I won’t buy ebooks anymore

"Folks like the OP" mentioned they use GOG, No Starch Press, etc, so they presumably don't mind paying as long as the experience is reasonable, DRM- and bullshit-free.

That's the thing with piracy: it's often more convenient than buying the thing. If the pirate book/game/music is unencumbered and easier to use on more devices, but the legal book/game/music is DRM-laden and requires proprietary devices or apps to use, which one would you choose?

I can lend or give a real book to whoever I want. Forever or temporarily. I can buy used books I find at discount used book stores.

Yes, he actually released his eBooks for free onto the piracy sites - with a twist: he included the entire first portion (quarter or third, cannot remember) of the book, gave info on where to buy the full copies (with zero recriminations - just the facts!), and then repeated those same early chapters to plump out a fully-sized eBook. He then flooded all the file sharing networks with this copy so as to make it difficult to find legitimately complete copies.

The entire first quarter or third was used to get readers heavily enough invested into his novel to _want_ to run out and buy the official copy -- he _justified_ the effort and expenditure to his readers, and they responded (mostly) positively by actually doing so!

Granted, there was a lot more to it than that, but this was the basics, and it pushed a lot of people towards not just his eBooks but also his physical sales. And there are probably many other strategies out there as well that utilizes the “piracy” platforms to your benefit instead of leaving you tilting impotently at windmills.

The patreons just get that free content a bit in advance. And in pdf form.

It took him around a year to reach that number.

He writes utter shit, sub-mediocre literature.

Check other top writers on royalroad, they also make lots of money.

The reason books don't sell isn't because of piracy, is because there's TON of free content (not only books) or almost free content (netflix, let's say).

The problem is that every retailer I can find that sells it sells a DRM'd version. Adobe Digital Editions isn't available for my operating system. There's no way for me to purchase a digital copy of your book that I can actually read.

If you sold a DRM-free epub on your website, I'd be reading Lament right now. I wouldn't have batted an eye at paying you $10 for a book Amazon sells for $5.

If I want to read your book on my Kindle, the only option is piracy. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pirate your book. I'll just end up purchasing an ebook from an author that has a DRM-free epub on their site.

Your books sound interesting and I hope you find commercial success as a writer. I just can't contribute to that success until your work's available in a format I can read.

> Thanks OP.

Is that the most appropriate thing you can say to someone who bought a book and (somewhat expectedly) got screwed by DRM? Maybe there's a reason they won't support writers. Maybe they'll eventually write a blog post about that!

DRM is not the solution because the solution doesn't exist. The problem of the impoverished writer predates digital publishing, it's hard to make a decent living by writing anything interesting other than through indirect benefits. Sorry but writing something interesting is a luxury, writing something slutty is the only direct business prospect in writing.

Consider this: did Charles Darwin make a living through the royalties of "the origin of species"? No, he was bankrolled, the book was simply the fruits of his investment.

I clicked on the title for it, saw that you had some chapters laid out in HTML and figured, "Oh, I guess an HTML book is DRM-free". I clicked through and eventually had to login with Facebook to continue. That rankled, as I hate Facebook, so I checked out the rest of the site, thinking I missed the store page. I did not. I cannot pay you for a DRM-free version of your book on that site. This makes me feel like you're generating drama or something with your comment? I couldn't figure out an easy way to pay you real money for an ePub file.

I'm not going to go pirate your book, but the same result ended up happening: I'm not going to buy it either.

Remember, piracy is a customer service issue. So perhaps buying your book isn't as easy as you thought, or your marketing is faulty, and you're not reaching the intended audience as well as you hoped.

FWIW, I was quite surprised by your comment that "Folks like the OP won't support writers". The OP writes about _only_ being able to purchase a book in a way that involves submitting to very restrictive, platform-dependent DRM and not wanting to do it again. OP specifically contrasts this experience to buying from publishers who sell DRM-free ebooks as a counterpoint to the awful experience buying her/his book.

For what it's worth, Tim O'Reilly notes, in "Piracy is progressive taxation"[0], that:

>> Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

[0]: https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...

The real number that would help you is finding out how many unique user downloads there were of your book and asking yourself if your marketing was strong enough to get that number of sales naturally? Or worse, is it that no one is downloading your book even with it being free?

I am biased since I write free content and believe in getting sponsored by supporters, but being the distributor of my free content and able to view download statistics, I can see that marketing is my biggest problem and no one wants to consume even my free content

OP bought the book?

It is surprising that as a writer you engage in this misleading usage of the English language. People copying files without your consent may be financially inconvenient for you, in bad taste, even illegal in some jurisdictions, and definitely an ass move. But it is not stealing. You can firmly condemn this behavior without using metaphors.

I had a library with thousands (and thousands) of books. When I moved I decided to get rid of many of them, because decluttering. Long story short - by the time you've allowed for post/carriage, listing time, packaging, and so on, you're more likely to be left with 5-10% of the nominal cover price - and that only after endless hours of work.

I donated most of mine, and I still got complaints from the local recycling facility that they were worthless because they were "too obscure" (i.e. pop science, math, stats, and such.)

I get what I want while supporting a local bookstore and the author.

But that of course is very subjective.

As an example, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: Primary Phase. The CD version is £20 from Amazon, whereas on Amazon Audible it's at most £8. (I'm not counting the £18 listed price on Audible, as one can simply 'subscribe' for £8, buy the audiobook with the token, then immediately unsubscribe. I put 'at most' because their per-book price is lower with a high-volume subscription.)

In this case, I'm ok with the DRM'ed non-physical version, as it's so much cheaper. It's true I can't easily gift the audiobooks or leave them in my will. It's also true that Amazon has the power to lock me out of my library, and if Audible disappears, I probably lose my library.

It displayed everywhere nicely. I never purchased books from other locations so I got no opinion on FNAC and the likes, but I never had an issue on Amazon books.

Ebooks don't work this way. I borrow them from a library. You're right, once an ebook is read it's just bits. They don't have the same value as hard copy books for resale, gifting, donation, or leaving out on the coffee table. Even obsolete textbooks have value, my monitor sits a few inches higher on top of a couple. Can't do that with ebooks.

When I go to buy a book, the ebook price seems to be 10-25% lower than hardcover. It could just be my experience, but this has been the case for dozens of books. I look at this difference as the lack-of-salability discount.

I won't buy print books anymore, because they are too cumbersome vs digital. The 20% discount vs print, or 30% increase over net value of print, by your calculation, is worth the value I receive.

I exaggerate, because there are some print books I buy, specifically for the print format, because for those books so much of the value is in the packaging and physical form factor. The Apple hardware book, the Nasa Graphics Standards book, the recent Prince of Persia book, etc. For a couple, I buy both print and ebook because both formats have their own value; for the same book sometimes it's good to be able to page flip and sometimes it's good to be able to search. Brendan Gregg's BPF book is a recent one that comes to mind.

But for the most part (95%+), I buy only digital, and I am happy to pay "more" than the net print value.

I'm a bit morbid, given that I statistically have decades of reading ahead of me, but I always dreamed of transferring the collection to my bookworm niece. I only learned of this Amazon policy recently and it was crushing!

I think within 5-10 years digital media like ebooks, games, movies etc will transition to being represented by ERC-721 tokens which brings with it the benefits of physical media (permanent ownership, sharability, etc) while also being easy to store, transport, read digital items. The main benefit is that you can buy your ebook/game/movie in one store/ecosystem and even if that system goes out of business your purchase will still be valid at other stores and platforms. Like physical books, these items can be re-sold and given to anyone you like (granted you won't have access to the book anymore.)

The headline says that he won’t ever buy ebooks, then lists good places to buy ebooks. I guess he is exaggerating for effect?

But it’s true, nobody should accept DRM. Here is the statement of the publisher who sells my gnuplot book:

“We believe that when you buy a book, it belongs to you. That’s why we use no ‘digital rights management’ or anything else that interferes with your rights. You can make as many personal backups as you want, and use the book on any number of your own devices. If you lose your files, you can just download them again, forever.”

It may be hyperbolic, but I basically feel the same way, because I had more or less the same thing happen: I saw a book I wanted to buy, it said EPUB; there was absolutely no indication that there was DRM, that I'd be required to install Adobe software, or anything. I bought the book, and after paying for it, was told about all this.

I was so furious I emailed them immediately and demanded my money back (which they complied with). But it certainly put me off buying e-books from random websites -- I haven't even thought about doing it since.

I'm all for finding ways of letting authors survive, or better yet thrive. But the current market seems to cater to the publishers, not the authors (cf: movie industry, music industry) so I don't even feel all that bad about that.

To stay in the allegory: if it was common practice and somehow widely acceptable for restaurants to use boatloads of laxatives during food preparation, but they only told you so after you asked to see the manager, would you judge the people who just outright refused to eat out any longer? The stress of finding a laxative free restaurant would simply outweigh the benefit from eating out.

When pirating books, I download it, put it on my ereader, and read it.

When actually purchasing books, I need to install Adobes proprietary DRM-program, open the book in there, unlock it with my account, then use the Adobe program to transfer it to my tablet.

Not a huge hassle, but pirating just works, and offers an experience that's infinitely more pleasant.

Libgen has everything and it's so much easier than dealing with online retailers and Adobe's bullshit. If you know stores that sell DRM-free ebooks I'd be very interested.

There's a reason why companies put customers through all this garbage and the reason is because I can easily pirate these books. So the story isn't as one sided as this guy makes it out to be. It's a contentious issue between customer rights of ownership and piracy.

So really it's like if someone usually takes food off the hot plate at a restaurant to steal it, and the one time they sit down and pay it's a shitty experience so they decide they're going to keep stealing lol.

I failed to do this after getting food poisoning once, thinking it was just bad luck/one bad restaurant in the chain, and I soon regretted it.

I think the author mentions it is the first time he buys an ebook.

Also if you think the problem is systemic ("it seems that all the restaurants in this chain behaves this specific way I dislike") then you might as well move on and don't try your chance a second time.

well, supposedly a chain will sell the same dishes everywhere.

If you don't like the menu of a certain chain, what's the point in trying at another location?

It's gonna be the same menu.

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Coming back to the article: my advice would be to download that illegally. If in order to use your legally purchased content you have to go through illegal means (and become a pirate anyway) you might as well save those seven euros.

Obligatory XKCD: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/steal_this_comic.png

it's not free. You've funded the library (who has to volume license the book) with your taxes.

There's a wide gap between "free" and "you've already paid for it, may as well consume it". I have to mention this because people in non-USA countries always talk about "free" healthcare, which isn't.

We all know that it doesn't have to be that way.

> DRM and other protection instruments are widespread in digital media and I don't think a good answer to this problem has been found yet

DRM is the easiest of problems to solve: just remove it.

I think within 5-10 years digital media like ebooks, games, movies etc will transition to being represented by ERC-721 tokens which brings with it the benefits of physical media (permanent ownership, sharability, etc) while also being easy to store, transport, read digital items. The main benefit is that you can buy your ebook/game/movie in one store/ecosystem and even if that system goes out of business your purchase will still be valid at other stores and platforms. You own the item itself and are not renting it from a certain store.

There is a workaround to download the book in an older format that can be cracked, but when you do so you don't get the newer features that are present only in KFX files.

If cracking DRM sounds like a fun project, check out the thread here:

https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools/issues/38

Thankfully a lot of sellers are selling books without DRM. I just bought a number of political books from Haymarket and Verso and that was the case.

Doesn't sound like the author is gonna stop reading ebooks, just that he's gonna pirate them (he mentions how easy it is to get a DRM-free book on Z Library).

I realize this may not be the experience or purchase model for everyone, but for a large segment of the reading public, it "just works."

Nobody does that, of course.

I agree that the article was poorly written. But you seem to be implying here that people involved with the FSF, as a whole, tend to be angry. I’m not at all sure that that’s true.

> It's not unreasonable that people should be compensated for work that they've spent months or years of their life working on.

Sure, agreed. And downloading unauthorized copies of ebooks from shady web sites, like the one mentioned in the article, isn’t a fair solution. But, for example, buying only ebooks without DRM from legitimate sources, and otherwise buying paper books, is one possible fair solution without DRM where writers and publishers do get paid.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

I think selling books for 25 cents etc. can result in massive sales. There is a middle-ground between selling overpriced editions with small changes in between, and outright piracy. Digital formats allow large-scale distribution, so pricing copies for under a dollar makes piracy not that attractive, when following the law and your conscience comes so cheap.

But somehow publishers want it all - the large scale distribution possibility of the digital medium, and the margins of the print medium.

Creating value and collecting a portion of the value created are completely different skill sets. You can't put them together by just saying it MUST BE SO. That's the "central committee" approach and history has shown that while it appears attractive, it will more likely destroy it all.

all i can say in a short comment on my reasoning is: 1. works of art done for love or the need to share are peices of content probably worth spending very valuable time on 2. works of art created for money are inevitably optimising for wasting your life - films and books are dragged out to series that largely go no where, vacuous music and media is created in the hope of getting you to spend money, not expanding your mind and adding to the value of society 3. historically this doesn't really seem to have been an issue. if you are good you can make money out of commissions and guest appearances or signed copies etc. this is not perfect, but it certainly makes it more likely money will go to the creator rather than a distributor. - note also the current system is far from perfect and many creators suffer from its failures today 4. nothing is done in isolation: inevitably you created your thing based on what you learned from others and opportunities society gave you.. but most importantly the value comes from other people need, NOT your creation - ability to write code is not valuable, removing someones problem is. 5. controlling and restricting the ability for other to create as they are not creating how some right holder wants seems drastically counter productive and greatly slows progress and de-motivates people who could be adding to society. 6. if we got better about respecting what others had contributed to our ideas (as we felt less need to hoard them) then overall i think people would be worried less when its someone else take on their idea that "makes it big". if thre was less ot be gained financially, it would remove incentives for deceit.

i suppose in summary, i think that you should create out of love and because you think that thing needs creating. if all "for profit" inventions and art were to vanish from existence, i don't actually think we would be missing much. there is no race we are trying to win with progress and there is no final state to get to.

Not heard of a 50 year old epub or pdf yet, wonder if it will ever happen ;)

What's nice is that I'm able to get access to libraries that are a pretty far drive. I can borrow those books without having to drive to one of their libraries.