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Comment by tene80i | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely, what is your motivation here? People often justify piracy in terms of their opposition to DRM, but here someone is showing you how to get DRM-free books, and your response is "But over here they are free." They clearly aren't meant to be free, and people put substantial amounts of work into creating them. Don't you care?

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For myself, I would never pirate a book that was still in print. Over the past so many years though a lot of books on archive.org (for example) are borrow only (and I like cultivating an offline-life).

Here's an odd, maybe edge-case example. Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories are clearly outside copyright. It's for sale on Amazon (the first link when I searched, becauseofcourseitis!) but I think we all know that the "copyright" on these published editions is only going to cover the Foreword or whatever the publishing company slapped on.

When I look for it on archive.org I initially thought I could only borrow it [1] but then searched harder and found another copy that I can in fact download [2].

[1] https://archive.org/details/completetalesofu0000harr

[2] https://archive.org/details/the-complete-tales-of-uncle-remu...

My motivation? I'd think it's pretty clear. I'm offering (for those few who don't know) an options for obtaining books DRM-free and free in a landscape that has become positively shitty to any standard notion of owning the things you bought to supposedly own them. If Amazon and others want to do this, then I have no obligation to respect their DRM, and if authors want to sell their books through such a rigged format, I also shouldn't feel guilty about respecting rules against piracy.

All of this aside from very reasonable arguments that copyright shouldn't apply to consumer uses of information.

I don't really share your moral views on piracy, so why both browbeating with them?

I wasn’t browbeating. I was curious about your moral justification, and you’ve made that clear. You feel that anyone who publishes using DRM (whether they have any idea or not, or any choice or not) doesn’t deserve to be compensated for your enjoyment of their labour. You won’t boycott them or sacrifice anything, as a principled stand against this thing you object to. You’ll just read their books and not pay.

I bought a book on Amazon recently and when it got delivered, I was too lazy to get off the couch to get it and I just downloaded it. Now I have the physical book and a copy that's convenient to open/reference whenever and wherever I am.

Yes this approach is great. Everybody is being paid, and you have the freedom of multiple formats. No one is getting screwed, because no one expects people to buy books in multiple formats (except perhaps audiobooks, which are different because you also have the reader who deserves to be paid). It would be nice to see publishers embrace this sort of flexibility (e.g. with a download code printed in the book?), but the use case might be quite niche for most readers so it feels unlikely.

Have you read the news lately? Amazon is about to restrict the rights of kindle users. They are about to remove the ability to download and transfer books via USB.

I don’t support/condone piracy, but I also don’t support the current trend of taking away user rights.

Next on the list will be the removal of the ability to transfer via email. Just wait.

That being said, all kindles can now be jailbroken: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073969

So you can use other legit sources when possible.

That appears to justify jail breaking or drm-free books, not screwing authors out of any kind of compensation for their labour.

The irony is that this will zero the e-book purchases of people that read only in unsupported devices.

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