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Comment by cik | Hacker News Reader

What bothers me, is the degree to which Z-library becomes the only feasible way I can read books now. As I now live in Israel I run into several headaches, and it's no longer feasible to buy books.

* Amazon shut off bookdepository.com

* Amazon.com just won't ship many books here.

* Amazon and Kobo have both clawed back ebook purchases because I don't have a US credit card. This is a frequent conversation point amongst English and French speakers living here.

* Amazon shut down Kindle Unlimited accounts for those of us living here.

* Libby (overdrive) shut off my grandma's Overdrive account (Canada) and sister-in-law's Overdrive account (US) because we had the nerve, to try and use the library.

Frankly I'm frustrated by this cat and mouse game. I keep trying to purchase, eventually somehow do, and then have obstacles thrown on my way. All this as a massive consumer of books.

The behaviour of the industry has literally driven my family, a book buying family to embrace piracy. I would conservatively say we easily spent 2-3K USD on books and ebooks annually. This behaviour has reduced it to nearly zero.

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I also pirate things. Often. I don't want to, but I'm always forced to by shitty policy.

Apple TV requires credit card verification to stream in certain circumstances. That verification is broken for me... So despite the fact I pay for Apple TV, I pirate when I'm away from home.

I'm not entitled to the rights of the Ebooks I bought. I guess publishers can just change them[0], and god forbid I put my book on my own EReader. What I tend to do is buy the book and strip DRM. I'm privileged to even have the ability to buy the book, I guess.

And buying ebooks? Terrible experience as well. At the book store, you can just page through the book to see if it's what you actually want. I wanted to buy a book on a development topic I'm interested, and the ebook costs 70$. No problem if it's the book I want, but the preview is just not enough, so I pirated it, then decided to buy it.

It really bothers me how consistently the best option is just not to pay.

[0] https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/ronald-dahl-ebooks-being...

Sidenote: I think there's a potential market for a service that allows local bookstores to sell ebooks. It sounds stupid, but I absolutely love browsing the book store... Just when it comes down to it I buy the ebook because it's a much nicer reading experience. I'd love if I could go to a bookstore, take the book to the counter, "buy it", and then the clerk takes the book and credits the ebook my account.

Lately I've been playing around with connecting the digital and physical worlds. I've been toying with smart windchimes for notifications, christmas lights that tell me the weather, and all sorts of little connections. It's beautiful.

I have legal, instant access to nearly every technical publication I need in digital form, but I still illegally download almost everything. It's much faster to get the docs, I don't have to slog through crippled page navigation or search, and they don't cut me off because I've opened too many research papers in one day to see if any of them actually answer my question.

The music and TV/film industries figured out how to get people to pay. The print industry can figure it out too.

We’re living in the dark ages of copyright policy.

> I don't think I support any changes

> that would help much here.

You don't support changes that would help improve copyright policy?

Seriously?

here = my previous comment

Oops, sorry... got lost in the thread :)

Indeed!

I have 4 library bookshelves (7 foot tall ones). And they're packed with books. *Bought* books.

But dealing with more current "online books" are a fraud. They 'sell' these books, but in actuality they're rentals due to DRM. I cant read them on Linux; I cant sell them; I cant read them on my phone; I can't print past their arbitrary print limits.

I have none of the same rights of these physical books.

So, yeah, I'll pirate.

> I have none of the same rights of these physical books.

So much effort spent creating DRM systems that try to destroy the natural advantages of ebooks over paper books.

Ebooks and the internet could have ushered in a golden age of worldwide digital libraries unlimited by the location or quantity of physical paper books.

The current copyright and technical control regime may be good for some publishers and authors, but at what cost in terms of lost value to humanity as a whole?

I'd say, maybe buy the physical book and pirate the Ebooks. I haven't been the best at this... I just buy the ebooks and strip them... But I suppose I could buy a physical book locally and have a loaner for a friend, or give it to charity

Kill a tree just so that you can feel morally correct and the author gets a 2¢ royalty? Naw, just pirate and don't feel bad since apparently that is what publishers want you to do[0]. Maybe buy the author a coffee if you ever run into them.

[0] based on their actions it sure seems like this is the case.

"Kill a tree just so that you can feel morally correct"

Because the cost of manufacturing a hardware eReader and keeping it charged doesn't have a corresponding carbon footprint.

"Maybe buy the author a coffee if you ever run into them"

Because that'll keep them solvent.

> Kill a tree

You know that paper producers own land where they farm trees for pulp, right?

It's not like they're making deserts out there randomly chopping down trees.

Those forest they own came with trees that would be preserved if they didn't exist.

They do make deserts out of forests when they clearcut. A lot of land is owned by others (governments, native tribes) and permits are used to extract the pulp

Trees grown for paper pulp regrow quickly and are farmed. If you know of old-growth forests that have recently been clearcut for paper pulp, please cite a source.

"Kill a tree just so that you can feel morally correct and the author gets a 2¢ royalty? "

As others have said, you seem shockingly unaware that trees are GROWN specifically for making paper.

NO ONE is cutting down premium "old growth" forests to make paper..

Nice "virtue signal" on your part, too bad you did not spend 5 mins to learn where paper comes from first.

This is what I do.

The physical copy exists to be a conversation piece on a shelf, to loan out, talk to friends about, not mind losing to a family member who's visiting, etc.

The digital copy exists to mark up, index, search, highlight, learn from, etc. If it's not on LibGen I'll buy it on Kobo and strip it in to my library using Obok DeDRM and an old ePaper reader I wouldn't want to use otherwise, and then buy a physical copy of it's something I'd want to share.

So often the books I loan out are "clean" and don't even have a wrinkle in the spine but sometimes I'll go through and dog-ear important passages or pencil-line particular parts. I've had friends assume I hadn't actually read the book until we pull out koreader and go over my highlights.

Tabletop RPG publishers are making inroads towards making digital versions of books available with purchase of physical books from indie games shops. Whenever I'm looking for a new TTRPG book I always first ask my Friendly Local Game Shops if they're in the Bits & Mortar program and it influences where I purchase. Even if the shop isn't part of the program many of the publishers will now send a PDF if you send them a picture of the receipt (shout out to Free League Publishing for being awesome about this).

https://www.bits-and-mortar.com/

Put a unique QR code in each physical book in some standardized location (probably the publisher's imprint page). Then, someone can scan it to purchase it. The bookstore then gets a cut of the purchase. It would even work browsing a friend's bookshelf or a library.

Seems like it'd be a win for consumers, publishers, and bookstores all alike, and it doesn't seem too complicated to implement technically.

It's called an ISBN. That's the barcode on all books printed since the latter half of the 20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN

ISBN's are not unique.

They're nearly-unique; there probably aren't more than ten books sharing the same ISBN.

Perhaps the previous poster means unique per physical copy?

Per physical copy, indeed. That's what would allow attribution of the sale to the store.

Even a QR code that provided a link that would allow an easy purchase for the ISBN would be great for publisher and the customer. It would, however, not be appealing to bookstores, since it just means the customer comes in, browses, and purchases it online, cutting out the bookstore that was playing a critical role in the process and cannibalizing its own sales.

You could create a bookstore-and-ISBN tuple that would also allow attribution without uniquely identifying each physical book. Probably improves privacy marginally (though it would provide a permanent indicator of which bookstore it was purchased from), but with the downside that it complicates things behind the scenes; what if one bookstore acquires another bookstore's inventory? And a bookstore ordering a new book would have to have its own individual print run.

You could handle that with geofencing, too. If somebody didn't want to participate in this scheme, they could easily not, after all. (Heck, you could even just have a separate code on the wall, to be scanned when prompted.)

From manning.com:

> Print copies, wherever they are bought, come with free electronic versions in PDF, ePub and Kindle formats. With your print copy in hand, register it on the Manning site and you can download the digital versions from your account.

No affiliation, I’m just a long-time satisfied customer.

I think it’s wild that publishers don’t do something like pay an extra dollar if you’re buying the hard copy and also get the ebook.

It’s also wild that the ebook is often as expensive as a hard copy.

The same can be said for the absolutely awful way that "smart" tvs work these days. A friend of mine has a "smart" tv and pays over $400 a month for cable tv and a huge variety of streaming services in order to watch all the things he wants to watch. Many times we have tried (and failed) to navigate the dizzying array of networks and services in an attempt to watch a game or a fight that should be legitimately able to watch due to his paid subscriptions, only to give up and end up pirating it because it was unavailable and/or too much of a hassle.

> No problem if it's the book I want, but the preview is just not enough

Manning has a decent solution to this. You can browse the entire book, but only a small section of it at a time is “descrambled” in the live view.

On more than one occasion I’ve used this to look up some specific topic, which was immediately viewable (and unblocked me on that problem), then gone on to purchase the book because I know it’s high quality and I’m likely to refer to it in the future for other reasons.

https://www.manning.com/

I might be misunderstanding the scheme, but that sounds like someone would just need to automate viewing of consecutive sections in live view as it would unblur each section until you've downloaded the whole book. What am I missing?

You’re not missing anything, but apparently it works for them. I suppose if it were more widespread then there’d be more incentive to automate scraping entire books.

They also sell their eBooks as normal PDFs (no DRM).

I assume it’s a healthy combination of making high quality technical publications easy to acquire at a reasonable price. Similar to how digital movie and music piracy finally died down when that media became reasonably easy to acquire legally.

I wonder if someone in the USA could setup a "piracy forgiveness service" where they accept amazon orders of books and movies and just immediately shred them.

> I don't want to, but I'm always forced to by shitty policy.

"forced"

You say that as if your hands are bound.

Creators have an intrinsic right to distribute their work as they see fit.

You do not have an intrinsic right to it.

If you don't like their terms, then your right is to not consume it. NOT to steal it.

If you decide to thieve, then that's your call.

Just don't pretend it's being "forced" upon you.

Who defines "thievery"? The RIAA? If I buy something, I expect full rights to it. Dead simple. I pay for the content, and then I pirate it because the distributer somehow invested millions of dollars (instead of distributing to authors, mind you) into making a less consumer friendly platform than piracy.

Not to mention, internet piracy is not thievery. The only thing in limited quantity is the silicon that enables it.

If piracy did not exist I would likely not buy these things in the first place, because the stupid restrictions mean I can't consume what I paid for. In that way, my hand is indeed forced.

Tell me, who is being cheated here?

> I expect

Great! You can expect whatever you want. Just as the seller can set whatever terms and price they want.

> who is being cheated here?

Well, if the seller is clear as about the terms they are willing to sell for, and you just take it without paying, you are the one cheating.

You may have a moral right to cheat because you, I guess, have a right to have everyone offer the deal you expect. But I think it's taking it a bit far to say that not only are you going to take the content without paying, but you also want to feel cheated when doing so.

> and you just take it without paying, you are the one cheating.

I think you glossed over the part where I pay for everything I pirate.

No.

The publisher was willing to sell X for $Y. You took X + Z for $Y.

I get that you feel entitled to it, and I've certainly pirated stuff for convenience or financial reasons (as a starving college student, there was a lot of $500 - $5000 software that I really needed).

But it's disingenuous to play the victim when you're the one not honoring a seller's right to set the terms of sale. Pirate away, by all means, but spare us the nobility.

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" - Gabe Newell

This quote is incredibly true for me. I used to (like 2 decades ago) pirate everything. Then Steam came along, and it is just so easy to buy things, and I don't have to worry about malware keygens or no-cd hacks. I haven't pirated a game since 2005.

I still pirate the shit out of music and movies simply because I can goto TPB and have any movie I want, in 4K or better, downloaded and ready-to-watch in under 15 minutes. Or any album I want, in FLAC, in 3 minutes.

pretty much. the only game I have pirated in the last 10 years are some had bought several decades ago for windows 95/98 and are ones that are not available on steam or GOG that I had the CD/floppy disk for but my laptop doesn't have a drive for either and would require a no-disc crack to run anyway. Essentially abandonware that no one seems to even know who own the IP for me to give my money to or if they do don't care to bother making it available for me to pay them.

It's so true. In the case where price actually is the issue, then it ceases to be a piracy problem, since they likely couldn't afford to pay anyway. No customer lost in many cases.

It is! Steam is great service and makes me gladly pay for games without any qualms.

Amazing what understanding this simple concept can do for your platform

Yeah, I started out buying stuff. The DRM eventually inevitably fucks up and steals the item from me.

Fuck it, they've failed to uphold their end of the bargain -- now I pirate, unless there is DRM-free content available for purchase.

If you wanted you could also purchase and strip DRM. All the big ones are cracked.

Or purchase and pirate, which covers your morals in most cases, and puts the burden on proving your hash doesn't match your license.

Yeah, it's stupid. Copyright industry pretty much defeats itself with their licensing nonsense that nobody cares about. Anything short of everything humanity has ever created in one place at negligible costs fails to compete with copyright infringement.

From the perspective of a consumer, the only real difference between a library and zlib is that "checkouts" aren't time-limited. So why aren't there any good, copyright-respecting digital libraries out there? The simple answer is that publishers either completely prohibit library usage of their ebooks, or have such onerous licensing terms that libraries can't afford to maintain large collections [1].

[1] https://doi.org/10.1080/01616846.2020.1782702

Adding to this, region restrictions on video content.

There are TV shows which are made in Canada, and unavailable on amazon prime in Canada, yet are available on amazon prime in the US?

In Canada, amazon prime tries to push me to getting yet another subscription?

There are also shows Amazon prime owns and refuses to broadcast in Canada? You might be able to say that prime doesnt have redist rights on some shows, but their own "prime originals"?

After fragmenting the market like this, what did they expect people would do?

To be fair, that is probably partially fallout from the Canadian content regulations and possibly other law regarding corporate ownership. Not sure because it has been over two decades since I was current in that stuff.

They actually just passed a new law last week to legislate even more CanCon meddling on online streaming sites, including YouTube and social media feeds.

Canada subsidizes an entertainment industry that mainly produces things nobody wants to watch, so they're regulating companies to algorithmically force it on Canadians.

The amazing shows and movies that have come out of Canada in the last 20 years are popular because they're good... not because of some visibility issue with the rest of the fodder from companies that spend more on admin related to lucrative tax breaks and grants than they do actually producing content.

My impression back then was that the TV cancon rules were a disaster, and the music ones may have helped more than hurt, after the first 10 years or so.

In my experience, usually Prime content is on Crave in Canada. But a whole lot of Canada just has a pirate Kodi box anyway.

Why not Library Genesis?

Z-Library always left a bad taste in my mouth since they used Library Genesis's entire book collection, but then never contributed additional books in their collection back to Library Genesis. Which just felt like being a bad neighbor.

But maybe I'm missing something to the story here?

Z-Library is easier to use. I've always struggled to find what I need on libgen. Now we have Anna's Archive[0] though, which is wonderful

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna's_Archive

> * Amazon and Kobo have both clawed back ebook purchases because I don't have a US credit card. This is a frequent conversation point amongst English and French speakers living here.

Kobo has an option to pay via PayPal, don't they? What you can do is change the Billing Information on your account so that your city/state/zipcode is somewhere in the United States, then save it--you don't actually have to give them credit card info. But Kobo will think you're in the US. Then try to make a purchase, and at the checkout screen, pay via PayPal. I don't think Kobo validates the origin of the PayPal payment (at least not according to other members of the MobileRead forums that have used this method). It should go through and purchase the book.

The other option is to get some friends to purchase Kobo gift cards on your behalf and add them to your account so that you have a balance. You can then use the billing info trick I mentioned above to change to whatever country you want, and buy your books. I use the gift card method quite frequently to buy books from Kobo UK store when they're not available in the US.

The point is that you should not have to hack your way through this or that payment system, because sooner or later the hack will be blocked and you will lose access even to stuff you paid for. It's not even a hypothetical, the parent poster brings clear examples of this happening multiple times.

I don't understand why you can't use libgen, which has quite an extensive collection. Why only Z-library?

Z-Library has more books. Z-Library contains every book within Libgen plus books that have been uploaded by Z-Library's userbase and never made it to Libgen.

Additionally, a huge thing for me that keeps me going back to Z-Library repeatedly is working fulltext search for the entire contents of their library. I have a number of things that I search for that get a trickle of new scholarly review every year, and Z-Library allows me to continually find new references within the body of text to published books. I have reviewed every alleged fulltext book search engine on earth that does not violate intellectual property laws, and nothing even comes close to the utility of Z-Library.

Way more books in z-library. When Z goes down it’s painful to go back to libgen.

Honest question: Why does Amazon (and others) restrict or block services in Israel? I'm genuinely curious what their reasoning might be.

Doesn't Israel have bookshops?

Just like any country with an official language other than English, I would expect them to have bookstores full of Hebrew books, with a small section of English books that you've probably already read.

The parent commenter even explicitly mentions "amongst English and French speakers living here".

any half decent bookstore will just order the books for you and you'll get them a few days later. It's how I buy most of my English books in a non-English speaking country. Added benefit, weans yourself off the 'i have to have it now' shopping culture

"Added benefit, you are forced to do this thing that I think is fashionable, while I don't have to (and likely will continue not to).”

In Italy we'd say armiamoci e partite, "we'll get ammo and you'll go fight".

but that is literally what I do, which is why I recommended it, I am in the same situation as the OP.

Sometimes the real problem is with customs not because of the language

That's how I used to get sheet music. It's a little pricier but I could trust the owner find an edition I would enjoy. They closed down a few years ago, and there's no nearby alternative.

This is the way. Did people forget you could do this, with the advent of online sales? It costs nothing more, it helps the store stay open, and it's one less sale for Amazon.

Indeed - and I purchase all of my Hebrew books and magazines there. If we're lucky the chains will bring in ~50 English books per quarter, and eventually sell them all off. These 50 books are usually ~5 Harry Potter, ~10 kid fantasy, and a random smattering of other things. They will not special order.

I can actually order a book on Amazon, to a drop shipper in the US, DHS it to Israel for less than the price of special ordering the book here, via צומת ספרים, assuming they even want to allow the special order.

Suffice it to say people don't try. There are two English book stores in the country (and a French one) that will go out of their way to work with you. They run into the geographic frustrations put in place by publishers. It's a mess.

You cannot compare the ability to purchase over a million books online to the selection at a bookstore. Plus my personal preference is reading books on my phone, not as an actual book.

ya this... as far as i know they have plenty?

Here, try this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35835656.

Libby (overdrive) shut off my grandma's Overdrive account (Canada) and sister-in-law's Overdrive account (US) because we had the nerve, to try and use the library.

Did the library state that was the reason? I got a notice from my library that it's switching to another system because Overdrive is going out of business.

I also live in Israel and have the same exact problems. I probably spend $5k a year on books but just cannot deal with the headache of trying to purchase a book and failing. VPNs, changing my iTunes Store location, just an absolutely frustrating experience for absolutely no good reason.

Did Amazon remove your “purchases” from your device simply because you no longer have a US card??

Same for me. I'm not buying books full of DRMs, that I can only read on one specific device and what not. F-that.

And since I don't like pirating, I just read books in the public domain.

Can always do both. Buy a copy and then immediately pirate it. Still fund your author but actually gain the ability to use the thing.

No because I don't want to encourage the distribution model.

Hi Cik

If there was a service that caters to you for buying books, would you use the service?

I learned bookbinding, now I print my own books and make pretty hardcovers as a hobby. Highly recommend.

Could be an opportunity for a business?

The how matters. Apple was at one point able to mess with perceptions of music industry. So was Netflix. Publishing industry has a history to draw from and is unlikely to give one a sweetheart deal without a lot of tracking and god knows what other terms they can come up with.

I agree that it looks like it could be, but I honestly don't know how to do it legally without forcing some market participants into submission. Sadly, that requires backing of a bigger company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com