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Comment by dallas | Hacker News Reader

I've had a Kindle of some sort since 2011 and not once have I read a book through Amazon... not due to avoidance on my part, just haven't needed to! My first device was an "ad supported" Kindle 4 but since I never signed in to Amazon with it, I never saw an ad. I read library books on a Kobo Touch and use the Kindle 10th gen for DRM-free, purchased e-books. Calibre is amazing. I've got fond memories of using Plucker on my Palm m505 to read books found on FTP sites back in the early 2000s and cleaned up with Perl.

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I, too, have had a Kindle since 2011 and never read a book through Amazon. Every time I purchased a new Kindle, I put it in airplane mode the moment I took it out of the box. Then, I just loaded books onto it over USB.

In fact, I have never paid for an ebook at all – already in 2011 the ebook filesharing community was well developed, and today LibGen and Anna’s Archive have 95% of everything I want to read in English. Through Internet Archive scans of library holdings, Anna’s Archive now has loads of fairly obscure twentieth-century publications that I never expected to see in digital form unless I, or some other member of the community, had scanned and uploaded them ourselves.

> have never paid for an ebook at all

Not snarking, genuine question: how do you expect the authors to make a living creating and writing the content you enjoy reading if you don’t pay for it? Do you only read content that authors publish for free?

Much of what I read – on linguistics, art cinema, or art music – is published by academic presses. No matter how much a scholarly publication might interest the general public, those books are usually priced at a level where only university libraries, and occasionally hired faculty, are expected to actually buy them. The retail price of what I have read in the last month alone already goes into the thousands of euro.

For English-language works of fiction that I will read a single time, I have no qualms about downloading them. People in English-speaking countries could get these for free through their public library, whether there on the shelves or through ILL. What, I have to pay for them just because where I am, I have no access to such libraries?

I still buy a lot of physical books, but I tend to purchase only what I know I will read multiple times over the years. That means, in the first place, poetry. And since poetry is a genre where page layout really matters, and ebooks still struggle with complex and large-format layout, it is especially nice to have the physical book.

Just a data point here but I am an aspiring author who negotiated with several university presses and ended up going with a small independent press instead and I strongly disagree on the audience you mentioned in your first paragraph. That may be the built in readership, but authors desperately want to reach larger audiences, even through academic presses, and often can exert little independent control over pricing. I would invert your assumption -- the authors that can afford to lose money from a shared copy are the ones published by the big five, many of whom received advances that their books won't pay back anyways, it's the authors published by academic presses and indie/nonprofit publishers that desperately need every dollar of revenue.

Trust me, I know books are expensive, they're probably my biggest line item after rent and food, but it really is meaningful for the publisher and author when you purchase a book.

edit: I also wanted to add that the publishing industry is decidedly low tech and a huge amount of assumptions about what gets chosen to be published is based on historical (mediocre, for a host of reasons) sales data via Bookscan, so when you don't purchase a book there also is is now one fewer piece of a demand signal that may lead another similar book to be greenlit.

As I said, what I have read in just the last month from academic presses goes into the thousands of euro. No individual reader is realistically going to spend all that. And especially not when one is in Eastern Europe and makes a fairly typical living here.

Furthermore, I question your claim that me purchasing a scholar’s book would benefit hurting authors. At least within my own discipline (I’m an occasional researcher when a funded project comes along, and I have published on a number of occasions) authors do not materially benefit from publishing a monograph, getting an article into a collection, or serving as an editor of a collection. It’s all for prestige/career advancement alone. In fact, the PDFs on LibGen are sometimes surreptitiously uploaded by authors themselves, who have little love for the big academic publishers like Brill.

There are two cases in my own discipline where authors do care about sales. One is textbooks, and the other is a case where a group of scholars came together to found their own press so they wouldn’t have to deal with the big corporate publishers any more. But those do not form a significant part of my own reading.

Sounds reasonable - and yes academic works are priced so far beyond consumer retail they’re not missing your revenue.

I get your point about libraries, and if you outright don’t have access in your location that’s valid - one thing I’d add though is that libraries do have constrained supply and limited loan periods (even for digital content) and also a smaller collection of books so it’s not a total free access service as you suggest (at least in the UK, I can’t speak to others) - but now I’m nit picking.

I tend to read fairly unpopular literary fiction, not hot bestsellers or whatever, so I am confident that if I were in the USA or UK and could request such books from a local library there, I wouldn’t have to wait long to receive it. “Smaller collection” isn’t actually true if the library has access to ILL. And again, a limited loan period hardly matters if this is going to be a one-off reading experience.

As someone who left the book industry because it was so easy and accepted to steal books, as if they just grow on trees.

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