The Anti-Ownership eBook Economy
nyuengelberg.org
nyuengelberg.org
I would like to reward the authors, but I refuse to allow the publishing industry to get away with this bullshit. If the authors choose to publish their books DRM-free as epubs, I will (and do) happily buy them.
Manning does put a “licensed to my_email” on the pages of the digital copies but it’s not onerous.
- I'm sending a message to publishers that physical books are in demand (not the case)
- I have to deal with the physical book (giving it away to a charity shop is probably the solution, but it's still hassle)
- It doesn't solve the problem - publishers still think everything is good. Only by depriving the publishers of revenue until they start respecting their customers can we solve this.
And I think my attitude is a lot less entitled than the publisher's. If I pay for something, I should own it, not have it subject to the publisher's whims. The attitude that they can disrespect their customers and keep control of the book even after it has been purchased is more than entitled. It should be illegal.
The world operates on contracts, and we are all free to decline to do business with companies we dislike or who ask more than we think their product is worth.
Agree to terms or don’t, but I have a hard time seeing “I’m going to take what they’re offering but not pay what they’re asking” as some kind of noble stand.
Digital assets cannot be compared to physical goods. A physical good that is shoplifted not only misses out on the sale, but must be restocked at the shop’s expense in order to capture the next sale. Digital piracy does not create any additional burden to a business’s expenses. This will never be a valid line of logic.
That's not a great comparison. The problem in this instance isn't a high price, it's a lack of access. If they offered ebooks drm free with a X% unlock fee or something then you'd have a point.
How would that not apply to shoplifting because the price is too high or the return policy too short or whatever?
That has nothing to do with it being a good or bad analogy.
> How would that not apply to shoplifting because the price is too high or the return policy too short or whatever?
What is "that" in this statement? I'm not saying the word "theft" isn't valid, I'm saying the circumstances are different enough that equating the two is a poor basis to reason from.
It's fine if you think what they are doing is wrong. The government shares your opinion.
Additionally, this argument here is even worse, because the laws you'd be violating in this instance have nothing to do with IP or theft, but rather privacy.
But you wouldn't be charged with theft.
If a book was excessively expensive for people, they wouldn't steal it. They'd get it from the library, Xerox it and bind the photocopies .
Copying a pdf is just the digital equivalent.
Since when? There may be a reduction in demand but bookshops where I live are full of customers.
I only buy physical copies—actual black atoms on white paper aren't as ephemeral as digital copies, neither are they subject the DRM nonsense.
There may be a reduction and I am kinda starting to warm up to my reader's ability to add multiple bookmarks to quotable quotes/interesting concepts/neat scripts, but I am not sure parent is right.
Maybe it depends on locale? If anyone has good data on that, it is likely to be Amazon.
There are plenty of authors choosing to publish their work DRM-free.
Most authors want to write and be recognized, so they get picked up for more writing contracts. Piracy is really the publisher's problem.
That doesn't count as a mention?
Publishers wouldn't be able to take down the list website, as it's perfectly legal to send authors money. Publishers wouldn't be able to take down the pirate sites either, because they've already been trying for decades and can't win the whack-a-mole.
I had thought he decided to distribute this way specifically as a response to how much publishers kept from commercial sales, but I can't seem to dredge up a source confirming that at the moment.
Generally if I say I would like to do something but I can't be bothered it's because I don't actually care about it at all and I'm just saying that as part of my complicated get away routine.
I believe what you probably really mean is you would be ok with rewarding the authors if it was convenient and met your requirements. Then you wouldn't pirate and the author would be paid as part of your purchasing in the way you wanted.
on edit: sorry, I see it wasn't you that made the original comment, and you were just pointing it out.
Yeah, hence the physical book. I agree with the other person that this is very morally questionable
Bullshit. While I agree with your point of view otherwise, this attitude is indefensible. To validate your "piracy," you have the simple option of paying for the physical book in order to provide the author at least a pittance. But your objection to that is that you might imply demand for physical books? Are you fucking kidding? Supporting physical books is A PUBLIC SERVICE. Because the fact is that many people DO prefer physical books, for the very reasons that you're railing against. They can't be taken away. If people don't demand them, they will disappear and we'll all be subject to yet another rental scam. That includes YOU.
WTF dude. You lost a lot of us right there, and need to re-think your value system.
Authors either need to sell something people want or get pirated.
It seems very obvious there is no moral or ethical justification for copyright/DRM or any other way of giving control over the replication of information. The author has at best only a legal right to money, and often bad law needs to be fought with civil disobedience (which is perfectly morally justifiable).
If an author/creator wants to get paid by people who disagree with DRM and the "licensing" of books/content they need to offer something for the money that those people want, or accept and attract donations.
I haven't pirated lately because there's enough great content I can get on reasonable terms. But if I'm put in a situation where the publisher says "my way or the highway", I'm gonna go option C every single time, and feel no remorse whatsoever.
You’re complaining about the terms they offer, not the product. If you’re not clear on that point, it’s no wonder the position is so garbled.
Maybe the author doesn’t want to get paid by people who dislike DRM. That doesn’t give anyone the right to take their content without paying. The principled answer is to refuse to read works from these authors.
> Maybe the author doesn’t want to get paid by people who dislike DRM.
That’s fine and as I stated those people shouldn’t / won’t pay them.
> That doesn’t give anyone the right to take their content without paying.
This is exactly what my original comment addressed and you ignored:
I contend that there is absolutely no moral or ethical problem with copying information and no valid moral or ethical basis for giving creators exclusive rights or “ownership” of their creations, when they can be copied without depriving existing holders of the information, or giving anyone special/exclusive rights to profit from information.
I can see an argument for preventing corporate entities from profiting from any information or content they didn’t create, but not when it comes to people’s ability to freely copy and share.
The principled answer is to support and fund people and tools that enable piracy and free information sharing, to the detriment of “rights holders”.
But it’s also totally disconnected from DRM. Presumably you wouldn’t pay for non-DRM ebooks either, or at least see no “moral or ethical” issue with someone so declines to do so.
And I hope you’re also on the side of AI training as fair use that does not require permission or payment?
I'm fine with my values, they make sense to me and I believe if everyone followed the same values we'd end up with a better world.
Furthermore, it doesn't matter if they're "obsolete." In the case we're replying to, they provide a non-revokable mechanism to reward the author if you decide to "pirate" the E-book. Complaining that it sends a misleading signal that physical books are still in demand is a weak, ridiculous excuse for stealing.
https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-can-boost-digital-music-sale...
You cannot eat the cake and have it too
They are in demand of course, just not by you.
Do you believe then same thing when renting a car?
I've got cash, plenty of people around me don't and I don't begrudge their piracy. I pay, see below, when I was young and broke I pirated everything. I'm surrounded by people for whom a US minimum wage would be a stonking income, why shouldn't they pirate?
The big issue for me personally is shipping. I live outside the US and EU, and it's a real problem getting books out. I often pay more for shipping than I do for the books themselves, and I have to wait up to a month, and there's the ridiculousness of getting a book shipped across the US/EU, then to my third country.
My approach is that I pirate freely and happily, without a shred of guilt. Most of the books on my reader only get read up through the first few chapters, some I'll finish completely.
I do however like books, real books. If I'm getting into an author I've pirated, I'll then buy some of their other stuff, and I buy frequently.
This comes back to the old thing with music pirates being the biggest spenders on music. A classic case, I think.
So please, leave your moralizing out of this. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to pirate, much of it ending up with money in author and publishers pockets.
When I want to read a book, I usually prefer a physical copy (and I am willing to pay for it, if I do not merely want to read it for a few hours at the library (if the library has a copy)); sometimes it is helpful to have it on the computer too, and in that case I would only accept non-DRM files, and possibly even piracy. However, some books might be difficult to find, or maybe I only want one page, etc.
I believe authors deserve to be rewarded proportionally to the quality of their work, I also believe good publishers can add a lot of value to an author's work, and even more I believe that DRM-Free publishers have shown it's possible to base their core business model on being more convenient than piracy. I buy a book, it's mine to use on my devices, no strings ttached.
The hubris of some companies make them refuse to see the reality of the market, and instead stubbornly push for wider copyright laws, harsher punishment, DRM, and higher walls for their gardens.
Hmm, tough choice... not :)
there are valid reasons to pirate books sometimes but at the end of the day, someone has to pay something into the system to keep books getting published
A) I don't see a reason why some mega-cooperations should know about every book I buy.
B) You don't know if they have been watermarked. I don't want every book I own to be watermarked with god-knows-what metadata about me.
Let me pay with Bitcoin, and I'll buy books again.
Now in the times of lightning, there is not even a transaction for the payment of a book. Payments are bundled into channels. Individual lightning payments do not leave any trace on the blockchain.
That's where you're probably wrong. If the NSA can listen to anyone on the planet through their phone, they surely have the data that exchanges are legally obligated to collect in terms of validating all users by their government documents, aka the place 99% of bitcoin users probably get their coin.
The rest is just mapping it all together and correlating the remaining blank accounts with the piles of other data they've got on each person, which I'm sure they're easily capable of. A bitcoin transaction and a book download coming from a the same IP at roughly the same time are surely mappable to a physical person.
I have over 2x my fiat savings in crypto and none of it could easily be traced to my real identity.
Just last week I walked into a random "crypto exchange service" in the city I was visiting and sold them USDT and walked out with $10k in cash. No kyc. They didn't even ask my name. They were buying and selling for only 0.5% commission.
You give then cash, they give you USDT or BTC. Now you can buy all the ebooks you want with anonymous crypto.
Just because you don’t find a comment useful doesn’t mean no one else will.
My reply described how it's easily possible to convert USDT to fiat because I assumed it was obvious that the process is similar in both directions and can be done for any common form of crypto, including Bitcoin.
Also your story begins with you holding USDT. I am assuming that you were able to amass your entire crypto fortune without ever involving a bank account or debit card, because otherwise your answer to my question would likely be “Visa or Mastercard” when it comes to how you came to possess any crypto assets in the first place.
Acting like a petulant child doesn’t do anyone any good.
Out of curiosity, what did you learn?
I learnt that Cryto ATM withdrawal limits have grown significantly in the last few years.
As a fun observation, when you see someone discussing something inane like buying ebooks, it’s actually pretty odd for a stranger to hop in and volunteer details about how much money they have and to brag about how they knowingly pay a premium to avoid KYC when handling cash.
For example, if a stranger walked up to you on the street and interrupted your conversation with “I totally know a guy that’ll take any amount of cash you’ve got and give you untraceable crypto or vice versa, no questions asked” without volunteering any other information, you’d be better off being suspicious of him rather than the person being skeptical of that guy.
If you think GP is talking about “Bitcoin ATMs”, can you point me to one that will dispense $10,000 cash from USDT, not Bitcoin without any KYC?
But please go on with your critique.
So they do care and intend to use the information to practice psychological tricks and deception to make me buy more things (probably not just books) and also sell it to others who want to do the same. No thanks!
I rather have targeted adds of things that I might need than porn and poker adds.
1. No recommendations
2. Generic recommendations
3. Tailored recommendations
4. Paid ads
I’ll always use an ad blocker to aim for (1) anyway, but shouldn’t have to rely on that.
There you have it. And beyond that, the corporation will sell the data to whoever if profitable. They will abuse them any time there is anything to gain.
They won't sell it because it is their advantage.
Moreover this is inherent in the nature of a capitalist system itself - it's Schumpeter's creative destruction at work. It is normal, regular, and otherwise healthy for all businesses to eventually end.
But if that business was the only entity with the right and ability to copy, distribute etc. - then the creative work they produced is highly likely to disappear, lost to us forever.
It's tragic enough that the early history of video games may simply disappear. That future generations will have no idea how it all got started. With copying and distribution cheaper and easier than ever before, we're somehow still at risk of losing this era of history.
It's far, far, FAR scarier to think of this happening to the repository of human knowledge contained in BOOKS. The future which is now unfolding is a sort of permanent, rolling version of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, where the collective wisdom of the human race just sort of fades away over time. Where we lose the ability to learn from our past, because we've lost the ability to make an enduring recording of it.
Ironically, with technology, we have unlocked infinite, practically free distribution of copying and information. It can be done with a keystroke. The problem lies in our legal, political and economic systems - the iron boot has become so heavy it's crushing the larynx of the past and future alike, in a way never before seen in human history.
But the tragedy of games disappearing? There's more than 30 games released on Steam _each day_, let that sink in. Writing and publishing books has never in history been so easy. A vast majority of these are archived and easily available to anyone, in many more magnitudes of scale than our capacity to consume them.
In fact, I'm seeing the opposite of your claims, with Meta and OpenAI publicly admitting of breaking copyright laws while training their LLMs, and also the widespread movement for self-proclaimed librarians hoarding books, ROMs and other software in terabyte scales. I'm not passing judgements about any of this, just saying that copyright law is not always strictly applied and the iron boot is more like a fluffy slipper when it comes to availability of historical content.
There was a recent article about 87% of "classic" games no longer being commercially available - well that's still above the Sturgeon's law ("ninety percent of everything is crap"). Why would anyone expect publishers to offer content that is only interesting for historical reasons? For games that are still relevant, there is an added effort to run them on modern systems and to offer customer support.
No one is saying publishers have to offer content which is not commercially interesting. My contention is that if we want to preserve knowledge we need to put it in the public domain after a while, maybe several decades, or at least be very generous with exceptions for archival. This is consistent with copyright law until it was subverted in the modern era. At this point it looks like Disney has successfully lobbied for permanent and perpetual copyright.
Exactly, as I said in my post we need a new political movement to fight the problem.
Now, you could choose to not read books that don't meet your high moral bar for distribution. But screw that, you can have your cake and eat it too!
Publishers need to stop doing this, or we end up in a world where everything is rented. They will only pay attention to what affects their revenue.
I repeat: I'm happy to pay for books if they're DRM-free. It's not like I'm pirating everything because it's free; I'm happy to pay for it if I can actually own it.
Self-flagellation is not a moral imperative.
And as juvenile as it sounds, I'd actually like my copies of The Dark Tower to include the interior art too. Completely absent.
We finally got to a point in the future where theoretically they could siphon tens of thousands of dollars out of me (because I wouldn't first have to spend x20 that amount buying a home with a large enough library proper), and their authorized, authentic ebooks look no better than some half-assed scan downloaded from a #bookz DCC bot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmi3akNnqis - You Should Pirate Anime (Reupload)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXiQJWT442I - You Should Pirate Anime 2 (Reupload)
Libgen works instantly, every time.
Im happy I only buy books where I get a DRM free copy
The only way to force this issue is to "pirate before you buy-it" and save your money. Hard to get screwed by fake purchase buttons if you dont buy, and hit libgen, torrents, and usenet.
but I agree, do not buy shit you dont own
Don't need to own a book I'm going to read once and never read again.
[1] https://www.marketingcharts.com/demographics-and-audiences-1...
Huh? I agree with everything up to this point. Of the G20 nations, only the US has all the problems you complain about: no disposable income, enormous medical costs, no job protections, etc. Well-run developed nations don't have these problems.
As someone who left the US, the only real problem over here is that English-language books are hard to find in countries where English isn't widely spoken (which should be obvious of course), so of course e-books are very attractive for this reason. But then, as you can see in many comments here, the e-book sellers don't work much with people living outside the US, your "purchased" e-books stop working outside the US, etc.
I hope your indigent pirate going to compensate the authors once he has lifted himself out of poverty.
Let's return to the central point: transactions ought to be consensual, and pirating ain't.
Yes, those transaction costs are way above the worth of the item if its already below the selling price for person A.
Note that in practice, almost all transaction costs are not money.
The key to the problem is political action.
Normally "have to" is used when the consequences of not doing so are very dire, possibly life threatening. A person shoplifting a copy of Harry Potter for their own use would not normally count.
Many would contend the consequences would be very dire if they didn't act. For example, those who depend on Sci-Hub for educational material. They'd contend they've no other option.
I don’t know a way to check in advance if a Google Play book is DRM‐shackled. Hopefully, if a purchase does turn out to have DRM, Google would let you return the book for a refund if you haven’t read it, but I haven’t tested that.
Atleast the web interface makes it clear in what format the book is downloadable in.
In my defense: Thalia is the only remaining book store chain here in Austria.
That works for Kindles via E-Mail.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=G5WYD9SAF7PGXRNAI have to buy through one of the bookstores, right?
I was mostly ignoring the fact DRM exists, because what could go wrong? Well, it was a refreshing reminder that our "R" in "DRM" are much more fragile than we got used to think when nothing bad happens for years. At least until we forget about it once again. That's it folks, gotta go buy a few limited use licenses on Steam while they're on sale!
Despite storage and transmission being very cheap, it is almost impossable to find many classic films, music, and books. Aparently it is legitimate can claim a "loss" if they cease to sell an item (presumably having destroyed the master copy).
It might make perfect commercial sense to drop low selling items and claim large tax losses, it may be legal, but how is this moral? For classic items, this is nothing less than destroying cultural artifacts.
(This is yet another case where modern copyright is out of step with modern morals and expectations. Personally, I'm for short copyright terms, perhaps requiring explicit registration, and requiring licence holders to maintain a copy for historical purposes - perhaps in some kind of escrow at the internet archive.)
This experience was a customer service horror show, and really soured me on buying any electronic content from Amazon, ever again. I really don't care about how piracy affects Amazon and mega-industries. I care a lot more about having $500 worth of content taken away on the whim of a call center agent. In fact, it might just be time to start working on getting legislation in place that forces companies to at a minimum, refund they buyer (with interest) if they cut off access to DRM protected content.
Source code to computer programs is protected under copyright law (and in America often also patent law). Databases such as the core of social networks are protected under a version of copyright law. Algorithms and procedures are often protected through confidentiality agreements and laws requiring confidentiality from employees and business partners. Names of companies, websites, URLs, games, characters, URLs (google.com) etc. are protected under trademark law. I can't just register "google.con" and make a search engine and sell ads from that domain. Google will come after me. And those on HN that don't work yet, often study at expensive universities that awarding fancy degrees. Not everyone is free to say they graduated as a Ph.D. in engineering from Harvard.
Yes, many developers on HN open source part of or all of their work. But then the get paid creating some other intellectual property right. Very, very few people just give away all their work.
Yet, that's literally what most commenters here seem to ask that publishing houses and authors do. Publishing houses make little money compared to many other businesses and especially compared to big tech. Authors typically make next to nothing.
If publishing houses don't try to protect their digital works, they will not be paid enough to cover costs, yet alone turn a profit. Simple as that. An e-book can be copied and spread much easier than a print book. Without publishing houses, there will be less screening of published works, and less marketing of authors and new books.
At the end of the day, people have to eat. We're going to have to pay people somehow, either by buying a product, buying merchandise, paying taxes / donating to fund grants, or through patreon or github sponsors. The topic is fairly broad, and so it's less one system than a bunch of different industries with their own funding models, so this is going to be speaking fairly generally. A lot of our present funding models are a hybrid of these systems. Some combination of ads, small dollar donations, institutional sponsorship, and public grants broadly help pay for anything from a new software library to webcomics. Sometimes it's enough, and sometimes it's not, but there are alternative funding models to the present winner-take-all model of big publishing houses. It's good to recognize that a lot of open source can only exist because a lot of us work in high paying tech jobs, and that model will not work for traditional books, but that doesn't mean we should give up trying to find a better solution than the patchwork system we have today.
So, why don't we just subsidize authors?
Arguably, access to more information drives more technological growth, which benefits us all. How many discoveries have been delayed because journal articles are behind a paywall? How many wasted manhours were spent on that? Grad students make even less money and arguably spend even more time creating intellectual property. It's frankly ludicrous to gate scholarly articles behind a $20 paywall, because for one, the burden of payment in those cases tends to fall upon those least able to pay for it, who are students and researchers, while the publishers make all the money by extorting institutions who can pay, all while profiting off of publicly funded research. This is the least morally objectionable point, and probably why newer fields (especially in compsci) post all their articles for free on arXiv, or else host somewhere else, since the price of hosting is extremely cheap compared to the actual work.
Less arguably, art itself is the same kind of public good; We have PBS, for programs that one can broadly say is "enriching" because a bunch of people a hundred years ago said so; we surely recognize that Shakespeare ought to be publicly funded. Why not modern forms of entertainment?
Failing that, let's look at this purely from a cost perspective. We'll assume if we're paying 100% of a writer's salary, their work is in the public domain, and that counts as savings to consumers. Let's suppose we wanted to fund every single writer in America to do writing full time. Let's do some back of the envelope calculations here. Supposing I spent $40 on books per year, for the sake of argument. There are 330m people in the US, median income for writers is around $20k USD [1] (but those are poverty wages) to $50k USD [3] (I think those include industry), and there are anywhere from 50k to 200k active writers right now [2][3], depending on how you count. So, that's anywhere from $3.3 (probably add an extra few cents for admin costs) to $33 per person per year in additional taxes, if we literally subsidized every single writer in the US. I'm certain I spent more than $33 on books this year, though one could probably quibble on that. 'course, that's probably overkill, and it doesn't account for support staff, admin, editors, marketing etc, but evenly naively taken, it doesn't seem out of the realm of economic possibility.
Of course, we probably won't pursue such an extreme solution. So let's look at another one. Consider the question of the library. Surely every author would be against an institution distributing their work for free (even having paid the publisher for one copy). For sake of money, should Stephen King be removed from circulation of libraries? But that fails to recognize that physical libraries target a market segment that cannot afford to buy a book; when it is more convenient, people tend to want to buy books for themselves. Digital removes these inconvenient constraints and will require a renegotiation in this space as it shifts to much in the other direction; the internet archive's unilateral action is at best, controversial. Streaming services like spotify initially gave a lot of consumer surplus at the expense of the artists (and is now, like every platform, trying to claw that surplus to themselves). The library model may not work for digital. Consumers or publishers can capture all the surplus in this new shakeup, but some balance is probably the most acceptable/optimal solution to most people.
And like it or not, with AI, artists will be devalued, even if that work isn't done. Amazon is already killing traditional publishing houses with its own platform. While we're having a debate on copyright, the market is going to shift even more in favor of consumers and less in favor of authors. We're going to have to address these issues anyways, like it or not, because we're already on this path, so we might as well figure out a more robust solution now. Failing everything, why not have a national system of grants for writers to produce public domain works?
(And yes, I know this naive solution probably has many holes in it. I'd be delighted to be corrected, even more so with another solution. But at the very least, shouldn't we at least try something else than the endless morass of DRM and copyright?)
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/books/authors-pay-writer....
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/572476/number-writers-au...
It loses revenue by itself by inconveniencing paying customers (lowering sales), restricting addressable market (by limiting purchases to compatible DRM leaden hardware) and demanding R&D costs.
Of course, facts rarely challenge belief when it comes to business owners - just see the RTO push.
This isn't a function of how difficult it is for the pirates themselves to get their hands on a DRM-free electronic copy of a book. Instead, it's primarily a function of the fact that piracy is illegal, and—regardless of how easy it is for pirates to obtain DRM-free copies of the media they want to distribute—such distribution activities are limited to dark and relatively lawless corners of the internet where "normies" fear to tread.
That's the basis of my point in reply to you. It may be that DRM prevents to some degree the more casual form of "piracy" in which e.g. I give a friend a copy of an ebook file instead of lending a physical copy, but that didn't seem to be what you were getting at, and anyway since lending physical copies has been a possibility since books first came to exist I think the degree to which this sort of casual piracy threatens publishers' bottom lines is not a foregone conclusion until some independent party convincingly measures it.
> if this solution isn’t working, or looks unfair, how are we going to solve it differently?
OP's article makes some recommendations under "Conclusions".
In terms of how DRM is cost-effective for platforms and publishers (i.e. why they bother with it at all), it seems much more likely to me that it's primarily meant to prevent fully legitimate post-first-sale transfers of books, e.g. library lending, second-hand sales, and so on. Publishers couldn't do anything to stop post-first-sale transfer of physical copies, but DRM-enabled ebook platforms give them a new lever.
These theories are hard to test.
Without it means for most book you will not be able load the book on a non kindle reader.
I think it's because I download the file for my old Kindle Keyboard 3G, so I probably get a file without DRM. Not sure. Calibre "just works".
"In addition, the owners of older e-ink Kindles running firmware prior to 5.6.5 (August 2015) can access books in non-KFX formats directly from the device via USB."
Don't lose it, might try to buy on old kindle :D
Edit: I don't really care if I lose it, though. I just won't tell Amazon if I do.
And is it really "piracy" when the only sale option is a fraudulent "sale"?
if there is really a mass misunderstanding by ebook consumers that they don't have rights as part of their licence that they believe they have, the market demand will start shifting back towards ownership
Then you can:
Keep it on your bookshelf. Read it over and over again. Make notes all over it. Photocopy it. Share it with a friend. Donate it to a tiny community library. Give it away Sell it. Burn it. Toilet paper.
I really wish that real paper books would become the new trendy thing (like with vinyl.[1])
You can even get together with some friends with similar tastes then each person can different good books and let everyone read them. Saves a lot of money.
[1] I read somewhere that a significant percentage of people who buy and collect vinyl LPs do not own a turntable. Quite odd
It sucks and there should be a way of proving ownership such that you get access to the online digital versions.
I have an extensive book collection and first several first editions in the areas I am interested in. I read the physical books from time to time, but for me the Kindle is a must have device that I use for hours every day - reading in bed, etc.
Do I like it being a closed system? No. Do I have the energy to pirate things and keep on top of managing those collections - books are somewhat easier, but media is much harder - no.
I'm not saying the way e-books work is good - it clearly isn't - but not because there's a fundamental law that owning an e-book should be identical to owning a physical book.
In your examples, you own the book and the gun because the publisher of the book and the manufacturer of the gun (or anyone else, excepting the state, I suppose) can’t unilaterally take them back from you or modify them without some sort of penalty. This can — and has [0] — happened with eBooks. The “unlimited rights to do what you want with [them]” are not guaranteed by ownership in my opinion.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
Not so for a DRM’d ebook.
Eminent domain is the state taking from you. I already mentioned this in my comment. In fact, the state pays a penalty for doing so in the US as enshrined in the 5th amendment: “… nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.“
> Ownership does not have a single neat list of requirements
No, it does not have a comprehensive list for all use cases, but I would say that the one I mentioned in my first comment is a necessary one: fundamentally that it cannot be taken from you without penalty.
Copying falls under the ownership of the text within the book. It is something completely separate.
Anybody have success with DIY book scanning and conversion to epub?
The main thing that’s kept me for pursuing this is that I don’t really want to own all the physical books in the first place. I prefer physical copies of technical and math books, but for random fiction I am interested in ebooks to save space. Buying the books and scanning them gets me into the same position with books that I’m already in with movies, shows, and music: lots of physical media taking up space so that I could put a bunch of extra effort into getting a digital copy that I could have downloaded for free with far less effort if I were willing to pirate.
I don't distribute these purchases, I just store and back them up myself. Every so often I will "lend" one to my partner or a friend like any other paperback on my shelf. The difference being, I suppose they now "own" it, too.
This is mostly because the value I extract from it (the format) is the convenience and formatting. I want it now, everywhere, and well formatted for my device, and I want to do as little work as possible to make that happen. I have money and not much time.
Is this short sighted? Probably. But I have come to accept that media is ephemeral, like most things. I just don’t have the time or inclination to be an archivist, much as I wish I did.
It's been around for about 17 years and will probably hang around until the author dies.
https://calibre-ebook.com/about https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.multipie.c... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/calibre-companion/id1171161691
Fine if "everywhere" you go is somewhere the DRM allows. For people who cross region borders, it can remove the right you thought you paid for, with no justification. If you want it 'now', read it 'now', then you're also somewhat the DRMed item being 'revised' against your will (happens) or removed by actions of or failure of the publisher (also happens).
That said, I’m still not very happy about the status quo. I wondered how the book economy would look like in my ideal world, and came up with this:
For all of its downsides, the subscription model has two big benefits: more of the money goes to writers, not publishers, as in the current system; and it shifts publishing to an economic situation similar to open source, where writers are compensated for their opinions/services and not for an easily copyable (and DRM'able) product.
At least MP3s on Bandcamp etc are fairly priced, $10/album is less than the $18.99 that was common at stores 20 years ago.
Ebooks on the other hand cost almost as much as a paperback $9.99 seems to be the lowest price I've seen on Amazon. I'm not paying that!
With physical books the invisible hand of capitalism alters prices to match books to buyers, creating a long tail of demand decades after publication. As a young person I used to love picking up gems at book fairs and remainder sales, exposing me to so many more ideas than I could afford at full price.
If publishers were smart, seeing fostering reading as a good thing for society and their bottom line, they would recreate this effect by gradually lowering the price on older titles.
Solved.
The problem is everywhere, Redhat circumventing open source software licenses, Microsoft turning its Windows O/S into a data collection operation, Facebook privacy violations, rampant selling of personal information without owner's permission, and so on. It's now so bad it's causing significant damaging to our societies.
Why aren't our politicians and political systems stopping this? Perhaps, a better question to ask is why aren't they capable of stopping it. It's not only happening in the US, it's everywhere, these greedy corporations have influenced US trade deals and just about every country is now beholdened to unreasonable US patent and copyright laws.
What we're witnessing is governance by corporations, democracy is essentially dead. If politicians don't take charge and start rolling back the power of corporations it'll soon be too late.
When the populous finally wakes up about how it's been screwed, things could turn very ugly and we could end up with another Marxist-like revolution, and that's the last thing we need. Revolutions rarely solve anything and cause much pain.
What's truly worrying is the complacency of the population in that it's letting itself be manipulated by these corporations without a fight. What we do about it is the big question.
It seems to me we need a new political movement that brings together all the disparate groups who are struggling with each part of the problem.
There's nothing like strength of numbers to bring about change. History has shown that many times.
If my library has a copy, I will often borrow it first before deciding to buy the book.
Digital books are always last choice for me.
My ereader, onyx boox uses WIFI to download books from NAS.
[^1]: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200634500 . Search the part about delivery costs.
Amazon almost got it right by doing similar, and subsequently dominates the ereader market by making it easy and convenient to buy and download an ebook and have it be in a comfortable and familiar format for all your books. They lost me as a customer the moment I wanted a more capable device and to use that library demanded that I use their Kindle software. Frankly, it's sort of a pain to be a third party ebook reader and even though I have given someone an ebook to read in the past, I had to set it up for them. I would be surprised if ebook piracy was a large portion of ebook consumers since it's more hands-on, though it would not surprise me if it was a growing market share.
Although the models are different, there have been similar effects with Spotify and video streaming services. You definitely own nothing in these examples, which I feel is worse but it's also pretty clear that you don't own something where ebooks and video games are arguably lying to you in terms of ownership. You essentially pay to get to play/read without owning anything. Before I move on, Spotify gets a special note here as I almost cancelled my subscription after being tired of their constant UI shifts to be more like a social media platform. Since it's the only place I consume music at the moment, I'm at the mercy of their bad decisions. It's all wrapped up into the same topic because if I drop Spotify, then I'm left with a music accessibility problem. This is the same thing Newell said, I now have a service problem, AGAIN. Thankfully they reverted those changes, but ultimately I feel like my problem has only been postponed. I lament that bandcamp is not more popular.
Perhaps this is all anecdotal, but from my perspective, it's very clear to me that piracy is (or will be) making a comeback to all of these industries. DRM is ultimately a losing strategy and can alienate consumers. Platform exclusivity, invasive DRM, juggling apps and subscriptions, companies trying to change their music app into a social media one, etc are all user and consumer hostile. The only shame is that the creators ultimately suffer when consumers get tired of the distributors, particularly musicians and authors.
So instead, I started getting FLAC's from Soulseek and I play them with either just a regular audio player, or a discord bot I wrote. That music will always be mine and no one can decide to take them away.
But, if these artifacts were just to distract us from preserving them in the first place, they were probably not worth to be preserved. And ho boy, how there is much distraction to be found today!
Most books, I don't /want/ to own.