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Comment by wortelefant | Hacker News Reader

I wish the publishing industry would create a flatrate model for books and magazines, I would gladly pay for it. With the current business model, digital versions are often more expensive than the printed one. Shadow libraries like z-lib, scihub or Annas Archive are just a symptom: we have a near unlimited demand for digital knowledge, but the supply logic still based on the idea of paper and scarcity.

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Digital products are also worse than physical ones, because the content cartels have used DRM to trample on your first-sale rights like resale and lending. It's no coincidence that digital books are often more expensive than paper books, because the publishers have killed the second hand market.

digital books also run the risk of being censored or disappeared from your devices overnight. Another nice thing about physical books is that you don't have to worry about anyone spying on you and collecting data on what you read/when/where/how often/how quickly, etc.

Don't connect your device to the internet, and nobody is deleting your books. I sideload all my epubs from various stores and back 'em up. It's mine, not theirs.

That seems like the way to go honestly. Just be careful to back up your books too because just one mistake can be enough to screw you over. I have a friend who ran into that very problem. Enabled wifi just one time without thinking and all his books were deleted. There were a ton of posts about it https://old.reddit.com/r/kindle/comments/18csl9d/all_books_g...

No idea if they ever fixed that or not. My friend had to try to track down which books were even on the device and then re-obtain what he could.

I'd suggest using calibre or similar to make alternate copies of any digital books you buy and storing them as backups in files completely outside any device you use to read them with (especially a DRM'd device). This can get tricky with newer editions of media through devices like Amazon's kindle, but there are usually workarounds. You bought them, they are rightfully yours and fuck any "ownership" model that treats what you bought as something to be taken away from you on a bullshit legal whim.

Also, if some DRM'd digital book you've bought is truly impossible to remove from the device you're using to read it, an alternative is to just pirate a copy from certain obvious sites (cough, libgen, cough) as a backup edition in a format you fully control. Since you did indeed buy the book, also having a pirate copy is at least morally legit as far as compensating the author goes, even if it's legally shaky. Then again, many laws themselves are legally shaky, if not morally too. This applies especially to all the absurd legal contortions and false outrage practiced by proponents of the legal dumpster fire that is DRM.

> Another nice thing about physical books is that you don't have to worry about anyone spying on you and collecting data on what you read

If you buy in a bookshop, for cash. If you think Amazon et al don't know your interests, I have a bridge to sell you.

True! Although ordering a book off amazon doesn't tell them that you bought it for you, or that you read it, or when, or how, etc. That doesn't stop Amazon from making assumptions about you that can be used against you, but the less ammo you give them the better.

Even bookstores don't always guarantee your privacy these days and libraries just keep getting worse on the privacy front. Librarians fought hard to keep the government from collecting lists of the books we check out, but they lost that fight, and now they're pushing users to use third party apps to download DRM filled digital ebooks.

>If you think Amazon et al don't know your interests, I have a bridge to sell you.

If they know then they certainly don't seem to act on that information.

You've got to be kidding, right?

  "Frequently bought together"
  "Keep shopping for"
  "Deals for you"
  "Gift ideas inspired by your shopping history"
  "Buy it again"
  "Pick up where you left off"
  "Related to items you've viewed"
  "Top picks for you"
  "Products from Small Businesses related to items you viewed"
  "Inspired by your shopping trends"
  "Recommended deals for you"
  "Fashion items recommended for you"
  "More items to consider in Outlet"
  "Related to items you've saved"
  "Tap to browse" (related to items I've viewed or purchased)
  "More top picks for you" (this one specifically has books related to books I've purchased or shown interest in).
  "Books that you may like" (ditto)
  "Everyday essentials for you"
  "Similar to your past purchases"
  "Hassle free reordering"

[...]

And that's just in retail...

That's the thing about surveillance capitalism. Nobody is going to tell you when they use the data they have against you. When my insurance premiums go up, my insurance company isn't going to tell me that it's because I've spent more time in drive-throughs over the last 6 months. The employer who doesn't hire me won't tell me that it's because of a political opinion I shared on facebook 12 years ago. When a store tells me that their return policy is returns within 3 days and I need a receipt, they aren't going to tell me that they told the last person who asked them the same question something very different based on the score they saw from a consumer reputation service.

The data being collected by companies is increasingly used to influence more and more of your life, but you aren't allowed to know when or why. Amazon's data could be being used to show you certain items while hiding others from you when you shop at amazon.com. It could determine what prices you pay vs your neighbors for the exact same items. It could be used to push certain content on prime. It could influence what ads you're shown. Amazon may sell your data to businesses they partner with (like “Starbucks, OfficeMax, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, J&R Electronics, Eddie Bauer and Northern Tool + Equipment.”) and they too will use that data in whatever ways they feel will benefit them.

Amazon isn't collecting and storing massive amounts of data on every facet of your life just to ignore it. They spend the money required to gather and keep that data because it is highly valuable to them in one way or another. That might mean taking more of your money from you, or that might just mean manipulating you and trying to sway your opinion, but you can be certain that they're using that data every chance they get to their own advantage and you can be certain that they aren't going to tell you when they do it.

Publishers are resisting tooth-and-nail a flatrate model. See previously:

"A 'Netflix of Books' would put publishing houses out of business"

https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40119958

Indeed, most movies make most of the money in the first few weeks of showing. Were it not for the physical limitation of having to go to a theater, much of that money won't be made.

Same with books: were it not for the need to buy a book before it shows up on libgen, or the need to have a physical book, book sales would plummet. Actually this is exactly what some of the anti-copyright activists proclaim as the goal: removing most of the need to buy a book, at least from the publisher.

Of course, there is the counter-example of music: people who pirate music also buy a lot of music, when the price is below the impulse buy threshold; see Bandcamp or Apple Music. The lack of copy protection does not incite them to pirate the same material, because they want to support their favorite bands. Those bands which did not sign up with major labels, of course, because the major labels earn and pay a significantly different amounts of money.

> people who pirate music also buy a lot of music, when the price is below the impulse buy threshold; see Bandcamp or Apple Music

How do the existence of Bandcamp and Apple Music support your claim that people who pirate music also buy a lot of music?

I think he's given you examples of where music can be priced "below the impulse buy threshold".

Supporting the claim are several studies that pirates or piracy advocates are often familiar with.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/pirates-more...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-pir...

https://corsearch.com/content-library/blog/does-piracy-impac...

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/663157

O'Reilly has had a subscription platform for technical books for a long time now. Used to be called "Safari Books Online", now it's "O'Reilly Online Learning". It's become a pretty standard benefit for public libraries and large workplaces.

It's important not to lump all 'publishers' in a single bucket here. The big 4-5 fight new models, but many outside of those are happy to try different models. See the many publishers who deliver DRM free files or work with libraries using flat rate models.

There has to be aligned interest and feedback mechanisms for that to work. Otherwise there will be no reasons for publishers to not take 99% cuts for the subscription.

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