ownership” of their creations, when they can be copied without depriving existing holders of the information, or giving anyone special/exclusive rights to profit from information.
I can see an argument for preventing corporate entities from profiting from any information or content they didn’t create, but not when it comes to people’s ability to freely copy and share.
The principled answer is to support and fund people and tools that enable piracy and free information sharing, to the detriment of “rights holders”.
Fair enough. It’s an extremist view but more principled than I gave you credit for.
But it’s also totally disconnected from DRM. Presumably you wouldn’t pay for non-DRM ebooks either, or at least see no “moral or ethical” issue with someone so declines to do so.
And I hope you’re also on the side of AI training as fair use that does not require permission or payment?
I am kinda doing both. There are books I want to own. Some I own in both formats.
There may be a reduction and I am kinda starting to warm up to my reader's ability to add multiple bookmarks to quotable quotes/interesting concepts/neat scripts, but I am not sure parent is right.
Maybe it depends on locale? If anyone has good data on that, it is likely to be Amazon.
If a store’s prices are too high, do you feel entitled to shoplift because it sends them a message?
The world operates on contracts, and we are all free to decline to do business with companies we dislike or who ask more than we think their product is worth.
Agree to terms or don’t, but I have a hard time seeing “I’m going to take what they’re offering but not pay what they’re asking” as some kind of noble stand.
> If a store’s prices are too high, do you feel entitled to shoplift because it sends them a message?
That's not a great comparison. The problem in this instance isn't a high price, it's a lack of access. If they offered ebooks drm free with a X% unlock fee or something then you'd have a point.
Shoplifting removes an item from the store's posession and is theft. Copying an ebook doesn't remove any copies the publisher has, which is why it's not theft.
Are you ok with me taking nude pictures of your family and than maybe also make them available for everyone else? It wouldn't be a theft, because you would still have originals.
The point isn't "it's ok", the point is "it's different", so drawing a line between the two is pointless. The nuances of copyright and IP in general don't apply to a bottle of Sprite on the shelf of a 7Eleven.
It's fine if you think what they are doing is wrong. The government shares your opinion.
Additionally, this argument here is even worse, because the laws you'd be violating in this instance have nothing to do with IP or theft, but rather privacy.
It's not theft, but I doubt people would be ok with that for other reasons. Depending on the laws there might be criminal charges for doing so, or a civil suit.
> Why? I was told that using the product without paying for it was a righteous form of protest against outrageous terms.
That has nothing to do with it being a good or bad analogy.
> How would that not apply to shoplifting because the price is too high or the return policy too short or whatever?
What is "that" in this statement? I'm not saying the word "theft" isn't valid, I'm saying the circumstances are different enough that equating the two is a poor basis to reason from.
> If a store’s prices are too high, do you feel entitled to shoplift because it sends them a message?
Digital assets cannot be compared to physical goods. A physical good that is shoplifted not only misses out on the sale, but must be restocked at the shop’s expense in order to capture the next sale. Digital piracy does not create any additional burden to a business’s expenses. This will never be a valid line of logic.
When you "buy" a Kindle book, for instance, you click "Buy It Now" not "Rent It Now". The implication is that you are buying it to own, not renting it. Not a good comparison to renting a car.
Also when renting a car, I pay a fraction of its retail cost. Charging me the whole cost as a clearly marked "sale" and then renting the item to me is what's going on here, and it has to stop.
I think that this makes sense if you want a physical copy (possibly in addition to the ebook); if not, then I think that you do not need to buy it and waste paper etc.
When I want to read a book, I usually prefer a physical copy (and I am willing to pay for it, if I do not merely want to read it for a few hours at the library (if the library has a copy)); sometimes it is helpful to have it on the computer too, and in that case I would only accept non-DRM files, and possibly even piracy. However, some books might be difficult to find, or maybe I only want one page, etc.
Entitled, eh? Some assumptions being made about people's ability to afford and access the physical books.
I've got cash, plenty of people around me don't and I don't begrudge their piracy. I pay, see below, when I was young and broke I pirated everything. I'm surrounded by people for whom a US minimum wage would be a stonking income, why shouldn't they pirate?
The big issue for me personally is shipping. I live outside the US and EU, and it's a real problem getting books out. I often pay more for shipping than I do for the books themselves, and I have to wait up to a month, and there's the ridiculousness of getting a book shipped across the US/EU, then to my third country.
My approach is that I pirate freely and happily, without a shred of guilt. Most of the books on my reader only get read up through the first few chapters, some I'll finish completely.
I do however like books, real books. If I'm getting into an author I've pirated, I'll then buy some of their other stuff, and I buy frequently.
This comes back to the old thing with music pirates being the biggest spenders on music. A classic case, I think.
So please, leave your moralizing out of this. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to pirate, much of it ending up with money in author and publishers pockets.
or not pay for the ebook, not have the hassle of having to deal with whatever digital prison they put the contents in. AND not financially reward the ones doing it.
the idea that not paying for an author's book doesn't negatively affect the author is absurd.
there are valid reasons to pirate books sometimes but at the end of the day, someone has to pay something into the system to keep books getting published
Companies need to remember at their heart that their business model should rely on being at least a bit more convenient than piracy.
I believe authors deserve to be rewarded proportionally to the quality of their work, I also believe good publishers can add a lot of value to an author's work, and even more I believe that DRM-Free publishers have shown it's possible to base their core business model on being more convenient than piracy. I buy a book, it's mine to use on my devices, no strings ttached.
The hubris of some companies make them refuse to see the reality of the market, and instead stubbornly push for wider copyright laws, harsher punishment, DRM, and higher walls for their gardens.
I wouldn't even buy those. Who wants a bunch of shitty ebooks that they don't even bother to include cover art for? Sure, lately, the way they do contracts for the cover artists must include ebooks, but any title prior to about 2018 still has the shitty generic cover for whichever Random House imprint it is.
And as juvenile as it sounds, I'd actually like my copies of The Dark Tower to include the interior art too. Completely absent.
We finally got to a point in the future where theoretically they could siphon tens of thousands of dollars out of me (because I wouldn't first have to spend x20 that amount buying a home with a large enough library proper), and their authorized, authentic ebooks look no better than some half-assed scan downloaded from a #bookz DCC bot.
Honestly, this is a very privileged take based upon false assumptions. As someone who doesn't have disposable income ~90% of the books I pirate I would have never read otherwise. I'm not depriving the creators of income because I never had any to give them in the first place. Over 53% of Americans between the ages of 18-34 do not have any disposable income [1]. Additionally, Americans that do have disposable income should probably be saving it all in case of an unexpected medical emergency or layoff. These problems are only worse outside the United States. Before you lecture me about public libraries, go ahead and take a bus outside of San Francisco or whatever major city you live in and try to rent a book published in the last 5 years... I'll wait. For all of human history the poor simply didn't read. Digital piracy has changed the world for the better. As an (unsuccessful) author myself, I beg anyone who cannot afford to pay for my work to pirate it. Most authors I know feel the same way. If you're only into writing for the money your work probably sucks anyway!
There is a world of free reading material, recent and old. More than enough for anyone to educate and lift her/himself out of poverty. The Wikipedia alone, with all its errors, is a fountain of knowledge. You don't need piracy.
I hope your indigent pirate going to compensate the authors once he has lifted himself out of poverty.
>These problems are only worse outside the United States.
Huh? I agree with everything up to this point. Of the G20 nations, only the US has all the problems you complain about: no disposable income, enormous medical costs, no job protections, etc. Well-run developed nations don't have these problems.
As someone who left the US, the only real problem over here is that English-language books are hard to find in countries where English isn't widely spoken (which should be obvious of course), so of course e-books are very attractive for this reason. But then, as you can see in many comments here, the e-book sellers don't work much with people living outside the US, your "purchased" e-books stop working outside the US, etc.
This is not correct. In economic terms if person A values a book at a price below the selling price and pirates it, the seller has not lost income compared to the counterfactual world where piracy was impossible.
That's not true, person A could still send the author money by other means, but really in that situation a trade should not take place because it is against the seller's consent.
I was assuming that the other means have transaction costs higher than the value to person A because this is the case in the real world (how many authors even have a Patreon?).
Normally "have to" is used when the consequences of not doing so are very dire, possibly life threatening. A person shoplifting a copy of Harry Potter for their own use would not normally count.
Many would contend the consequences would be very dire if they didn't act. For example, those who depend on Sci-Hub for educational material. They'd contend they've no other option.
same here, I actually love it when publishers publish epubs, it encourages me to purchase more stuff from them. Same with bandcamp stuff with music files. A lot of times publishers are very ambiguous about the nature of their ebooks and I have to email their sales team or customer service to get a square answer about what exactly I would be buying from them. If it's some complicated morass of third party obscure e-readers and other clunky interference I just end the conversation there and move on.
He pays them when they don't DRM their content. Pirates would get a much better experience, otherwise, by not having to put up with the DRM crap. I'm doing the same as OP in other domains. Whether the message is understood or not depends on how many of us do it. It's called activism.
Are you having an impact? Do you have publishers quaking in their boots? Do you even have a plan to extract your demands? Or are you just pirating shit you want to read and dressing it up as meaningful? Which achieves what?
Activism would mean you are out there convincing people who don’t already agree with you, and making hard choices about your own consumption, such as with a boycott.
You’re just enjoying the fruits of people’s labour without compensating them.
Right. To facilitate this we need a much easier payment system. I've advocated for ages we should be able to buy a card with value on it—say $10, $20 or so. The card would have a lottery-like scratchy which would reveal a number that could be used for such payments.
I'd be private, anonymous and dead easy to use. If you could buy these at shops, supermarkets—just about everywhere—I reckon people would use them.
Note: I've often not paid small amounts because of the complexities with credit cards, entering name etc. and being databased by some third-party company, etc. has made me hesitant.
Yes, I agree. But I don't see any other way around it that works.
Publishers need to stop doing this, or we end up in a world where everything is rented. They will only pay attention to what affects their revenue.
I repeat: I'm happy to pay for books if they're DRM-free. It's not like I'm pirating everything because it's free; I'm happy to pay for it if I can actually own it.
I pay to skip ads wherever that's an option. I do use an ad-blocker because ads are annoying. What I don't so is pretend my ad-blocking is a grand crusade for privacy.
I've taken a principled stand against Crunchyroll and Kindle - the result has been basically dropping reading nonfiction books and watching anime as a hobby for over a decade. Who does this benefit?
I like your point that the person you’re responding to is lying. It’s cheaper and easier to pirate everything, including books published DRM-free, so in order for your point to be true they must not actually buy any books at all.
Why not just say “You are lying” rather than asking them to stop bringing up morals?
Yes. One account removed my purchases after changing countries. The other is stuck in the old country, but won't let me purchase most books unless they're available in both countries.
The only way to force this issue is to "pirate before you buy-it" and save your money. Hard to get screwed by fake purchase buttons if you dont buy, and hit libgen, torrents, and usenet.
This. I move country a lot, and Amazon/Kindle just wasn't happy with that. Books kept being unavailable despite the fact I'd bought them. Spotify does the same, but at least Spotify doesn't pretend that I've bought the music.
The same. I only buy DRM-free epubs (e.g. on Gumroad, Humble Bundle and directly), also pirate some which are not available this way. If I really were to buy something I would unDRM it. If I found out I can't unDRM it I wouldn't buy. Needless to say I only buy games at GOG.com.
Manning is another publisher without DRM. I used to buy Oreilly books without DRM, but they’re subscription only but some books do show up on humble bundle from time to time.
Manning does put a “licensed to my_email” on the pages of the digital copies but it’s not onerous.
I was living in Germany, but don't speak/read German, so that was tricky. Moving country a lot doesn't help with this - a lot of the time you have to be a citizen or permanent resident to join the library and rent ebooks.
The arguments for pirating ebooks are very similar to the arguments in Uniquenameosaurus's "you should pirate anime" video (originally uploaded in, IIRC, 2018?). This:
Just 5 cents, thats why I always trying to buy any games on GOG. No "install necessary launcher" bullshit and 100% confidence that backup of any purchased game will work in next decades, or even in next next decades without internet.
I on the other hand am absolutely happy to buy ebooks via kindle. In fact most of the time I just borrow them via Kindle Unlimited, read them and effectively return them.
Don't need to own a book I'm going to read once and never read again.
In Germany, Austria and Switzerland all local Book store chains got together to create Tolino, a competitor to kindle.
It got the same nice features like apps and sync. And the devices themselves are very good too.
But the one thing that sets them apart is that they give you the opportunity to download the EPUB files for e-books and MP3s for audiobooks.
Also you can just upload EPUB Files via the web interface.
Sure you sometimes pay more, but at least you own what you buy.
I get encoding issues when sending books directly as epub, so I have to use a epub->mobi conversion service (sendepubtokindle). Is there any way to fix encoding issues directly on kindle? I would really like to skip a step of conversion.
In addition to that, many public libraries offer a service where one can lend ebooks. And this is integrated in the tolino.
This is based on some DRM system from Adobe, though.
But still, a nice thing as an additional source for ebooks.
Google Play Books allows you to download an EPUB, but only if the book is from a DRM‐free publisher. Tor Books is one such (sci‐fi) publisher, so I buy their books through Google Play.
I don’t know a way to check in advance if a Google Play book is DRM‐shackled. Hopefully, if a purchase does turn out to have DRM, Google would let you return the book for a refund if you haven’t read it, but I haven’t tested that.
Kobo does too. Usually it says something like "At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied." and below in the download options it will tell you DRM-free.
I didn't know Tolino offered DRM-free ebooks, will definitely have to check them out. (According to the FAQ there are some Adobe protected ebooks, but that's rare)
I have to buy through one of the bookstores, right?
Well, it’s not that big of a mistery actually, even less a psychological manipulation to increase revenues. If I completely own an e-book, I can duplicate it, quadruplicate it, post it online for 10000 people to have it for free. And this would bring the company just the 3$ that I gave to them.
If you want to live in the olden days, buy the hard copy, share it with a friend, donate it to a library. Nothing has changed there.
Is the prevalence of DRM actually preventing ebooks from being pirated? I don't pirate books myself but I get the impression that the answer is very much 'no'.
These days companies have been able tie in DRM with convenience value add. Rather than fiddle around with epub files, just log in with your amazon account and have everything right there. It's crap from a freedom perspective, but I can see how it actually seems better to the average user.
In terms of how DRM is cost-effective for platforms and publishers (i.e. why they bother with it at all), it seems much more likely to me that it's primarily meant to prevent fully legitimate post-first-sale transfers of books, e.g. library lending, second-hand sales, and so on. Publishers couldn't do anything to stop post-first-sale transfer of physical copies, but DRM-enabled ebook platforms give them a new lever.
It has prevented it to a certain degree. If don’t have the know-how, you can’t find the book you’re after. And I know very few people that actually know where to find for free the book they want to read.
Anyway, my poin was: if this solution isn’t working, or looks unfair, how are we going to solve it differently?
> If don’t have the know-how, you can’t find the book you’re after.
This isn't a function of how difficult it is for the pirates themselves to get their hands on a DRM-free electronic copy of a book. Instead, it's primarily a function of the fact that piracy is illegal, and—regardless of how easy it is for pirates to obtain DRM-free copies of the media they want to distribute—such distribution activities are limited to dark and relatively lawless corners of the internet where "normies" fear to tread.
That's the basis of my point in reply to you. It may be that DRM prevents to some degree the more casual form of "piracy" in which e.g. I give a friend a copy of an ebook file instead of lending a physical copy, but that didn't seem to be what you were getting at, and anyway since lending physical copies has been a possibility since books first came to exist I think the degree to which this sort of casual piracy threatens publishers' bottom lines is not a foregone conclusion until some independent party convincingly measures it.
> if this solution isn’t working, or looks unfair, how are we going to solve it differently?
OP's article makes some recommendations under "Conclusions".
It is not at all preventing this. There for instance 2 major sites with millions of books and wikipedia entries and all efforts to shut done is change the tld they are offered at which is linked on Wikipedia.
It isn't. It's been a while that I've seen a (English at least) book I can't find a pirated version somewhere, unless it has a really small, niche audience or it just isn't published in a way that's much harder to use (vendor provided applications, etc). All it takes is one user with the know-how to remove the DRM and a willingness to share the file, which as the history of the internet shows, is almost an inevitability with even semi-popular books.
Pretty much every single paper and research repeats the fact that DRM is completely ineffective and has practically no effect on piracy or revenue loss.
It loses revenue by itself by inconveniencing paying customers (lowering sales), restricting addressable market (by limiting purchases to compatible DRM leaden hardware) and demanding R&D costs.
Of course, facts rarely challenge belief when it comes to business owners - just see the RTO push.
If DRM were banned maybe things wouldn't be different. So long as publishers have the option, I think they're more comfortable publishing e-books with DRM than without, and more comfortable publishing more obscure e-books from unknown authors than paper books from the same as the investment is lower. So there could be a catalog of books that wouldn't be available without DRM in the picture.
I stopped buying ebooks with DRM, which essentially means I stopped buying them altogether. It's a real shame, because ebooks are vastly more convenient than print books, but I got to a breaking point with the hassle of cracking modern DRM.
Anybody have success with DIY book scanning and conversion to epub?
I’ve been looking into it. Google published the design and software for the book scanners they used for Google books and it seems plausible to DIY them for a reasonable price. You can also buy book scanners for a couple of hundred dollars if you don’t mind turning pages manually.
The main thing that’s kept me for pursuing this is that I don’t really want to own all the physical books in the first place. I prefer physical copies of technical and math books, but for random fiction I am interested in ebooks to save space. Buying the books and scanning them gets me into the same position with books that I’m already in with movies, shows, and music: lots of physical media taking up space so that I could put a bunch of extra effort into getting a digital copy that I could have downloaded for free with far less effort if I were willing to pirate.
Calibre has allowed me to essentially own all of my ebooks. I try to buy from wherever the author will get the largest percentage (so, not Amazon, essentially) and then use Calibre to strip the DRM. It's an amazing software and will basically do everything for you automatically, I can't recommend it enough. The only reason I need to do this is because I use an off brand e-reader and DRM can prevent me from using it. I use these words quite deliberately: it's fucking ridiculous.
I don't distribute these purchases, I just store and back them up myself. Every so often I will "lend" one to my partner or a friend like any other paperback on my shelf. The difference being, I suppose they now "own" it, too.
One of the biggest downsides to eBooks and streaming in my opinion is the availability of out of print books/music. I have had a hard time getting hold of a number of books and CDs. Some music seems to have just been lost, where the only place to get them is ebay - but that I suspect that avenue is dying rapidly with the adoption of streaming.
And taking credit for something you didn't do may or may not be some form of misrepresentation/fraud, but I doubt many jurisdictions would consider it literal theft.
You do own the power you purchase. You just decide to give it away to our collective pool of entropy right away. You could store it in a battery instead if you wanted.
I know you're joking, but at least in Germany you couldn't _steal_ electricity because electricity is not a _thing_ (according to German law)[0]. They fixed that well over a century ago by just making electricity theft itself a specific crime though.
I agree with everything in this article, but I also gave up. I accept that when I buy an ebook, it’s not mine, I’m just renting cloud storage for it until the company decides I can’t have it anymore.
This is mostly because the value I extract from it (the format) is the convenience and formatting. I want it now, everywhere, and well formatted for my device, and I want to do as little work as possible to make that happen. I have money and not much time.
Is this short sighted? Probably. But I have come to accept that media is ephemeral, like most things. I just don’t have the time or inclination to be an archivist, much as I wish I did.
Calibre trivializes removing DRM on import, collects your ebooks in a simple directory structure, sharing them on the web to yourself or others, moving books to your device plugged in or wirelessly on your iphone or android with an easy to use app.
It's been around for about 17 years and will probably hang around until the author dies.
Calibre is great! I’ve donated a few times. Alas, I simply don’t have the time or patience to maintain a library like this. It just isn’t worth it to me. I am grateful that the option exists.
Fine if "everywhere" you go is somewhere the DRM allows. For people who cross region borders, it can remove the right you thought you paid for, with no justification. If you want it 'now', read it 'now', then you're also somewhat the DRMed item being 'revised' against your will (happens) or removed by actions of or failure of the publisher (also happens).
This is a silly argument. "Owning" something doesn't mean you have unlimited rights to do what you want with it. Do you not "own" physical books because you can't (legally) photocopy them? Do you not own a gun because you can't (legally, at least where I live) lend it to a friend?
I'm not saying the way e-books work is good - it clearly isn't - but not because there's a fundamental law that owning an e-book should be identical to owning a physical book.
> "Owning" something doesn't mean you have unlimited rights to do what you want with it. Do you not "own" physical books because you can't (legally) photocopy them? Do you not own a gun because you can't (legally, at least where I live) lend it to a friend?
In your examples, you own the book and the gun because the publisher of the book and the manufacturer of the gun (or anyone else, excepting the state, I suppose) can’t unilaterally take them back from you or modify them without some sort of penalty. This can — and has [0] — happened with eBooks. The “unlimited rights to do what you want with [them]” are not guaranteed by ownership in my opinion.
Again, "owning" does not mean that something cannot be unilaterally taken from you. Eminent domain is a very obvious example of that. Ownership does not have a single neat list of requirements, which is why it makes no sense to say "this is bad because we don't own it".
> Again, "owning" does not mean that something cannot be unilaterally taken from you. Eminent domain is a very obvious example of that.
Eminent domain is the state taking from you. I already mentioned this in my comment. In fact, the state pays a penalty for doing so in the US as enshrined in the 5th amendment: “… nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.“
> Ownership does not have a single neat list of requirements
No, it does not have a comprehensive list for all use cases, but I would say that the one I mentioned in my first comment is a necessary one: fundamentally that it cannot be taken from you without penalty.
(Taking continental law as basis because lol common "law") Ownership means you have these three rights towards the object: usus, fructus and abusus. usus (use, i.e reading) and abusus (abuse, i.e deleting the file) are fine under DRM, but DRM introduces non-legally-required limitations for enjoying the fruits of the ebook you own (renting it, lending it, selling it). Any "ownership" with DRM is not ownership in the legal sense.
Copying falls under the ownership of the text within the book. It is something completely separate.
The definitions of rights that are guaranteed by constitution can be altered via laws. The government has quite a bit of leeway there that private firms do not.
That's a long study. I look at ebooks like I look at movies, CDs, etc. Unless I can my own CDs or rip my own movies, I don't have a digital "file" copy of those items. Honestly, it has been difficult keeping up on that, improvements in displays (4K OLED TV, for instance), etc.
It sucks and there should be a way of proving ownership such that you get access to the online digital versions.
I have an extensive book collection and first several first editions in the areas I am interested in. I read the physical books from time to time, but for me the Kindle is a must have device that I use for hours every day - reading in bed, etc.
Do I like it being a closed system? No. Do I have the energy to pirate things and keep on top of managing those collections - books are somewhat easier, but media is much harder - no.
I hope that the subscription/Patreon/Substack model for publishing wins out in the end, because it seems obvious that piracy is not really a sustainable solution if you want new books to continue to be published.
For all of its downsides, the subscription model has two big benefits: more of the money goes to writers, not publishers, as in the current system; and it shifts publishing to an economic situation similar to open source, where writers are compensated for their opinions/services and not for an easily copyable (and DRM'able) product.
In all of this, I am surprised that the authors managed to miss out (or did they leave it out?) the damaging role that Apple played in this ecosystem by colluding with publishers. It got away with a light tap on the wrist but we still feel its effects today.
As long as there will be FOSS and open hardware, there will be a chance for piracy to exist. As long as piracy will exist, there will be a chance to save the many artifacts of our modern culture.
But, if these artifacts were just to distract us from preserving them in the first place, they were probably not worth to be preserved. And ho boy, how there is much distraction to be found today!
I love getting ebooks from my library. I can even request new books within my system that aren't out yet, then when they're released and purchased by the library, they are automatically put on hold and added to my account.
some consumers will pay the premium of ownership over the licence and some won't. if either market has demand fall below a particular threshold, the market will collapse. this isn't a moral issue, this is simply an effect of a new market for a service substituting effectively for an old market for a good. it's clear that a lot of previous book-owners really just wanted to be able to access a text
if there is really a mass misunderstanding by ebook consumers that they don't have rights as part of their licence that they believe they have, the market demand will start shifting back towards ownership
The author touches on revocation - to me this is a MAJOR problem with "licenced" media. Publishers have shown, again and again, that they will not continue to "sell" (distribute) their product.
Despite storage and transmission being very cheap, it is almost impossable to find many classic films, music, and books. Aparently it is legitimate can claim a "loss" if they cease to sell an item (presumably having destroyed the master copy).
It might make perfect commercial sense to drop low selling items and claim large tax losses, it may be legal, but how is this moral? For classic items, this is nothing less than destroying cultural artifacts.
(This is yet another case where modern copyright is out of step with modern morals and expectations. Personally, I'm for short copyright terms, perhaps requiring explicit registration, and requiring licence holders to maintain a copy for historical purposes - perhaps in some kind of escrow at the internet archive.)
One often missed negative about digital goods, books and audio books especially, is that publishers have no incentives to lower their prices ever.
With physical books the invisible hand of capitalism alters prices to match books to buyers, creating a long tail of demand decades after publication. As a young person I used to love picking up gems at book fairs and remainder sales, exposing me to so many more ideas than I could afford at full price.
If publishers were smart, seeing fostering reading as a good thing for society and their bottom line, they would recreate this effect by gradually lowering the price on older titles.
I use my e-reader a lot, as I only have limited shelf space at home, and like to be able to take my whole library with me in the train. For most books, I am fine with having them only available on my device. Bit once in a while, I wish there was some way to get the physical copy of the book for free or at a discount when one purchased the electronic version. Not being able to have the physical book to display on my bookshelf and lend to friends and family, although I essentially paid the same price, frustrates me again and again.
I think what really chaps my ass about DRM and by extension, piracy, is that convenience is what really what people want. Gabe Newell of Valve said on stage, way before it was cool and way before everything was being served to you from the cloud, that piracy is not a pricing issue, it's a service one. Steam single-handedly made pirating games just not worth the time, so much so that people were re-buying old games, even ones that they had previously pirated, so that their library could be in one place. Unfortunately, ownership of what your purchase is still very much a heated topic and is more a game-to-game topic for now (ie, I can download and play certain games outside of Steam but other games need external and third-party launchers to be online in order to play).
Amazon almost got it right by doing similar, and subsequently dominates the ereader market by making it easy and convenient to buy and download an ebook and have it be in a comfortable and familiar format for all your books. They lost me as a customer the moment I wanted a more capable device and to use that library demanded that I use their Kindle software. Frankly, it's sort of a pain to be a third party ebook reader and even though I have given someone an ebook to read in the past, I had to set it up for them. I would be surprised if ebook piracy was a large portion of ebook consumers since it's more hands-on, though it would not surprise me if it was a growing market share.
Although the models are different, there have been similar effects with Spotify and video streaming services. You definitely own nothing in these examples, which I feel is worse but it's also pretty clear that you don't own something where ebooks and video games are arguably lying to you in terms of ownership. You essentially pay to get to play/read without owning anything. Before I move on, Spotify gets a special note here as I almost cancelled my subscription after being tired of their constant UI shifts to be more like a social media platform. Since it's the only place I consume music at the moment, I'm at the mercy of their bad decisions. It's all wrapped up into the same topic because if I drop Spotify, then I'm left with a music accessibility problem. This is the same thing Newell said, I now have a service problem, AGAIN. Thankfully they reverted those changes, but ultimately I feel like my problem has only been postponed. I lament that bandcamp is not more popular.
Perhaps this is all anecdotal, but from my perspective, it's very clear to me that piracy is (or will be) making a comeback to all of these industries. DRM is ultimately a losing strategy and can alienate consumers. Platform exclusivity, invasive DRM, juggling apps and subscriptions, companies trying to change their music app into a social media one, etc are all user and consumer hostile. The only shame is that the creators ultimately suffer when consumers get tired of the distributors, particularly musicians and authors.
Yeah, I got fed up with Spotify's (and other streaming services') shitty AI recommendation and shuffle algorithms, the region locks and the social media-ification of their platforms.
So instead, I started getting FLAC's from Soulseek and I play them with either just a regular audio player, or a discord bot I wrote. That music will always be mine and no one can decide to take them away.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadI would like to reward the authors, but I refuse to allow the publishing industry to get away with this bullshit. If the authors choose to publish their books DRM-free as epubs, I will (and do) happily buy them.
A) I don't see a reason why some mega-cooperations should know about every book I buy.
B) You don't know if they have been watermarked. I don't want every book I own to be watermarked with god-knows-what metadata about me.
Let me pay with Bitcoin, and I'll buy books again.
Now in the times of lightning, there is not even a transaction for the payment of a book. Payments are bundled into channels. Individual lightning payments do not leave any trace on the blockchain.
That's where you're probably wrong. If the NSA can listen to anyone on the planet through their phone, they surely have the data that exchanges are legally obligated to collect in terms of validating all users by their government documents, aka the place 99% of bitcoin users probably get their coin.
The rest is just mapping it all together and correlating the remaining blank accounts with the piles of other data they've got on each person, which I'm sure they're easily capable of. A bitcoin transaction and a book download coming from a the same IP at roughly the same time are surely mappable to a physical person.
I have over 2x my fiat savings in crypto and none of it could easily be traced to my real identity.
Just last week I walked into a random "crypto exchange service" in the city I was visiting and sold them USDT and walked out with $10k in cash. No kyc. They didn't even ask my name. They were buying and selling for only 0.5% commission.
You give then cash, they give you USDT or BTC. Now you can buy all the ebooks you want with anonymous crypto.
Just because you don’t find a comment useful doesn’t mean no one else will.
My reply described how it's easily possible to convert USDT to fiat because I assumed it was obvious that the process is similar in both directions and can be done for any common form of crypto, including Bitcoin.
Also your story begins with you holding USDT. I am assuming that you were able to amass your entire crypto fortune without ever involving a bank account or debit card, because otherwise your answer to my question would likely be “Visa or Mastercard” when it comes to how you came to possess any crypto assets in the first place.
Acting like a petulant child doesn’t do anyone any good.
Out of curiosity, what did you learn?
I learnt that Cryto ATM withdrawal limits have grown significantly in the last few years.
As a fun observation, when you see someone discussing something inane like buying ebooks, it’s actually pretty odd for a stranger to hop in and volunteer details about how much money they have and to brag about how they knowingly pay a premium to avoid KYC when handling cash.
For example, if a stranger walked up to you on the street and interrupted your conversation with “I totally know a guy that’ll take any amount of cash you’ve got and give you untraceable crypto or vice versa, no questions asked” without volunteering any other information, you’d be better off being suspicious of him rather than the person being skeptical of that guy.
If you think GP is talking about “Bitcoin ATMs”, can you point me to one that will dispense $10,000 cash from USDT, not Bitcoin without any KYC?
But please go on with your critique.
There you have it. And beyond that, the corporation will sell the data to whoever if profitable. They will abuse them any time there is anything to gain.
They won't sell it because it is their advantage.
So they do care and intend to use the information to practice psychological tricks and deception to make me buy more things (probably not just books) and also sell it to others who want to do the same. No thanks!
I rather have targeted adds of things that I might need than porn and poker adds.
1. No recommendations
2. Generic recommendations
3. Tailored recommendations
4. Paid ads
I’ll always use an ad blocker to aim for (1) anyway, but shouldn’t have to rely on that.
Moreover this is inherent in the nature of a capitalist system itself - it's Schumpeter's creative destruction at work. It is normal, regular, and otherwise healthy for all businesses to eventually end.
But if that business was the only entity with the right and ability to copy, distribute etc. - then the creative work they produced is highly likely to disappear, lost to us forever.
It's tragic enough that the early history of video games may simply disappear. That future generations will have no idea how it all got started. With copying and distribution cheaper and easier than ever before, we're somehow still at risk of losing this era of history.
It's far, far, FAR scarier to think of this happening to the repository of human knowledge contained in BOOKS. The future which is now unfolding is a sort of permanent, rolling version of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, where the collective wisdom of the human race just sort of fades away over time. Where we lose the ability to learn from our past, because we've lost the ability to make an enduring recording of it.
Ironically, with technology, we have unlocked infinite, practically free distribution of copying and information. It can be done with a keystroke. The problem lies in our legal, political and economic systems - the iron boot has become so heavy it's crushing the larynx of the past and future alike, in a way never before seen in human history.
Exactly, as I said in my post we need a new political movement to fight the problem.
But the tragedy of games disappearing? There's more than 30 games released on Steam _each day_, let that sink in. Writing and publishing books has never in history been so easy. A vast majority of these are archived and easily available to anyone, in many more magnitudes of scale than our capacity to consume them.
In fact, I'm seeing the opposite of your claims, with Meta and OpenAI publicly admitting of breaking copyright laws while training their LLMs, and also the widespread movement for self-proclaimed librarians hoarding books, ROMs and other software in terabyte scales. I'm not passing judgements about any of this, just saying that copyright law is not always strictly applied and the iron boot is more like a fluffy slipper when it comes to availability of historical content.
There was a recent article about 87% of "classic" games no longer being commercially available - well that's still above the Sturgeon's law ("ninety percent of everything is crap"). Why would anyone expect publishers to offer content that is only interesting for historical reasons? For games that are still relevant, there is an added effort to run them on modern systems and to offer customer support.
No one is saying publishers have to offer content which is not commercially interesting. My contention is that if we want to preserve knowledge we need to put it in the public domain after a while, maybe several decades, or at least be very generous with exceptions for archival. This is consistent with copyright law until it was subverted in the modern era. At this point it looks like Disney has successfully lobbied for permanent and perpetual copyright.
- I'm sending a message to publishers that physical books are in demand (not the case)
- I have to deal with the physical book (giving it away to a charity shop is probably the solution, but it's still hassle)
- It doesn't solve the problem - publishers still think everything is good. Only by depriving the publishers of revenue until they start respecting their customers can we solve this.
And I think my attitude is a lot less entitled than the publisher's. If I pay for something, I should own it, not have it subject to the publisher's whims. The attitude that they can disrespect their customers and keep control of the book even after it has been purchased is more than entitled. It should be illegal.
That doesn't count as a mention?
Publishers wouldn't be able to take down the list website, as it's perfectly legal to send authors money. Publishers wouldn't be able to take down the pirate sites either, because they've already been trying for decades and can't win the whack-a-mole.
I had thought he decided to distribute this way specifically as a response to how much publishers kept from commercial sales, but I can't seem to dredge up a source confirming that at the moment.
Generally if I say I would like to do something but I can't be bothered it's because I don't actually care about it at all and I'm just saying that as part of my complicated get away routine.
I believe what you probably really mean is you would be ok with rewarding the authors if it was convenient and met your requirements. Then you wouldn't pirate and the author would be paid as part of your purchasing in the way you wanted.
on edit: sorry, I see it wasn't you that made the original comment, and you were just pointing it out.
There are plenty of authors choosing to publish their work DRM-free.
Most authors want to write and be recognized, so they get picked up for more writing contracts. Piracy is really the publisher's problem.
Yeah, hence the physical book. I agree with the other person that this is very morally questionable
Bullshit. While I agree with your point of view otherwise, this attitude is indefensible. To validate your "piracy," you have the simple option of paying for the physical book in order to provide the author at least a pittance. But your objection to that is that you might imply demand for physical books? Are you fucking kidding? Supporting physical books is A PUBLIC SERVICE. Because the fact is that many people DO prefer physical books, for the very reasons that you're railing against. They can't be taken away. If people don't demand them, they will disappear and we'll all be subject to yet another rental scam. That includes YOU.
WTF dude. You lost a lot of us right there, and need to re-think your value system.
I'm fine with my values, they make sense to me and I believe if everyone followed the same values we'd end up with a better world.
Furthermore, it doesn't matter if they're "obsolete." In the case we're replying to, they provide a non-revokable mechanism to reward the author if you decide to "pirate" the E-book. Complaining that it sends a misleading signal that physical books are still in demand is a weak, ridiculous excuse for stealing.
Authors either need to sell something people want or get pirated.
It seems very obvious there is no moral or ethical justification for copyright/DRM or any other way of giving control over the replication of information. The author has at best only a legal right to money, and often bad law needs to be fought with civil disobedience (which is perfectly morally justifiable).
If an author/creator wants to get paid by people who disagree with DRM and the "licensing" of books/content they need to offer something for the money that those people want, or accept and attract donations.
I haven't pirated lately because there's enough great content I can get on reasonable terms. But if I'm put in a situation where the publisher says "my way or the highway", I'm gonna go option C every single time, and feel no remorse whatsoever.
You’re complaining about the terms they offer, not the product. If you’re not clear on that point, it’s no wonder the position is so garbled.
Maybe the author doesn’t want to get paid by people who dislike DRM. That doesn’t give anyone the right to take their content without paying. The principled answer is to refuse to read works from these authors.
> Maybe the author doesn’t want to get paid by people who dislike DRM.
That’s fine and as I stated those people shouldn’t / won’t pay them.
> That doesn’t give anyone the right to take their content without paying.
This is exactly what my original comment addressed and you ignored:
I contend that there is absolutely no moral or ethical problem with copying information and no valid moral or ethical basis for giving creators exclusive rights or “ownership” of their creations, when they can be copied without depriving existing holders of the information, or giving anyone special/exclusive rights to profit from information.
I can see an argument for preventing corporate entities from profiting from any information or content they didn’t create, but not when it comes to people’s ability to freely copy and share.
The principled answer is to support and fund people and tools that enable piracy and free information sharing, to the detriment of “rights holders”.
But it’s also totally disconnected from DRM. Presumably you wouldn’t pay for non-DRM ebooks either, or at least see no “moral or ethical” issue with someone so declines to do so.
And I hope you’re also on the side of AI training as fair use that does not require permission or payment?
They are in demand of course, just not by you.
https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-can-boost-digital-music-sale...
You cannot eat the cake and have it too
Since when? There may be a reduction in demand but bookshops where I live are full of customers.
I only buy physical copies—actual black atoms on white paper aren't as ephemeral as digital copies, neither are they subject the DRM nonsense.
There may be a reduction and I am kinda starting to warm up to my reader's ability to add multiple bookmarks to quotable quotes/interesting concepts/neat scripts, but I am not sure parent is right.
Maybe it depends on locale? If anyone has good data on that, it is likely to be Amazon.
The world operates on contracts, and we are all free to decline to do business with companies we dislike or who ask more than we think their product is worth.
Agree to terms or don’t, but I have a hard time seeing “I’m going to take what they’re offering but not pay what they’re asking” as some kind of noble stand.
That's not a great comparison. The problem in this instance isn't a high price, it's a lack of access. If they offered ebooks drm free with a X% unlock fee or something then you'd have a point.
How would that not apply to shoplifting because the price is too high or the return policy too short or whatever?
It's fine if you think what they are doing is wrong. The government shares your opinion.
Additionally, this argument here is even worse, because the laws you'd be violating in this instance have nothing to do with IP or theft, but rather privacy.
But you wouldn't be charged with theft.
That has nothing to do with it being a good or bad analogy.
> How would that not apply to shoplifting because the price is too high or the return policy too short or whatever?
What is "that" in this statement? I'm not saying the word "theft" isn't valid, I'm saying the circumstances are different enough that equating the two is a poor basis to reason from.
Digital assets cannot be compared to physical goods. A physical good that is shoplifted not only misses out on the sale, but must be restocked at the shop’s expense in order to capture the next sale. Digital piracy does not create any additional burden to a business’s expenses. This will never be a valid line of logic.
If a book was excessively expensive for people, they wouldn't steal it. They'd get it from the library, Xerox it and bind the photocopies .
Copying a pdf is just the digital equivalent.
Do you believe then same thing when renting a car?
When I want to read a book, I usually prefer a physical copy (and I am willing to pay for it, if I do not merely want to read it for a few hours at the library (if the library has a copy)); sometimes it is helpful to have it on the computer too, and in that case I would only accept non-DRM files, and possibly even piracy. However, some books might be difficult to find, or maybe I only want one page, etc.
I've got cash, plenty of people around me don't and I don't begrudge their piracy. I pay, see below, when I was young and broke I pirated everything. I'm surrounded by people for whom a US minimum wage would be a stonking income, why shouldn't they pirate?
The big issue for me personally is shipping. I live outside the US and EU, and it's a real problem getting books out. I often pay more for shipping than I do for the books themselves, and I have to wait up to a month, and there's the ridiculousness of getting a book shipped across the US/EU, then to my third country.
My approach is that I pirate freely and happily, without a shred of guilt. Most of the books on my reader only get read up through the first few chapters, some I'll finish completely.
I do however like books, real books. If I'm getting into an author I've pirated, I'll then buy some of their other stuff, and I buy frequently.
This comes back to the old thing with music pirates being the biggest spenders on music. A classic case, I think.
So please, leave your moralizing out of this. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to pirate, much of it ending up with money in author and publishers pockets.
Hmm, tough choice... not :)
there are valid reasons to pirate books sometimes but at the end of the day, someone has to pay something into the system to keep books getting published
I believe authors deserve to be rewarded proportionally to the quality of their work, I also believe good publishers can add a lot of value to an author's work, and even more I believe that DRM-Free publishers have shown it's possible to base their core business model on being more convenient than piracy. I buy a book, it's mine to use on my devices, no strings ttached.
The hubris of some companies make them refuse to see the reality of the market, and instead stubbornly push for wider copyright laws, harsher punishment, DRM, and higher walls for their gardens.
And as juvenile as it sounds, I'd actually like my copies of The Dark Tower to include the interior art too. Completely absent.
We finally got to a point in the future where theoretically they could siphon tens of thousands of dollars out of me (because I wouldn't first have to spend x20 that amount buying a home with a large enough library proper), and their authorized, authentic ebooks look no better than some half-assed scan downloaded from a #bookz DCC bot.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27241085
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30315992
[1] https://www.marketingcharts.com/demographics-and-audiences-1...
I hope your indigent pirate going to compensate the authors once he has lifted himself out of poverty.
Huh? I agree with everything up to this point. Of the G20 nations, only the US has all the problems you complain about: no disposable income, enormous medical costs, no job protections, etc. Well-run developed nations don't have these problems.
As someone who left the US, the only real problem over here is that English-language books are hard to find in countries where English isn't widely spoken (which should be obvious of course), so of course e-books are very attractive for this reason. But then, as you can see in many comments here, the e-book sellers don't work much with people living outside the US, your "purchased" e-books stop working outside the US, etc.
Let's return to the central point: transactions ought to be consensual, and pirating ain't.
Yes, those transaction costs are way above the worth of the item if its already below the selling price for person A.
Note that in practice, almost all transaction costs are not money.
The key to the problem is political action.
Normally "have to" is used when the consequences of not doing so are very dire, possibly life threatening. A person shoplifting a copy of Harry Potter for their own use would not normally count.
Many would contend the consequences would be very dire if they didn't act. For example, those who depend on Sci-Hub for educational material. They'd contend they've no other option.
Are you having an impact? Do you have publishers quaking in their boots? Do you even have a plan to extract your demands? Or are you just pirating shit you want to read and dressing it up as meaningful? Which achieves what?
Activism would mean you are out there convincing people who don’t already agree with you, and making hard choices about your own consumption, such as with a boycott.
You’re just enjoying the fruits of people’s labour without compensating them.
Cheap, cheap, cheap.
Your attitude is, respectfully, not helping.
I'd be private, anonymous and dead easy to use. If you could buy these at shops, supermarkets—just about everywhere—I reckon people would use them.
Note: I've often not paid small amounts because of the complexities with credit cards, entering name etc. and being databased by some third-party company, etc. has made me hesitant.
It should be as simple as buying gum or a block of chocolate. No questions, names, no pack-drill.
Now, you could choose to not read books that don't meet your high moral bar for distribution. But screw that, you can have your cake and eat it too!
Publishers need to stop doing this, or we end up in a world where everything is rented. They will only pay attention to what affects their revenue.
I repeat: I'm happy to pay for books if they're DRM-free. It's not like I'm pirating everything because it's free; I'm happy to pay for it if I can actually own it.
Self-flagellation is not a moral imperative.
Why not just say “You are lying” rather than asking them to stop bringing up morals?
Libgen works instantly, every time.
Im happy I only buy books where I get a DRM free copy
The only way to force this issue is to "pirate before you buy-it" and save your money. Hard to get screwed by fake purchase buttons if you dont buy, and hit libgen, torrents, and usenet.
but I agree, do not buy shit you dont own
Manning does put a “licensed to my_email” on the pages of the digital copies but it’s not onerous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmi3akNnqis - You Should Pirate Anime (Reupload)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXiQJWT442I - You Should Pirate Anime 2 (Reupload)
Don't need to own a book I'm going to read once and never read again.
That works for Kindles via E-Mail.
In my defense: Thalia is the only remaining book store chain here in Austria.
I don’t know a way to check in advance if a Google Play book is DRM‐shackled. Hopefully, if a purchase does turn out to have DRM, Google would let you return the book for a refund if you haven’t read it, but I haven’t tested that.
Atleast the web interface makes it clear in what format the book is downloadable in.
I have to buy through one of the bookstores, right?
In terms of how DRM is cost-effective for platforms and publishers (i.e. why they bother with it at all), it seems much more likely to me that it's primarily meant to prevent fully legitimate post-first-sale transfers of books, e.g. library lending, second-hand sales, and so on. Publishers couldn't do anything to stop post-first-sale transfer of physical copies, but DRM-enabled ebook platforms give them a new lever.
This isn't a function of how difficult it is for the pirates themselves to get their hands on a DRM-free electronic copy of a book. Instead, it's primarily a function of the fact that piracy is illegal, and—regardless of how easy it is for pirates to obtain DRM-free copies of the media they want to distribute—such distribution activities are limited to dark and relatively lawless corners of the internet where "normies" fear to tread.
That's the basis of my point in reply to you. It may be that DRM prevents to some degree the more casual form of "piracy" in which e.g. I give a friend a copy of an ebook file instead of lending a physical copy, but that didn't seem to be what you were getting at, and anyway since lending physical copies has been a possibility since books first came to exist I think the degree to which this sort of casual piracy threatens publishers' bottom lines is not a foregone conclusion until some independent party convincingly measures it.
> if this solution isn’t working, or looks unfair, how are we going to solve it differently?
OP's article makes some recommendations under "Conclusions".
It loses revenue by itself by inconveniencing paying customers (lowering sales), restricting addressable market (by limiting purchases to compatible DRM leaden hardware) and demanding R&D costs.
Of course, facts rarely challenge belief when it comes to business owners - just see the RTO push.
These theories are hard to test.
Anybody have success with DIY book scanning and conversion to epub?
The main thing that’s kept me for pursuing this is that I don’t really want to own all the physical books in the first place. I prefer physical copies of technical and math books, but for random fiction I am interested in ebooks to save space. Buying the books and scanning them gets me into the same position with books that I’m already in with movies, shows, and music: lots of physical media taking up space so that I could put a bunch of extra effort into getting a digital copy that I could have downloaded for free with far less effort if I were willing to pirate.
I don't distribute these purchases, I just store and back them up myself. Every so often I will "lend" one to my partner or a friend like any other paperback on my shelf. The difference being, I suppose they now "own" it, too.
And taking credit for something you didn't do may or may not be some form of misrepresentation/fraud, but I doubt many jurisdictions would consider it literal theft.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entziehung_elektrischer_Energi...
This is mostly because the value I extract from it (the format) is the convenience and formatting. I want it now, everywhere, and well formatted for my device, and I want to do as little work as possible to make that happen. I have money and not much time.
Is this short sighted? Probably. But I have come to accept that media is ephemeral, like most things. I just don’t have the time or inclination to be an archivist, much as I wish I did.
It's been around for about 17 years and will probably hang around until the author dies.
https://calibre-ebook.com/about https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.multipie.c... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/calibre-companion/id1171161691
Fine if "everywhere" you go is somewhere the DRM allows. For people who cross region borders, it can remove the right you thought you paid for, with no justification. If you want it 'now', read it 'now', then you're also somewhat the DRMed item being 'revised' against your will (happens) or removed by actions of or failure of the publisher (also happens).
Most books, I don't /want/ to own.
I'm not saying the way e-books work is good - it clearly isn't - but not because there's a fundamental law that owning an e-book should be identical to owning a physical book.
In your examples, you own the book and the gun because the publisher of the book and the manufacturer of the gun (or anyone else, excepting the state, I suppose) can’t unilaterally take them back from you or modify them without some sort of penalty. This can — and has [0] — happened with eBooks. The “unlimited rights to do what you want with [them]” are not guaranteed by ownership in my opinion.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
Not so for a DRM’d ebook.
Eminent domain is the state taking from you. I already mentioned this in my comment. In fact, the state pays a penalty for doing so in the US as enshrined in the 5th amendment: “… nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.“
> Ownership does not have a single neat list of requirements
No, it does not have a comprehensive list for all use cases, but I would say that the one I mentioned in my first comment is a necessary one: fundamentally that it cannot be taken from you without penalty.
Copying falls under the ownership of the text within the book. It is something completely separate.
It sucks and there should be a way of proving ownership such that you get access to the online digital versions.
I have an extensive book collection and first several first editions in the areas I am interested in. I read the physical books from time to time, but for me the Kindle is a must have device that I use for hours every day - reading in bed, etc.
Do I like it being a closed system? No. Do I have the energy to pirate things and keep on top of managing those collections - books are somewhat easier, but media is much harder - no.
For all of its downsides, the subscription model has two big benefits: more of the money goes to writers, not publishers, as in the current system; and it shifts publishing to an economic situation similar to open source, where writers are compensated for their opinions/services and not for an easily copyable (and DRM'able) product.
But, if these artifacts were just to distract us from preserving them in the first place, they were probably not worth to be preserved. And ho boy, how there is much distraction to be found today!
Solved.
if there is really a mass misunderstanding by ebook consumers that they don't have rights as part of their licence that they believe they have, the market demand will start shifting back towards ownership
Despite storage and transmission being very cheap, it is almost impossable to find many classic films, music, and books. Aparently it is legitimate can claim a "loss" if they cease to sell an item (presumably having destroyed the master copy).
It might make perfect commercial sense to drop low selling items and claim large tax losses, it may be legal, but how is this moral? For classic items, this is nothing less than destroying cultural artifacts.
(This is yet another case where modern copyright is out of step with modern morals and expectations. Personally, I'm for short copyright terms, perhaps requiring explicit registration, and requiring licence holders to maintain a copy for historical purposes - perhaps in some kind of escrow at the internet archive.)
With physical books the invisible hand of capitalism alters prices to match books to buyers, creating a long tail of demand decades after publication. As a young person I used to love picking up gems at book fairs and remainder sales, exposing me to so many more ideas than I could afford at full price.
If publishers were smart, seeing fostering reading as a good thing for society and their bottom line, they would recreate this effect by gradually lowering the price on older titles.
Amazon almost got it right by doing similar, and subsequently dominates the ereader market by making it easy and convenient to buy and download an ebook and have it be in a comfortable and familiar format for all your books. They lost me as a customer the moment I wanted a more capable device and to use that library demanded that I use their Kindle software. Frankly, it's sort of a pain to be a third party ebook reader and even though I have given someone an ebook to read in the past, I had to set it up for them. I would be surprised if ebook piracy was a large portion of ebook consumers since it's more hands-on, though it would not surprise me if it was a growing market share.
Although the models are different, there have been similar effects with Spotify and video streaming services. You definitely own nothing in these examples, which I feel is worse but it's also pretty clear that you don't own something where ebooks and video games are arguably lying to you in terms of ownership. You essentially pay to get to play/read without owning anything. Before I move on, Spotify gets a special note here as I almost cancelled my subscription after being tired of their constant UI shifts to be more like a social media platform. Since it's the only place I consume music at the moment, I'm at the mercy of their bad decisions. It's all wrapped up into the same topic because if I drop Spotify, then I'm left with a music accessibility problem. This is the same thing Newell said, I now have a service problem, AGAIN. Thankfully they reverted those changes, but ultimately I feel like my problem has only been postponed. I lament that bandcamp is not more popular.
Perhaps this is all anecdotal, but from my perspective, it's very clear to me that piracy is (or will be) making a comeback to all of these industries. DRM is ultimately a losing strategy and can alienate consumers. Platform exclusivity, invasive DRM, juggling apps and subscriptions, companies trying to change their music app into a social media one, etc are all user and consumer hostile. The only shame is that the creators ultimately suffer when consumers get tired of the distributors, particularly musicians and authors.
So instead, I started getting FLAC's from Soulseek and I play them with either just a regular audio player, or a discord bot I wrote. That music will always be mine and no one can decide to take them away.