Hacker News Reader

Comment by night-rider | Hacker News Reader

> I want to purchase ebooks, but I want to own what I purchase!

Without a DRM mechanism it can be easily shared on warez sites. They really don't want books easily disseminated DRM free on warez sites. Alongside this they can track what pages you read and even know how 'fast' you are at reading. Welcome to 1984.

View on HN

> Without a DRM mechanism it can be easily shared on warez sites.

DRM doesn't seem to be very good at preventing this either, though. The only thing it's really good at is making it harder for legitimate users to access their legally purchased media.

There is an inherent asymmetry to it: It only takes one sophisticated bad actor to break DRM and make a cracked book widely available, yet legitimate users not willing to break the law are suffering the inconveniences of error-prone, user-hostile systems.

I can even somewhat empathize with the idea of DRM for subscriptions or loans (otherwise there is really no incentive for users to continue paying, and durable access is not a concern either), but for outright purchased media, it really rubs me the wrong way to know that I can lose access to my stuff at any time.

It worked like this for music (Spotify and Apple Music have DRM, but iTunes and Amazon MP3/AAC purchases haven't, for example), and it's even working for eBooks in some countries: German language ePubs have been DRM free for some years now (although watermarked).

https://gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-ki...

That is the reason why I still have a cellar full of books and over 1000 CDs. I refuse to let someone else take control over the content I buy after I’ve bought it. I’d be happy to pay for digital content, but if it comes with DRM, it’s a non-negotiable “No, thank you sir.”

Any coherent text that can actually be read somehow with human eyes can trivially be de-DRM'd. If nothing else with a physical book scanning machine that swipes instead of turning a page.

> Without a DRM mechanism it can be easily shared on warez sites.

Every time a publisher mentions this to me, they look surprised when I tell them their books are already easily shared on warez sites. Complex DRM schemes, especially Adobe, limit innovation in reading applications and cause all sorts of end user issues. This in turns pushes people to find sites like zlib in the first place.

I don't think there's any Kindle format that you can't strip the DRM from fairly easily.

The music industry used to think the same way. We need the equivalent of the iTunes Music Store to make the no-DRM situation normal.

> Alongside this they can track what pages you read and even know how 'fast' you are at reading.

Does anyone do this? I don't see how it's relevant beyond "wow! you reading speed increased 5% this month" in emails from the Kindle service. Maybe they target ads for "read better and faster in 90 days" if you're in the 10th percentile on reading speed?

It could also be a useful proxy for density/interestingness of the material (when adjusted for your typical reading speed). Fed into a recommender system it might produce better outputs and more purchases.

It could also be sold to publishers as part of a tool to determine the above prior to publishing; what if books were optimized for your attention?

Pleasant or not, there are plenty of uses for the data.

Probably amazon

They can also see the things that you highlight, the things that you reread. This could be used to profile the reader and personalize ads

not only this, but being forced to buy an ebook through their portal, they'll know everything you're reading. Whereas you could read pdfs anonymously if you wanted

The Kindle app tracks how fast you're reading. If nothing else it uses it to improve it's estimate of how long until you finish reading the chapter, which it tells you.

For all the bigger companies I've worked with that have infinite war chests and rely heavily on user data and analytics, the question is always why shouldn't a specific metric be tracked, not why should it. Even if they have absolutely no reason to track how fast you're reading, it's safe to say they're tracking it anyway. At a certain point you stop reading privacy policies or listening to what a company says it's doing or not. You even stop looking at code or inspecting network traffic. You simply assume you're being tracked in every technical way it's possible for "them" to do so, and you either accept it or change it.

That's the main reason I refuse to buy DRM'd content. It gives the companies too much control and ability to track whatever I might be doing. I'll gladly pay for good books, but I am not paying Amazon or whatever to fund their data collection megaoperation

The probably track it to make sure you are not gaming the system. Kindle Unlimited pays out based on pages read.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201541130

> A customer can read your eBook as many times as they like, but we will only pay you for the number of pages read the first time the customer reads them.

Warez means specifically software piracy. So pirating ebooks is not warez

> Warez means specifically software piracy. So pirating ebooks is not warez

Warez sites often link to more than just software. Software may or may not be the primary focus. Terminology evolves.

As an example of how far the terminology has come, consider the purported line “Let me taste your wares”[0] from the nursery rhyme "Simple Simon", which possibly dates back to the 17th century.[1]

[0] https://songswithsimon.com/simple-simon/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Simon_%28nursery_rhyme%...

What is the term for books then?

eB00KZ

Reply on news.ycombinator.com