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Comment by tene80i | Hacker News Reader

Your solution hurts authors more than Amazon. Just buy ebooks from somewhere else! Don’t be cheap and pretend it’s principled. I know you say buy a copy if you enjoyed it but that’s not really how commerce works and none of these authors agreed to offer you donationware.

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> Just buy ebooks from somewhere else!

Where can I buy ebooks (epub) that give me access to download the file so that I can copy it to my other devices and keep it on my own backups and organize it in my digital library the way I want to? I want a good selection of anime / manga / sci-fi, and a little bit of the typical best seller stuff.

If you want to go down the route offered by GP, buy it anywhere and then pirate the epub. The author is compensated, you get the freedom of an unconstrained ebook file, everyone wins.

I buy from Ebooks.com it comes with the adobe drm but it is super easy to strip using a calibre plugin

This! I did this when an relatively new but obscure book was needed for work.

Read it on my kindle after removing the DRM and sent it via amazon.com/sendtokindle

I've switched from Amazon to Kobo (in terms of a store, I don't use either's devices). I tested last night and I was able to copy epubs purchased from Kobo wherever I wanted. They have all of what you just described.

Like you, I insist on having the ability to archive and backup my media, and the second I learned that Amazon was removing that ability I was done with them.

Also just to echo what others have said, I'm of the belief that once you pay for a book/game/etc... as long as you're the only one using it, the rest is free game. Pirate away after you buy a copy and I don't think there's an ethical problem there.

Some of the books on the kobo store come with DRM, but if that’s the case it says so in the description.

That's true, but it's also the Adobe DRM which can be trivially stripped using Calibre, so it's not a big deal IMO.

Honestly in most genres you're hosed, but if you're into Japanese nerd stuff, j-novel club sells light novels (and a few manga) with no DRM.

Wait WHAT?! I’ve been buying ebooks off BookWalker and it’s so annoying. Their reader app sucks and they have these faux-protective constraints like not permitting a “copy” function on any highlighted text and limiting a book to no more than 50 highlights. It’s so silly… Edit: damn, had assumed you meant maximum nerd mode and that these books were available in Japanese… looks like it’s all English translations. So it goes.

For books from small and specialty presses, I like to buy the ebook from the publisher because they'll often sell you a copy without DRM. Mind you, this has been true for tech presses and small companies but not for university presses and imprints attached to big publishing houses.

Humble Bundles (if you get lucky and find a good one) are also usually just DRM-free files in a zip archive. I've seen more sci-fi bundles lately (e.g., they had bundles of the complete works of John Scalzi, V.E. Schwab, and Ursula K LeGuin last year), and I think they usually have some anime bundle on offer.

Kobo is also a pretty complete bookstore, and they tend to match a lot of the "1.99 ebook today only!" sales that Amazon runs. I do most of my reading on one of their devices becaus you can sync PDFs/ePubs (via a USB cable or Dropbox) and log in directly to Pocket (for web pages) and OverDrive (for library books).

I saw Bookshop.org also sells ebooks, but their marketing copy ("read right in your web browser, or download our iPhone or Android apps for the full reading experience") makes it sound like they built a closed platform and don't sell files.

bookshop.org is very nice alternative!

I'm happy to spend more money on that than using Amazon or any other big corp. They are heavily subsidized and in the long rung destroy people community and the world in general.

It has DRM and there is no way to read books from there except on their iOS and android apps and maybe the website (ereaders are excluded entirely at least for now - i think they’re hoping to add Kobo support eventually)

Authors still write books in a world where digital copying is so commonplace that people talk and trade openly with zero fear of repercussion. Trading material helps it to live longer and get it into more hands, giving it more significance, meaning that it has a chance of reaching an audience that has a portion of people who will seek out a means of paying for it, directly or otherwise (eg supporting some other work from the author, or even paying for it directly like when Radiohead leaked Hail to the Thief for free but fans still clamored to pay for it which also help to underline the fact that one copy does not equal one lost sale)

Digital piracy has been around for decades, naturally. The primary thing that computers do is copy data (you download a book, that's a copy on your hard drive. You read it, you've now copied it to RAM and to your graphical display. You sync it to another device, that's another several copies, etc). It will never be stopped

> I know you say buy a copy if you enjoyed it but that’s not really how commerce works

when I was younger I pirated all my OS X software because I couldn't afford it. That machine broke some years back (2021-ish) and I was on Windows for a while, but after I got a job I bought a Mac again and dropped probably over $500 on copies of all the software that I had once pirated.

I don't know how you think commerce works, but without piracy, a lot of this software I wouldn't even know exists, and certainly wouldn't have gotten my money, because I wouldn't have known at all which of it was worth buying to me. Sorry though for hurting all those authors by (eventually) giving them money.

You’re describing something different, which is just paying later. I was objecting to someone proposing reading books and then paying only if they thought it was good. That’s the part that isn’t commerce, because one side is making use of a good and isn’t compensating the other side.

I mean, I also didn't pay for stuff I tried and didn't think was good. (Which reminds me, one day I should actually buy the Warriors series of books since I only read them from a library once...)

I throw money around a lot more now though, I tend to just buy something and try it and only ask for a refund if it's really useless (like was a macOS app called Vivid that ruined video playback; Lunar works much better).

I personally don't think there's anything wrong with not compensating for a good that you can't use. Then you're not using the good without compensation because you're just not using the good. Books are a funny concept because people consider reading it to be using the good.

If I read a book and there's absolutely nothing I can gleam from it and I just hate it, why should I pay for it? Is it the experience of having those words thrown at me that I'm paying for? If yes, did you know some movie theater tickets are refundable if you didn't like the movie after watching it? I think mostly in Canada. Look it up, it's a real thing. Are those theaters implementing commerce incorrectly?

Yes, interesting case. I'd say the difference is that those theatres are agreeing to those terms. With books, I think it's fair to read chapter or two in a bookshop and decide if you want more. But if you read the whole book, you can't then just say "That wasn't great, I won't pay". Nobody agreed to those terms, and you're getting the product of someone's labour and just declining to pay for it.

Too many ebooks are Amazon exclusive for that to be viable. Within the fantasy genre, at least. I agree with you generally but this was a valid way to support authors while still reading on non-Kindle eReaders. Amazon just shut that door.

> Within the fantasy genre, at least.

Also true of smut! Chuck Tingle recently signed with Tor, but I believe all of his earlier books (including classics like Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt) are Kindle-only. Same for niche favorites like C.M. Nascosta

If it's OK for Meta, the society accepts it.

Personally I'm glad to pay for a book later if author provides alternate method for payment. But to pay for the book just to flip trough it and decide it's not for me is not worth it.

Do you also go out for lunch and decide whether to pay for the meal after you’re done if it tastes well enough? Pay for games if you enjoyed the story? Go to a concert and pay for the tickets if it was a good show?

That isn’t fair, and also not how economic transactions work. If everyone did this, we would not have the majority of enjoyable things.

> I know you say buy a copy if you enjoyed it but that’s not really how commerce works and none of these authors agreed to offer you donationware.

I'm all for also buying books, but my local library has all the books too, so it is sort of how the commerce of books works (at least where I live).

Also if people are still buying ebooks or kindles from Amazon after the whole 1984 fiasco I doubt they're going to care about downloads.

Libraries are great! And authors get paid for that too. Win-win.

Would be worth spending some community time to see what are the costs of improving non gafam or making a new distribution platform.

Go to a library if that's such a problem

Nowadays nobody writes books for money so yes, it hurts only Amazon.

That's not true. Just like in every other time, many authors rely on multiple income streams, but book sales are an important part of that. Amazon would love for your assertion to be true, but we're not there yet.

Sorry...it is: "The median author income for full-time authors from their books was $10,000 in 2022" - https://authorsguild.org/news/key-takeaways-from-2023-author...

"Nobody makes money from books" - https://malwarwick-98471.medium.com/nobody-makes-money-from-...

Exceptions and wildly successful authors are just the exceptions that confirm the status quo.

A wild, unsupported claim. And even if any particular author doesn’t make a full living out of writing, that doesn’t mean you’re hurting them by not paying.

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