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Comment by nirvdrum | Hacker News Reader

What's the problem here? You're getting a nice bundle of DRM-free ebooks at a favorable price that the publisher, if not the author, are okay with. And it's all done with a few clicks. What does piracy add or solve in this situation? Nearly all arguments I've seen in favor of piracy are either stands against DRM or a "service quality" issue, neither of which apply here.

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In this particular case the bundle is full of useless and outdated books, the few interesting ones require that you buy the higher tier available.

And given that the purpose of HB is to get money donated to charity, it's not an efficient way of achieving that because they get a very small fraction of what we pay.

Hence why I said you'd better off pirating, evaluate the book value, and if needed buy the book to support the authors.

And if charity is also important because they earn more money.

The "higher tier" ($40) is still cheaper than probably any 2 of the books direct from their publishers, even on sale/discount. The next highest tier ($30) is cheaper than most of the books singularly from their publisher and only missing out of one (very well recommended) book. I personally already had LPI, Devops for the Desperate, Absolute FreeBSD, Absolute OpenBSD, The GNU Make book and STILL picked up the bundle at the $30 tier because it's a huge value AND some of it goes to EFF which is probably the best "charity" I could support if I had to choose one.

Suggesting you should pirate these books because you think they're outdated is just 'splaining away being too cheap/frugal to pay for things that you want.

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