The Pirate Book | Hacker News Reader

The Pirate Book

thepiratebook.net

118 pointszwetan21 comments

This reminds me of a few years ago, in almost every supermarket in China, there are third-party vendors selling electronic stuff also sells pirated MP3s and videos, for 5 Yuan(~84c) they'll load up your iPod Classic/MP4s(how video player called in China, as succeeder of MP3) with titles of your choice.

Until Apple has enhanced their DRM in apps, if you buy iPhones/iPads from a third party "authorized" resellers, you could ask them to install any paid apps, and/or jailbreak your iOS. Only difference was those kiosks are fancier.

But days are better now, I see people around me are starting to pay for Music and Applications, at least in larger cities.

What makes them decide to pay? Paid content is sometimes better quality but the selection is always much smaller.

How is it better that fewer people are taking ownership of their computers and more are being pushed into following laws dictated from Washington?

Lots of African immigrants come to Atlanta, they will play music or talk loudly into their phones at the coffee shop I frequent. Did not know it was a cultural thing, will have to be less annoyed and just ask them nicely to go outside with it.

It happens in London too. It's just bad manners to sit and loudly play your poor taste in music out loud on a bus or train rather than on headphones. It's not limited to any particular racial group though; it's usually just young men.

Yeah, there's a difference though between having been raised in a different culture and not being aware of local norms and being just ignorant. One you can simply and easily solve with a short conversation, the other you just have to grin and bear because any attempt to better the situation could easily make it worse. At my coffee shop, very few people are actually trying to be rude.

Hell, even if they are, what happened to that famous English weaponized politeness? Does nobody bother to develop that anymore?

Someone in Zurich once stepped in front of me in the queue, and I gave them my best British passive-aggressive glare. They didn't even notice, the cad.

So it's not as easy as you might think.

If a glare is insufficient, you have to step up the game. A stern glare did not the British Empire make. You should have solicitously pointed out the location of the end of the queue for him. After all, he may not have known where it was.

Well, in that sort of situation you'd probably just get stabbed.

This book is fascinating. Piracy certainly have different meaning in different places.

It's been a long time since I've gone to a site and just said WOW! Flooded with zillions of links daily, media overload for me, finding this one was well worth the minutes spent on the site.

Definitely worth reading, but after the first 30 seconds I had to fix the 10.5px monospace font as it was not at all suitable for extended reading. Great content, but the 'style over substance' presentation means there is no chance I would buy a hard copy of the book because I couldn't override the CSS like I did with my browser.

If you like reading about this subject you should also try two earlier books "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation" by J D Lasica and "The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism" by Matt Mason. Both cover similar subject matter in depth.

Fortunately the site is excellently responsive so you can just hit the zoom button in browser and enjoy the text size of your choice.

Only pdf format download? Why not epub/mobi? PDF is a terrible format and it's not like there are tables etc to maintain.

The ASCII art is very beautiful. So much culture! How is the printing quality from lulu.com?

also interested

Just bought the black and white version from Lulu as I find reading on paper easier for actual reading. I can download the colour pdf for the photography.

Interesting approach to academic publishing and I hope it does well.

I love surcouf. I cannot wait to read this book.

Unreadable. Great big floating "The Pirate Book" book occupying left quarter of the screen. Obscures text, covers pictures. Readable, I'm sure, for the vast majority, but this is a static set of pictures and text. Great job.

I, too, found the format and text size troublesome. I get that they're going for a style, but it obscures the content rather than emphasizing it.

Otherwise, very interesting.

You've got to love "style". It's just text. How do people manage to screw up something so simple?

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