Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)
themillions.com
themillions.com
You should buy the book, because this makes both you and the author better off.
But if you can't, you should read it anyway, because at least one of you is benefiting. You can buy the book later when you're in a better place, or at least pay it forward in some other way.
The only thing worse than not getting paid for your work is your unpaid work not being used at all.
To protect their own business interests, publishers (and their technical accomplices) have invented crippled digital formats that try to destroy the most fundamental and beneficial advantages of e-books: free transmission and duplication, and the ability of one library copy to be read by millions simultaneously.
We have built the library of Alexandria and made it big enough to serve the entire world, but instead of burning it down we just lock the door so that nobody can get in.
When I personally used pirated stuff it was because I couldn't afford to buy it or there was no other possibility to get a digital copy that is easier to search and transport.
It is only greed that is stopping our world from becoming something with all the good features of series like "Star Trek" including access to all those books for free.
The greedy people think they can gain even more money by forcing poor people to buy their stuff by punishing them. The greedy who have money influence governments to make laws against this piracy and investigate against them with public money.
In the end the poor can still not afford to buy the books, music etc. and will just be punished which costs more public money than giving them free access in the first place.
This is just another thing that is very wrong in our world.
The difference between $200k and $300k is a lot, but I see a lot of unattached young people not really caring. Ironically, it seems much smaller than the difference between $20k and $30k.
But most artists don't have people breaking their door down to compete for their time. And anyways, coding is a creative profession; I'm sure that plenty of techies are aspiring artists who didn't like their odds.
I'm surprised that more people don't see exclusively 'ex post facto' rewards as a sort of corrupting influence on the creation of art, rather than a motivator.
In which context do you see that?
> ex post facto' rewards as a sort of corrupting influence on the creation of art
So ... Patronage only? Commissions only?
But in the end artists just like open source maintainers need money to pay their food and most of them can't afford to stop charging for their work.
I would love to do that but I can't afford it so I won't. If the system changes and the government gives every citizen 1k $ / month we can start this discussion again because I would really much appreciate to do things that I like without having to take money for my work.
Without piracy, which was essentially a for education free trial of sorts many graphic designers would probably be using other free or cheaper alternatives
Pirating CS6 can only go on so long, right? After a while its ui will simply be too out of date compared to the current cc offering right?
How is GIMP coming along these days?
Any other open source projects people recommend?
Authors are motivated to write books because of money. A lot of authors who are not make their books available for free in pdf and other formats. Almost all ORielly books are found as pdfs on internet too.
I would be a good candidate for something like Kindle Unlimited, but most of the books I'm interested in aren't available there. At least half the books I downloaded (many academic as well as poetry and other books) are not available on Kindle Unlimited.
Subscription music aggregators seem to have a pretty decently comprehensive offering in a way that the book, news, and movie aggregators don't.
It would be a little weird, but if there was an app where I could read any book but every 20th page or so was some full page ad...I could live with that (as long as it wasn't a video or something). Not sure if that kind of a model could work in terms of the economics for writers -- but it's of course working for news mostly and for some film sites like Tubi and Pluto.
Despite this, I strongly prefer a physical copy. Except for some of the books on Safari which I use as a quick reference, I mostly use PDF copies as a sort of extended preview before purchasing (or not!) a physical copy
But the interviewee is spot on when he argues that a pirated download != a lost sale. The idea that it is is just pure silliness. Before I got into tech, if I couldn't find a PDF of a $70-120 book I simply wouldn't read it. Period.
(1) you can't read books in your browser while offline (2) many publishers don't contribute to Safari (Springer, MIT Press, etc) (3) publishers that are technically on Safari don't publish their whole catalog (Wiley) (4) Publishers that are on Safari, and do publish their whole catalog, may take months, a year even to put their books online (Wrox). (5) A lot of the books in the catalog are from Packt, which I consider noise.
So, while I do have Safari, I use it as a last resort and buy the DRM-free PDFs from publishers that have then (Manning, Prag Prog, etc) even if they are in Safari.
This past week, my account got corrupted. I lost about one years worth of Playlists that I put much effort into curating. All gone. Support was able to get me a CSV file of a known good state, but its going to be a PITA to manually recreate everything again. I might not bother.
That said, I can't fault them for having every publisher's catalog, since their focus seems to be on software and software-adjacent subjects. The publishers you mentioned have vast catalogs largely in areas outside of their sweet spot.
With regard to your account being corrupted, yikes -- I'm sorry that happened, and I can't say I'm super surprised. I've always found their playlists and "recently read" UI to be buggy to the point that I don't really bother much with it. For example, items "recently read" on their mobile app don't seem to sync with desktop/browser and vice versa.
I will also say that their recent embrace of dark patterns has been bumming me out -- aggressive marketing modals on login goading me into attending one of their live seminars, and breaking basic browser functionality (eg copy -- you can surprisingly copy text from inside books in SBO, but it will almost certainly be a bad time for you when you eventually try to paste it somewhere), among others.
I think Safari is close to the fitness gym upfront year plan. Are most people who subscribe really going to read $49 worth of their material per month?
I could imagine someone learning to code for the first time might find better value elsewhere with that $49 a month, but in my case I think that it works out.
The time I can spend every month for "extra" reading translates to roughly one book. For 49 USD a month, I could just buy the book secondhand every month (and even sell it further when done).
I would have happily paid 5 USD a month, but 49 USD, that's way too much for the value, for me.
I understand they’re was probably so much piracy it forced their hand (books being small files, easy to distribute).
According to the article people are scanning books now and uploading.. which I didn’t realize was happening.
There are a few sellers that sell you a un drm es books. Manning though puts a “licensed to ______” on each page in a attempt to make me not share.
It’s kinda a tragedy that behaving badly puts you at an advantage (free books more money for me) vs those that buy. There are people that legit can’t afford the books and it’s kinda nice to have that option.
Well the clocks ticked, I came here for graduate school and but the time I got my first job, over a period of time I had instinctively purchased all the original CDs and Box Sets of these and many other artists, about 1000 of them on my shelf. When I exchange notes with with my old buddies, some in Canada and some in England, they have more extensive collections than me. For one weak immitation of a Gibson lookalike guitar we had, we own a small stable of the real things by now :-)
The pirated copies that hooked us to the artists in the first place. I hate to steal from the artists I so much adore, but then shouldn’t there be a way to spread the music around.
I don't know how to feel about it. All I know is that I'm more effective than I would've been if I had to pay for the books, since I wouldn't have read anything.
It's common on HN to pretend that everyone here is an affluent programmer working for FAANG with $500k/yr in stock vesting. In reality, I've spoken to many who are more along the lines of "month to month paycheck." Dropping $50 on a book about Tensorflow just isn't in the cards.
Yet the outrage is extreme, and probably justified: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18047297#18049297
I apologize to the authors of the books I've absorbed. No doubt you've worked exceptionally hard. For what it's worth, I do recommend your books to others who may be in a position to buy them.
I like:
- Hands-on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and Tensorflow, 2nd Edition
- IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook 2nd Edition
- Nick McClure - TensorFlow Machine Learning Cook (2017)
These are easily found on Library Genesis, which has become my de facto study.
From the learnings, I did a fulfilling and enriching side coding gig for a couple of years spending a couple of hours every week that matched 50% income from my full time job (managing a large US real estate portfolio). It was related to increasing health awareness in the US and later to help immigrant families to prepare for the new administration.
I make every effort to buy content nowadays as an attempt to pay back the authors. That is the main reason, I totally love Medium, Spotify, Netflix and other content providers. They allow me to pay as you go and are on-demand.
If you mean "go work for someone," then certainly. But that involves working for someone. Almost everybody on HN works for someone; many are less well-off than they seem. Students, for example.
One reason this is true is that GCE offers $300 credit for new accounts, and TFRC emphasizes that you should sign up for a new account before activating TFRC. $300 ain't much. If that didn't matter, they certainly wouldn't bother mentioning it. Yet $50 is 1/6th of $300.
Of course, buy them if you can afford to. I probably didn't emphasize that enough.
Luckily, at this point someone else foots the cloud bill for me, but I’m still loyal to GCE just for giving me the opportunity to explore.
Don't feel bad at all. Intellectual Monopoly laws are morally wrong (and I would argue counterproductive if the goal is progress of the arts and sciences and/or economic growth). I hope that when the generation that grew up with the web is making the laws we'll get rid of these abysmal systems.
The author of the comment you referencing is wrong. Copying a book that has been released to the public is not stealing. It makes zero sense without complete bastardizing the definition of property (but I'll admit—that analogy has been an effective lie, other unscrupulous marketers should take notes!). Transistors are property. Telling me how I can arrange my transistors is almost the exact opposite of property.
Ideas published cannot be "stolen". Don't let anyone lie to you and tell you otherwise. The outrage of that comment is not justified. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. If anyone thinks their book is so amazing, let me ask how great it would be if it removed all ideas that were "stolen" from other books? How great would their book be if they couldn't steal from Leonardo Pisano's Liber Abici from 1202, the first sentence which is "The nine Indian figures are: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1?"
It's a good question. I think there's a 2 phase answer. But first, it's important to figure out the numbers. And one thing that quickly becomes apparent is on the order of 99% of writers make $0 from IM laws. IM laws instead, regardless of intent, funnel almost the entirety of profits to 1% of holders.
So the question then becomes, how do you better compensate those 1%? And the answer is you don't. The 1%'s current compensation is artificially inflated, and the 99% is under compensated.
Right now IM laws create artificially high compensation for less meaningful contributions like a 500 page book or 50 page pdf in a publication like Nature, and undervalue more meaningful contributions like small additions to Wikipedia or commits to the Linux kernel. I would much rather have the top 1,000 compensated "authors" in the world never write again than I would have Wikipedia disappear.
I think we should 2 phase the transition away from IM laws. I don't think we should abolish overnight, as that would be very disruptive to the families of folks in the IM industry. I have no sympathy for IM lawyers and IM business folks, but I do think we should have a transition period where we perhaps switch patents from an Intellectual Monopoly system to an X-Prize style system, and perhaps then phase it out (or keep the X-Prize style system, if it seems to be effective). Then in phase 2 the progress of the arts and sciences will flourish so much, I'm not too sure if you need any sort of system to artificially inflate the value of intellectual contributions at all. Creativity of billions of people will be unleashed. For a single example, if I didn't have to worry about IM laws, I (or many other people) could build a viable alternative to Google search in a year. I think the Internet has fundamentally changed the economics of the world by making many more markets feasible. There are so many markets and opportunities now, that if you lowered the cost of product development (which eliminating IM laws would do), I could see an argument where it's feasible that everyone who desired could have a natural monopoly, because there would be so many markets to choose from.
> IP is simply the means of enforcing the value of books. If you deny it without proposing a viable alternative, you're denying the value of writing itself.
IM is one idea. There are plenty of alternatives. When a janitor cleans a room, do we then give that janitor the right to charge a royalty for every person who enters that room?
As the saying goes, the future is here, just not evenly distributed.
But still, that is an interesting argument.
So why aren't libraries considered to be pirating?
It's worth pointing out, that many of the book pirates are from outside the US. There are more than 500 million people in the EU, and the most up-to-date technical material has always been in English.
Before Kindle was available, it used to take 3 weeks for the books from Amazon UK to arrive in my country, and almost half of the costs were shipping.
Also, ten years ago, when this article was written, even senior software engineers in my EU country were making less than 1000€ / month after taxes, which made a 30-40€ book a luxury item. For a junior developer, a single technical book could have easily taken away 10% of his/her monthly salary.
I expect something similar to still be the case in many parts of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and South Asia, which are developing regions with a lack of world-class universities and international libraries.
For someone in Lviv, Ukraine, a city with 12 universities and 8 academies, where an average monthly salary is 350€, pirating a book might still be the only way to read it.
While I understand some people could be in such a spot, I think many people use this argument to wash their conscience.
I don’t know why an author would get into such a unbalanced commercial relationship with a publisher, but it’s common for this to happen, and at the end of the day, it was their choice: Price tag is 50$. Let’s not use fake morality high ground to continue stealing from the original author.
If you don’t like the current publishing industry or cannot afford the price tag: just don’t buy it, choose another cheaper book, or try a Public library or learn by experience and write your own free book...
I for example, am a big fan of the book "Waves & Beaches" by Willard Bascom, a long out-of-print book on the physics, dynamics of the ocean (and the spirit of longing to understand the nature of the sea), but which always only could be found for >$30 on Ebay or something like that.
I finally bought a copy (out of nostalgia) and actually enjoyed it again so much, I went to the trouble of sawing off the spine, scanning it and OCRing it to produce an eBook and prolong its life. For myself.
I have been tempted to share it, but have no idea how. But I imagine there's tons of books and people like this.
I'm not goint to upload the latest JK King Grisham page turner but an obscure gardening book where the author is long dead? Yes that is getting uploaded.
For the culture.
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078652
Copyright-infriging a book does not sound as serious as "piracy" or "theft" but these two words are actually misused.
The author who is dead, has one seminal work online and four other not online. (Randolph Stow)
The author who is dead, has four minor works online but not the seminal work (c.m. kornbluth)
The author who is in dispute with epublishing as a protest against ipr contract terms (Ursula le guin, Philip Pullman) and has their work ripped anyway.
The bad OCR conversion.
My gut feeling is that publishers these days face problems not from privacy so much as from 1) the sheer glut of content, making it hard to stand out, and 2) shortening attention spans and people preferring to read snackable content on their phones instead of longform books.
When Kindles appeared, they seemed to augur a golden age for reading (and sure, you could load them up with pirated ebooks). Nowadays I am conscious at the beach or on public transport of usually being the only person with a Kindle while everyone else around me is looking at their phones, and it would be hard to believe any significant number have an EPUB reader open on those phones to read actual books.
But again, even if a phone could be used as an ereader, my point is that for most people it is likely not. Even for bibliophiles, they might not get so much reading done on a phone due to the distractions that phones bring.
> they might not get so much reading done on a phone due to the distractions that phones bring.
Short of notifications, there are no distractions on my phone when reading a book. No clock, no battery indicator, no nothing. If I really want to read, I can just go into DND mode, and even notifications have gone away.
I charge mine every two or three weeks (about an hour of usage per day).
Anyway, it feels good to know that someone got his(her) exams fine, school homework done or just a pleasant read because some of my work. This is my contribution to the humanity. The invisible spark of information freedom.
But e-books are comparatively expensive. They were conceptually sold to us as a cheaper alternative to hardback and paperback books; but they cost as much as hardback editions quite often. For no reason other than "the market will bear it". The market may technically be bearing it, but it's caused a segmentation of that market with piracy on the other side of the line.
Technical books are even more ridiculous; $50 for a book is insane in this day and age. Especially when it's a distilling of topics and subjects easily found online for free. The act of distilling is not worth $50 to me. "Physically Based Rendering" is probably the only technical book I've purchased and felt good about purchasing; and that's because it feels like a full college course in the subject.
And then there's the college textbook scam. I feel morally incapable of supporting that racket in any way, shape or form. It's an egregious abuse of a captive audience that forces purchases at prices which are based on what can be gotten from a college loan, not in the value the textbook may provide.
A number of e-books on Amazon are priced at $9.99 since Amazon pays a higher royalty rate for prices under $10.
It’s my equivalent to walking into a book store and thumbing through books until I find one I want to buy.