Of course I agree and would do the same if I was buying ebooks from that company in the first place, but for every one of us, how many people will just go ahead and buy a new device?
> - Physically copy it onto the Kindle via a USB cable.
Wait a second... you're rewarding Amazon and the publisher for their bad behavior by continuing to buy from Amazon? Nothing about this plan is discouraging the problem.
Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.
> And it can hardly escape anyone’s notice that I would achieve exactly the same end-state — the book on my Kindle — if I just skipped the first two stages.
>Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.
If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?
On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly?
Maybe because those middlemen platforms provide some form of discoverability, rating, convenience and trusted return policy at scale that's valuable to both consumers and developers/authors. Since nobody forces you to sell your IP on Amazon or Steam yet everyone who wants to be seen goes there.
This should be relatively easy to disrupt for ebooks. It doesn't seem necessary to have the infrastructure and pockets of Amazon to sell ebooks (and be fairer to authors and readers).
I'm not convinced about discoverability, I don't browse random books or look for recommendations on Amazon; to me Amazon is the final stop once I know the ebook I want to buy. Literally a search bar for the book I already want. I don't use Amazon as a shelf of books to peruse, and I never look for recommended products (especially not books).
I think it's mostly the integration with Kindle, and the reputation ("I trust Amazon so I'll enter my credit card"). This should be feasible to overcome by a better platform. And Amazon seem hell bent on ruining their reputation...
But how do you know the books you want to buy in the first place? That's the Indie creators dilemma, sometimes good creators are terrible marketers, or have no budget, and their creation is undiscovered from the others that spend, market or game the system.
True in principle, but I find in practice the Hugo and Nebula seldom disappoint me (in the sense of having wasted my time, not that every winner is a masterpiece). And these are not the only prizes (or genres), I just mentioned two. There are also magazines, reviews, etc. Sometimes following an author you like on Twitter or whatever helps see what they like.
Friend's recommendations aren't gamified. Actual friends I mean, not facebook contacts.
In any case, these were just examples that Amazon is NOT the place to go for browsing books. I'm sure people must do it, but I don't know of anyone who goes to Amazon to look for book recommendations...
>This should be relatively easy to disrupt for ebooks. [...] This should be feasible to overcome by a better platform.
If it's so trivial as you claim, then you can put your money where your mouth is and become a millionaire/billionaire by delivering this. Especially now with LLMs, the coding part of the problem should be easier than ever.
A snarky reply. I never said "trivial", and I didn't mean it's easy in absolute terms, just that this seems relatively easy to disrupt compared to other endeavors.
I have no desire to become a millionaire, and do I need to remind you of the HN guidelines you've clearly forgotten?
You said it's easy to disrupt, as per the quote, and I showed you it really isn't easy to disrupt, because if it was, someone else would have attempted it already.
Now you're shying away from this fact pretending it's snark and invoking then HN rules as a defense shield. What a wiesel.
You claimed I said it was "trivial" which I didn't, I said it was "relatively easy". Strike one.
Then you went into that nonsense of if it's so easy then why don't you do it and become a millionaire yadda yadda, which is a thoughtless cliche. Strike two.
You misquoted me then trotted out a dumb cliche.
It's spelled "weasel" by the way. Strike three.
> someone else would have attempted it already.
You don't know that it hasn't, and in any case, everything hasn't happened until it does.
Many of us do. But the majority of ebook readers will: a)never find us
and b)just want to click buy now not download epub (from a site they have never heard of) then transfer to kindle manually. So best to cover your bases and give them the Amazon option too.
Yeah… There’s a few things I think the tech crowd misses the mark on when discussing media creators of all sorts:
- A vast gulf separates the potential exposure on established platforms vs smaller or DIY platforms, and that dramatically affects income. Same with usability of the platform on a whole. When a nontechnical person sees that they have to put down their phone, boot up a computer (which they might not even own,) download a couple of programs, etc. etc. etc. they’ll be on Amazon, seconds later, pricing out the new kindles. That sucks, but if you make media of any sort for a living, you can’t just pretend that isn’t true.
- There‘a a huge difference in strategy between being a hobbyist/side hustler and being a full-time professional. You can’t just scale your hobby business up like that.
- Wanting to make a living as a writer, designer, artist, musician, etc. is not a moral failure. Few would deride developers who want to be paid for their work instead of exclusively making FOSS software and hoping for donations. I’m not sure why creatives doing the same thing are seen as greedy.
> If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?
> On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?
We're needlessly making this into a general problem. Why hastily discuss ideal models? The current model is fine and the issue isn't generalized. We're talking about having the option to skip asshole middlemen, or to be more specific, Amazon. A company so big that solving this special case on its own leaps us a huge portion of the way into solving the problem at large.
Is the general sentiment that Steam is also an asshole?
That’s fine if you have one near to you, don’t have mobility issues that make it hard to visit or accessibility issues that make book print hard to read. And it stocks the kinds of books you want to read. Without being all woke about it, indie book stores can be great if you like reading the sorts of books your particular local flavour of indie book stores stocks.
May work better in some countries than others; e.g. checking the book I'm currently reading that's published by Hachette, my local indie book store sells it for the same price as amazon.ca, (and I can easily order online, there's no need to "explain to a shop owner what I want") but Hachette doesn't seem to have any B2C online front that I'm able to order from.
As somebody who wrote a book in the past, yes, this. Give Amazon no money. If you want to spend money because pirating makes you feel bad, send a few bucks to the author, buy something on the publisher's store, or go to your local book store and spend some money there.
But never feel bad about not sending money to Amazon.
How much money? I mean, the natural answer is full price but that’s not the amount the author gets from a regular sale. There’s a whole range where it’s cheaper to freebooters and still more profitable to the author.
I’ve seen an argument that buying an album from a musician (or a physical media or merch) and pirating the rest of their library in most cases more profitable to the musician than streaming.
I suppose there’s a similar dynamic in publishing where the overhead created by all the intermediaries is significant compared to the actual work done by the author, editor, designers, and so on.
If you send the author half of what the book costs, there's an almost 100% chance this is more than they would have made if you had bought the book. If you send the author 20%, that's roughly what most authors earn per book sale. It can be substantially higher or lower depending on a bunch of factors, but I think it's a reasonable rule of thumb.
> I’ve seen an argument that buying an album from a musician (or a physical media or merch) and pirating the rest of their library in most cases more profitable to the musician than streaming.
Streaming is a particularly brutal example for musicians. Book authors make quite a bit more per book sale than an author makes per stream.
Wouldn't it be cool if we could get to the point where authors (and artists generally) are making more from voluntary direct payments than they are from the platforms?
It would be a great way to demonstrate how broken the funding model is, and all of that money would be money that didn't contribute to the surveillance/censorship tech that copyright is used to justify.
Sure, that sounds grand, but if setting up a little store is too much to ask, I'd settle for a consistent way to just send them money.
I'd love it if voluntary payment could be mobilized to the point where it's more profitable to authors than the shit treatment they're getting from Amazon. For many, piracy is about rejecting the problematic distribution mechanism, not stinginess. It would be great to have a way to provably put our money where our mouths are (provably, because making Amazon look bad is part of the fun).
Sure, but they've claimed to "sell" you something, and now they're making your continued "ownership" of that thing contingent upon some future purchase. "Evil" is maybe a strong word, but I see no reason to continue playing by their rules after shenanigans of that sort.
I ended up migrating to ebooks.com and importing them into Calibre (after some work to get Adobe Digital Editions to import nicely) and using that to manage my Kindle. Did the same with my old Amazon library too when they were talking about stopping you exporting the azw3's
I find that integration near-useless. Even obscure books (if available) tend to have a multi-month wait at my library. Since the wait times seem to be semi-random, it's basically impossible to queue up books in a way that syncs up to my pace of reading.
(I guess if I really wanted to, at my rough reading pace of one book per week, I could place a hold on two books per week, and on average every week I'd get two books available, pick one to read, and just cycle the other back into the hold queue.)
Hmm, I've had pretty good success with it. The current bestsellers are hard to get, but haven't really had a problem with anything else. I wonder if it depends on the library?
Yeah, I'm sure it does - libraries buy licenses to a specific number of books that can be lent out. I've got no insight into how the licenses my library has stack up against other libraries though.
If you don't want to resort to piracy, there are many vendors that sell epubs with weak DRM and presumably give money to publishers. Ebooks.com is one. If you have not already, I would recommend looking into calibre for managing such titles.
(I did this even when I used to buy from Kindle, first thing I would do is break the DRM and put it into calibre even if I was only reading on Amazon devices, because I never trusted Amazon in the first place. But supposedly the DRM breaking flow is broken with new kindle releases.)
The public library is of course an option as many mention, assuming they have the book in their inventory. You might also be able to check it out from https://openlibrary.org/
I agree, easy and much more pleasant. Walk down the street, go into the bookshop (which is by essence a place in 3D, much more pleasant than a screen), search for a book, find it, turn a few pages, chat with the seller or with someone else interested by a book you liked, buy the book you came for, and another one you did not plan to buy, stop somewhere to drink a coffee, open the first few pages, etc... How can a website reproduce this "quality of life" ?? No need to live like during covid and lockdowns. If you live 30 km away from the nearest bookshop (like I did for 4 years) a phone call to check if the book is available and order it if it is not. Never bought anything on amazon (don't want, don't need), and maybe 10 times online in the last 25 years for very specific stuff.
They don't have it, because they've limited shelf space and only stock popular books that are on best-seller lists. The History of Scruggs Biplanes 1907-1919 isn't one of them.
I’ve got an old DX. The fact that it doesn’t have net access anymore is now a security feature and an anti distraction mechanism. I can load what I want by USB. It doesn’t do epub3 which is a problem, but it does PDFs and conversion tricks are possible.
The Amazon ecosystem isn’t uniquely untrustworthy, but it’s not where I want to keep future electronic purchases.
I used to read the New York Times on my kindle. It was great: delivered each morning, no waste paper by the afternoon, a simple subscription, etc. I was on my 4th kindle at least, which says more about the use I got out of them than their endurance. And then the service disappeared for reasons I never really understood.
I have an older kindle and I can still load it with epubs by emailing the unique kindle address. I think there are other ways too, via USB for example.
My understanding is that it's only downloading via the amazon kindle store that is no longer supported for devices that are considered end-of-life, which makes sense to me personally. The kindle web browser is probably based on an ancient android version of chrome. That browser is not going to last forever.
It is indeed trivial to "side-load" ebooks onto an older Kindle; you plug it in via USB and drop the files into, IIRC, the "/documents" directory.
Kindle, for many years and I think even now, does not actually support EPUB, for likely unethical reasons you can probably guess; I believe the Kindle email address method hides a conversion to the AZW / AZW3 format.
Nothing is going to happen. Amazon is like a very large redwood tree that is all grown. It has no interest in fire, drought, animal life, human culture, or anything else you value. It couldn’t care less what you do about your Kindle.
tbh the dev support/infra for the old devices was probably more than the money they were making in sales on those devices. They noticed and just decided to cut them off and that was the extent of that decision.
Great! You currently have just one other comment pointing out that Bezos is no longer CEO, as if that were a piece of information that would make even the slightest difference in this matter. Unfortunately, my comment isn't any more sympathetic either. These people couldn't care less whether you can continue reading the digital books you've already purchased on your existing device or not. And yet you insist on paying for these books instead of just pirating them outright. Sorry, but that's exactly what Nietzsche called "slave morality." You're making a virtue out of clinging to the very structure that disadvantages you. And that whole "commercial incompetence" thing can't really be true, can it? The company dominates e-commerce, and the guy has enough cash to fly into space in his own rocket. So the business hasn't gone under yet just because it missed out on a few book sales to nerds with old devices. I find your whole perspective kind of baffling. I realized right from the start that I would either buy digital books as fully functional PDFs or continue to buy paper books that I could put on my bookshelf, because anything else would amount to exactly what you're describing now. And a small suggestion for improving your workflow: first check to see if the book is available on a torrent site, and only buy it afterward.
It's a fascinating bit of biology to see a species collectively sacrifice its well being for the benefit of one man almost entirely without getting something in return.
Not to argue rich people never did anything useful for humanity. The pun is that one may be promoted to great status for doing great things but after that there is no obligation to continue doing great things.
We are in an endless war against the great void and we've appointed many generals who at best couldn't care less about the war and at worse joined the dark side.
You've paid the man and now you get to see books you like fly into the great nothingness. Funny as hell! He showed non of the kindness and generosity he is known for?
You should give him more money, maybe something different happens next time.
> It's a fascinating bit of biology to see a species collectively sacrifice its well being for the benefit of one man
I wouldn't attribute this phenomenon to biology. But in a healthy world, there would have been an intervention by now—at the very least with pitchforks, but ideally through institutional channels. I'm curious to see if that will still happen, or if we'll simply hand the world over to our new feudal overlords without putting up a fight.
I think of it as a species trying different formulas until one sticks to the wall. (it never does) Eventually, one way or the other, we will go full grasshopper and burn everything to the ground again, we have that part down to an art.
We will again (proverbially) ride our horse to the saloon with our gun (or sword) hanging from our belt, we will play poker, smoke, drink, sing, dance and hang out with the guys - only to have each one of those things taken away again.
I’m the worst of the worst. I only buy second hand paper books. Then I give them to someone when I’ve read them!
This is incidentally after a kindle phase terminated by Amazon after I returned too much of their third rate junk that didn’t work for me to remain a profitable customer.
Everybody, get up, we're leaving. Jailbreak your kindles and move to epub. It's not that difficult.
Buy books at Kobo or bookshop.org
There are so many functional kindles out there, this could be the event that changes the power dynamic and puts the author-reader relationship back in the center instead of the publisher/distributor.
It's what's slowly happening in the Movie industry now: The studios learn that they can't create sustainable value by just spending money and adding stars to a production. But directors create value. So they are suddenly put front and center and actively promoted.
I’d be curious to see the financials on the Kindle readers, my suspicion is that they very quickly make the cost back through book sales. If retaining customers was a concern they could simply ship people the cheapest reader before cutting service.
80 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 33.8 ms ] thread> - Find the book I want on Amazon.
> - Buy it.
> - Find the same book on a torrent site.
> - Download it.
> - Physically copy it onto the Kindle via a USB cable.
Wait a second... you're rewarding Amazon and the publisher for their bad behavior by continuing to buy from Amazon? Nothing about this plan is discouraging the problem.
Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.
> And it can hardly escape anyone’s notice that I would achieve exactly the same end-state — the book on my Kindle — if I just skipped the first two stages.
If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?
On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly?
Maybe because those middlemen platforms provide some form of discoverability, rating, convenience and trusted return policy at scale that's valuable to both consumers and developers/authors. Since nobody forces you to sell your IP on Amazon or Steam yet everyone who wants to be seen goes there.
I'm not convinced about discoverability, I don't browse random books or look for recommendations on Amazon; to me Amazon is the final stop once I know the ebook I want to buy. Literally a search bar for the book I already want. I don't use Amazon as a shelf of books to peruse, and I never look for recommended products (especially not books).
I think it's mostly the integration with Kindle, and the reputation ("I trust Amazon so I'll enter my credit card"). This should be feasible to overcome by a better platform. And Amazon seem hell bent on ruining their reputation...
Never Amazon! I also don't know anyone who goes to Amazon to look for book recommendations, but that might be my bubble.
I buy a LOT of books in brick and mortar stores, my preferred method of browsing books.
Friend's recommendations aren't gamified. Actual friends I mean, not facebook contacts.
In any case, these were just examples that Amazon is NOT the place to go for browsing books. I'm sure people must do it, but I don't know of anyone who goes to Amazon to look for book recommendations...
If it's so trivial as you claim, then you can put your money where your mouth is and become a millionaire/billionaire by delivering this. Especially now with LLMs, the coding part of the problem should be easier than ever.
I have no desire to become a millionaire, and do I need to remind you of the HN guidelines you've clearly forgotten?
Now you're shying away from this fact pretending it's snark and invoking then HN rules as a defense shield. What a wiesel.
You claimed I said it was "trivial" which I didn't, I said it was "relatively easy". Strike one.
Then you went into that nonsense of if it's so easy then why don't you do it and become a millionaire yadda yadda, which is a thoughtless cliche. Strike two.
You misquoted me then trotted out a dumb cliche.
It's spelled "weasel" by the way. Strike three.
> someone else would have attempted it already.
You don't know that it hasn't, and in any case, everything hasn't happened until it does.
Try harder next time.
- A vast gulf separates the potential exposure on established platforms vs smaller or DIY platforms, and that dramatically affects income. Same with usability of the platform on a whole. When a nontechnical person sees that they have to put down their phone, boot up a computer (which they might not even own,) download a couple of programs, etc. etc. etc. they’ll be on Amazon, seconds later, pricing out the new kindles. That sucks, but if you make media of any sort for a living, you can’t just pretend that isn’t true.
- There‘a a huge difference in strategy between being a hobbyist/side hustler and being a full-time professional. You can’t just scale your hobby business up like that.
- Wanting to make a living as a writer, designer, artist, musician, etc. is not a moral failure. Few would deride developers who want to be paid for their work instead of exclusively making FOSS software and hoping for donations. I’m not sure why creatives doing the same thing are seen as greedy.
> On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?
We're needlessly making this into a general problem. Why hastily discuss ideal models? The current model is fine and the issue isn't generalized. We're talking about having the option to skip asshole middlemen, or to be more specific, Amazon. A company so big that solving this special case on its own leaps us a huge portion of the way into solving the problem at large.
Is the general sentiment that Steam is also an asshole?
But never feel bad about not sending money to Amazon.
I’ve seen an argument that buying an album from a musician (or a physical media or merch) and pirating the rest of their library in most cases more profitable to the musician than streaming.
I suppose there’s a similar dynamic in publishing where the overhead created by all the intermediaries is significant compared to the actual work done by the author, editor, designers, and so on.
> I’ve seen an argument that buying an album from a musician (or a physical media or merch) and pirating the rest of their library in most cases more profitable to the musician than streaming.
Streaming is a particularly brutal example for musicians. Book authors make quite a bit more per book sale than an author makes per stream.
It would be a great way to demonstrate how broken the funding model is, and all of that money would be money that didn't contribute to the surveillance/censorship tech that copyright is used to justify.
I'd love it if voluntary payment could be mobilized to the point where it's more profitable to authors than the shit treatment they're getting from Amazon. For many, piracy is about rejecting the problematic distribution mechanism, not stinginess. It would be great to have a way to provably put our money where our mouths are (provably, because making Amazon look bad is part of the fun).
(I guess if I really wanted to, at my rough reading pace of one book per week, I could place a hold on two books per week, and on average every week I'd get two books available, pick one to read, and just cycle the other back into the hold queue.)
If you don't want to resort to piracy, there are many vendors that sell epubs with weak DRM and presumably give money to publishers. Ebooks.com is one. If you have not already, I would recommend looking into calibre for managing such titles.
(I did this even when I used to buy from Kindle, first thing I would do is break the DRM and put it into calibre even if I was only reading on Amazon devices, because I never trusted Amazon in the first place. But supposedly the DRM breaking flow is broken with new kindle releases.)
The public library is of course an option as many mention, assuming they have the book in their inventory. You might also be able to check it out from https://openlibrary.org/
They don't have it, because they've limited shelf space and only stock popular books that are on best-seller lists. The History of Scruggs Biplanes 1907-1919 isn't one of them.
The Amazon ecosystem isn’t uniquely untrustworthy, but it’s not where I want to keep future electronic purchases.
My understanding is that it's only downloading via the amazon kindle store that is no longer supported for devices that are considered end-of-life, which makes sense to me personally. The kindle web browser is probably based on an ancient android version of chrome. That browser is not going to last forever.
Kindle, for many years and I think even now, does not actually support EPUB, for likely unethical reasons you can probably guess; I believe the Kindle email address method hides a conversion to the AZW / AZW3 format.
- First they stopped allowing download of purchased books for cable-transfer to kindle in 2025.
- Then they amped up their effort to avoid jailbreaking by suddenly releasing more firmware updates than before.
- Now they stopped supporting a wide range of kindles.
Amazon obviously assumes that they sufficiently killed the competition so they don't need to worry about customers leaving.
As for me, I managed to exit on-time, applied a jailbreak on my kindle touch and now buy my books elsewhere...
Not to argue rich people never did anything useful for humanity. The pun is that one may be promoted to great status for doing great things but after that there is no obligation to continue doing great things.
We are in an endless war against the great void and we've appointed many generals who at best couldn't care less about the war and at worse joined the dark side.
You've paid the man and now you get to see books you like fly into the great nothingness. Funny as hell! He showed non of the kindness and generosity he is known for?
You should give him more money, maybe something different happens next time.
haha
I wouldn't attribute this phenomenon to biology. But in a healthy world, there would have been an intervention by now—at the very least with pitchforks, but ideally through institutional channels. I'm curious to see if that will still happen, or if we'll simply hand the world over to our new feudal overlords without putting up a fight.
We will again (proverbially) ride our horse to the saloon with our gun (or sword) hanging from our belt, we will play poker, smoke, drink, sing, dance and hang out with the guys - only to have each one of those things taken away again.
This is incidentally after a kindle phase terminated by Amazon after I returned too much of their third rate junk that didn’t work for me to remain a profitable customer.
Fuck ‘em.
1. But the book on kobo or ebooks 2. Convert it to mobi and transfer it Kindle using calibre
- Buy nearly any audiobook that's on Audible or other services
- Donate to your favorite local bookstore
- Get the downloadable audio file without DRM
Buy books at Kobo or bookshop.org
There are so many functional kindles out there, this could be the event that changes the power dynamic and puts the author-reader relationship back in the center instead of the publisher/distributor.
It's what's slowly happening in the Movie industry now: The studios learn that they can't create sustainable value by just spending money and adding stars to a production. But directors create value. So they are suddenly put front and center and actively promoted.
It’s straight up greed, IMHO.