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Comment by meristohm | Hacker News Reader

I get most of the books I read from the public library. Sometimes I want to buy and gift books to friends. Only a few publishers (Tor, and other sci-fi publishers, as noted in this article) have determined that it's better to not bother with digital rights management. I haven't yet found as a DRM-free epub the book I want to gift, and I may end up not buying it at all because of that. In addition to whatever discussion this URL might bring about, here's an Ask: What can I do, in addition to not buy books (quietly speaking with my wallet?), to promote DRM-free epub sales?

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> I get most of the books I read from the public library.

Best Buy will no longer be selling physical DVDs soon. What happens if publishers stop selling paper books and only sell licenses for ebooks?

Edit: https://time.com/6266147/internet-archive-copyright-infringe...

In all honesty, this is why I have no problem removing DRM from media. If it has a lock on it, someone can take away the key. Screw that. As if an individual author cares whether you removed the DRM.

It works until we can no longer remove the DRM.

until the DRM is embedded in our eyes or brains, if you can see/head/read it you can remove the DRM.

I'm pretty sure most (maybe a vast majority) of authors don't like DRM and don't want it. DRM is a publisher's thing, not an author's. It's the same with libraries; authors love them, publisher's hate them.

Books only require the efforts of one person for a relatively short period of time and only a shoestring budget and as a result there's an unfathomable number of books to choose from, and the technology required to manufacture books is so simple that any number of large companies deciding to opt out of paper books is not going to stop them from being made. Even if major publishers and stores stop selling physical books, these factors mean that nothing short of literally outlawing paper books could make them a thing of the past.

> Books only require the efforts of one person for a relatively short period of time

Have you actually tried writing a book that you'd want to read? I think there are very few authors who just knock one out like you imply.

Yes, and I know that it's far more difficult than you might initially expect. I wasn't trying to portray the process as easy or trivial in terms of the effort required, my point was more about the fact that the barriers to entry are sufficiently low that you don't need millions (or hundreds of millions) of dollars, an entire team (or dozens of teams) of workers to handle different tasks, or even decades of work to make a top-tier book happen. You only really need the author themself [0], so there's little risk of there not being a wide variety of literature to choose from even if megacorporations decide to lock their offerings behind DRM-infested ecosystems.

[0]: Editors are very useful, but you could feasibly avoid utilizing them, and they're also not so expensive as to be out of the range of what an individual person could afford to hire, so my point stands even if you take them into consideration.

Books are likely going to be around for a lot longer, as they have a long history of being shelf decorations. Plus, people like them for the format, not in spite of the format. e.g. if you could get the same DVD quality video copied onto a USB stick, it would be more appealing than a disc nowadays.

Pushing back on drm from the seller and/or publisher end feels like a lost cause at this point. There are tools that allow you to strip drm and convert to epub. If you buy another copy of the book it seems perfectly ethical to do this as a workaround.

Cracking DRM is illegal with the DMCA.

So is piracy.

So instead of paying the privilege of being illegal, just pirate and save your money.

XKCD called this hypocrisy out ages ago. https://xkcd.com/488/

The only thing wrong with this is that piracy means the author gets no benefit. I have pirated very few books; but I buy and strip DRM, getting the best of both worlds.

The author chose to publish with DRM. They could choose not to, as others have done. They could choose a publisher that doesn't add DRM. They could argue with their publisher that DRM is hurting their sales because so many people are pirating their books instead of buying them because of the DRM.

Authors are not powerless victims here.

> Authors are not powerless victims here.

Perhaps not entirely powerless, but nearly so if they want anybody to actually read their book, or to make any money on it.

Doctorow has written extensively on this:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/31/seize-the-means-of-comput...

> I won't let my books be sold with DRM, which means that Audible won't carry my audiobooks. My agent tells me that this decision has cost me enough money to pay off my mortgage and put my kid through college.

Big authors like Sanderson and Doctorow can pull it off, small and new authors, if they want to build an audience, really can't.

Exactly. Authors have some power here. Up to them whether the money matters more, exactly as Cory Doctorow says.

You can usually send the author money directly. It may not be "click a button" convenient but lately rarely is doing the "right thing" so easy, annoyingly. But it's not so bad.

I recently read Adrian Tchaikovsky. If I wanted to send him money, I google his name, end up at his website, and at the bottom is a contact page: https://adriantchaikovsky.com/contact.html there's his agent's address at the bottom, where I can easily mail cash. This works for most authors.

In the past I've emailed small creators, such as authors or music producers, and simply asked them for their cashapp, paypal, or venmo, and sent them money that way. Many small producers already have this info on their website or instagram for this exact reason.

Yeah, it is. However, if you have to break the law, the ethical way that supports the authors is the better choice.

I was thinking the same thing. Either you go Amazon or you don't get it for some book. It is pretty dismal experience to be honest. Of course there are "other places" you can find them and not deal with any of the hassle. Search and download an ebook in about a minute.

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