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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.

Copyright policy needs improvement, but I don't think I support any changes that would help much here.

> 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'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

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"

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 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.

> 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?

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.