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Comment by cik | Hacker News Reader

eBook reading has gotten truly painful the last few years - due to further segmentation and DRM. I've now completely changed what I do and bought an Onyx Boox (Air C for the curious).

Now, I buy whatever I want wherever I want it / is cheaper - I will not pirate literature. I then never download it from the retailer - I immediately go and pirate the thing I've purchased. It's actually just easier. It's easier for me to have a torrent server sync eBook/cbx/pdfs to a folder, that's rear-mounted in google drive and shows up on my device, than it is to deal with what app has what book. Add to this multiple languages and you can see why this becomes a bigger pain.

It could be a niche issue.. But it's also a reason that Kindle/Kobo just aren't big here in Israel, and Android tablets are.

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My gut feeling is that there is no overlap between everyone that gets inconvenienced by DRM crap and the people in high seas (you being the exception)

I wonder if publishers would actually save money by simply publishing a pdf/epub and save up on all the enforcement infrastructure/ip.

At least for software there is some evidence that the people pirating would never have bought it anyway, specially when they are struggling in developing economies.

"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates."

I have an Onyx note air (2?) and it's been wonderful so far. I use it to read research papers, something that's impossible on my kindle. It's not just the screen size - the onyx boox has options to segment a 2-column paper into 4 quarters so that each page is a quarter of the pdf page and fills up the screen. This is something the kindle _could_ have done, but refuses to.

I stick to buying DRM-free ebooks. That way, I can support authors by buying their books instead of pirating them, while avoiding dealing with DRM.

I usually buy from WeightlessBooks or Smashwords. Libreture maintains a list of places that sell DRM-free ebooks [1]

[1] https://libreture.com/bookshops/

Even DRM-free books I’ll often buy then torrent, since the download user flow is so awful on most major bookstores. For a while you could buy nominally DRM free books at Kobo but not download them except via device - maybe still the case, I didn’t try in years…

I do the same thing with movies + anime, I can + will pay for it but streaming is a no mans land for me. It's a useless product that provides no value, but an .mp4 or .avi file can be played back on any hardware I own, anywhere.

I can't even use crunchyroll. They don't have an app for my TV, and airPlay doesn't work at all

You're not missing much, the app on my TV is probably the slowest and most unresponsive thing I use

We need bandcamp for ebooks

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