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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

It's ok boys, now you're allowed to pirate all books ever published as long as you don't seed.

My strategy is to read a pirated copy for 2-3 chapters and then decide whether I want to buy the book. It's similar to the 90s when I used to read volumes and volumes in a bookstore but only with enough money to buy one or two every quarter.

BTW I wish No Starch ships cheaper to Canada. It quickly adds up when I buy more. One of the best publishers out there I think.

I recall seeing a nice sale, I was to get a few books from them, and then the reality of living on the second side of the Atlantic hit hard :(

At least one of our publishers did a translation for few of them...

I agree that shipping can cost a lot, especially oversea. Last time I checked, Amazon US is still a lot cheaper than Amazon CA. But Canada doesn't have something that can compete with Amazon.

Personally I really don't like the whole downloading-but-not-seeding approach. The whole point of p2p networks is to receive and to give and spread. Back in the day it was the leecher clients that got banned because they were amoral and breaking the system.

Buy books from responsible publishers. And please keep seeding the things you torrent that can't be purchased anywhere. And when I'm looking for that classic undubbed Jackie Chan movie and you are the single seeder making it possible to still get it, I salute you from the very bottom of my heart.

And apparently, as long as you don't read them, if you only need a license to view...

I hope the huge new antipiracy push that is coming will require litigators to prove that you're actually viewing the material you pirate.

Which would make Plex and friends with their metrics a bad idea to trust with all of your pirated content.

Though the antipiracy push is going to focus on the torrent sites themselves.

The torrent sites is how meta and friends get their books. They are safe.

Amazing how quick that story blew over.

wow i hadn't heard that before!

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Teenage me who wanted information to be free didn't imagine this would be the result.

It's like everything I wanted to happen in the 00s did, but from the monkeys paw.

The only way I can think of fixing this is by giving rights to flesh and blood people that corporations don't have.

GPL? Humans only.

Free speech? Humans only.

"Well, it was playing on the TV, but I wasn't actually watching. I was looking at my phone like everyone else."

"That sounds quite likely. Case dismissed!"

Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi.

> Even if Jupiter is allowed to do it, that doesn't mean a cow is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bov...

Very apt. The average individual downloader-not-seeder wouldn't have 1/10th of the cash required to fight a legal battle in court, whereas large firms seem to be able to just do whatever they want.

The average person is put through hell and bankrupted. The large firm, at worst, pays a fine that amounts to some fraction of quarterly profit.

Almost the worst thing about Amazon and this gouging way of renting books is that it ‘legitimizes’ piracy. My partner works in publishing and we know a lot of authors. If you think piracy is going to sustain that industry and give you and your children books to read in the years and decades to come, you’re very mistaken.

Plenty of books I've tried to purchase epub or PDFs of only have Kindle rental versions.

If the publishers of these authors wanted me to let me own a PDF, I'd gladly purchase, but until they actually do that I have several easy alternatives to getting sucked into Amazon's ridiculous ecosystem.

And this is a larger subset of books I want to buy than I would want, surprisingly.

I say the same thing about GNU licensed software: if the author just gave me my preferred licensing terms, I wouldn't be forced to use it in proprietary software without compenstion.

How is pirating books to read them by myself comparable to proactively selling other people's work?

Neither belonged to you in the first place.

And yet, one of these options is much more benign than the other.

nope.

Indeed, it is!

> without compenstion

A key point here is that GP expressed a willingness to pay. The analogy would be attempting to license a piece of GPL software that you've decided to integrate into your proprietary stack and being outright refused for ideological reasons. Still illegal but people are probably going to perceive it a bit differently.

As an author, I barely get any money from Amazon. In some cases, with the cut Amazon and the publisher take, I make a few pennies on a $30 book.

If you buy my book directly from my publisher's website, I'm extremely grateful. I get a fair amount for that. If you buy it from a local bookstore, at least they benefit.

But if you buy it from Amazon, you might as well just get it from Anna's Archive. At least you're not supporting the jungle.

I would love to buy ebooks directly from publishers, but publishers generally sell ebooks with DRM just as bad as Amazon's DRM, if not worse. If publishers insist on vendor lock-in, then I might as well stick with Kindle where most of my ebook collection already is.

You can buy a copy of the ebook from the publisher (or whatever source the author tells you is the best for them), and then acquire a useable copy by other means. You get an ebook, the author (and publisher) gets a sale.

Can you clarify if you're talking about physical and/or ebooks?

Both.

I contacted a well known author about the shit latex rendering of his ebooks on Amazon. He said sorry and send me the a pdf copy he build with my name on all the pages. I really like the fact that I have a book dedicated to me by the author, but why the fuck do we need Amazon in this interaction?

In fairness you are the reason for needing Amazon. If you purchased it elsewhere Amazon would cease to exist.

It was the only place where you could purchase the ebook.

and that would be bad?

Lot of people have asked that question ever since Amazon (Platform Economy[0]) emerged. But the answer is not simple.

This is why experiments like ONDC[1] (being pushed by the Indian Govt) are interesting. They want an alternative path between producer and consumer with out a middleman (Platform). Similar to how email works based on open protocols. Or UPI which has reduced dependence on Mastercard/Visa.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_economy [1] https://ondc.org/learn-about-ondc/

What’s an authors perspective on libraries, including ebooks from apps like Libby?

Libraries buy ebooks with your property tax dollars. The more patrons read, the more copies they buy. Authors and publishers like this.

Authors love libraries, because libraries create readers. Publishers don't so much, because though libraries have to buy books, a lot of individuals read a specific copy of a book, which means they aren't buying the book.

I have no idea how publishers feel about used book stores.

I'm only speaking for myself, not other authors. As with most authors who write books on technology, I don't depend on my income from writing, so it might be different for professional authors whose primary income is from writing.

But personally, when I went to a local library, saw that they had two copies of my first book, and both were checked out, I was incredibly proud. I love libraries. I guess overall, I would make more money if everybody who checked out my book at the library bought it instead, but I don't care.

Then why do you sell on Amazon?

Publishers decide where to sell, not authors.

I know you probably don't have the option since it's part of the publishing contract, but if you could, would you opt out of being listed on Amazon and just sell direct from the publisher's site?

This is something that regularly comes up in discussions between authors and my publisher, but the reality is that not being on Amazon hurts books. Amazon has essentially a monopoly on book sales. If you're not on Amazon, it hurts your reviews on other sites like Goodreads, which in turn decreases sales on the few other outlets that still exist.

What my publisher does is sell books on Amazon, and then put a page in it to tell people to please buy the next book directly on the publisher's site. They believe that this is overall the least bad option.

Is that true? I see book shops in every town. As for e-books, distribution of these small files cannot be too much of a technical challenge.

I think it wouldn't be too difficult to make a system for authors to sell their e-books and physical books themselves on their own websites, but the problem is that authors would rage with fury for paying an upfront cost or paying 10% for such a system, and instead stay with the publishers to rip them off instead. You see this in every industry.

Do authors not have agents any more? If an agent is that bad at negotiating residuals why even have them.

Because your own ability is even lower, and nobody else gets any more?

This is not about residuals, it's about Amazon being a monopoly that can dictate terms to publishers.

huh, the publisher i work for pays 25 perecent of net receipts on ebook sales. and we’re an academic nonprofit org.

TBH, I haven't looked into exact numbers in a while, but the way I recall it is that for a Kindle book, you get 35% royalties. So in your case, if a book sold for $30, you'd get $2.6 for that book, which is already not great. If you factor in publisher expenses, taxes, maybe advances, etc., you may end up with a very low amount, depending on how exactly your publisher calculates these.

Tech books tend to not sell very high numbers (a book on a niche programming language is considered quite successful if it sells 10k copies), so it's important to make a good amount of money on each individual sale.

So for me personally, Kindle sales in particular are essentially worthless. Let's say I end up making 2 bucks on a Kindle sale (which is more than I make on average). If I sold 10k Kindle books, that would be 20k income for me, which is simply nowhere near enough to justify the effort of writing a book.

well, if you haven’t earned out your advance, and you encourage people to pirate, you’ll never earn out your advance. i don’t recall exactly offhand, but our net on an Amazon ebook sale is about 70% of list.

I'll never earn out my advance on Amazon sales, period.

The 70% royalty is only available to books below $10, and also incurs other costs from Amazon. Which makes the calculation even worse, because now you're forced to sell at a lower cost, and you pay additional flat fees to Amazon for each sale.

In your case, if you sell the book for $10, you get about $6 ($7 minus fees), of which you get 25%, so you also only end up with about $1.50 per sale.

i think you need to find a better publisher.

It doesn't matter who the publisher is. I've shown the calculations for Amazon's take. I've pointed out how many copies reasonably successful tech books sell. The numbers don't work.

What's that capitalist moniker: adapt or die.

When we pay for a good, be it digital or physical, we want possession and ownership of that good.

When your class of people demand 'licenses to read' instead of the actual ownership of the book, you can shove it.

I would rather pay pirates to get actual non-DRM books than buy the temporary permission to view., especially since the eBook is more expensive.

I will buy physical books, drm-free books, and pirate. I'm not paying hard earned money for a temporary license.

If your publishers and authors can't understand first sale doctrine and actual ownership, then you can close up shop and quit.

Moniker or not, I don't see Amazon or Kindle going anywhere anytime soon.

We need an AI that produces the text of a book, from a video of it as you flip through its pages. No special hardware, just a phone and a thumb. If a few pages get missed it can ask you to do it again.

I think it’s wrong to pirate books, but making it harder and harder to use the thing someone buys will push people to pirate. The onerous DRM from the likes of publishers and Amazon will eventually back fire on them. They are fighting hard to not have books end up like music, but I feel it’s inevitable.

I think it's contextual whether it's even wrong to pirate books. A new book that just came out? Sure. If I want to read a copy of "Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake, who died in 1968, you'd have to do some marvelous convincing to make me feel bad about pirating it. Piracy would be wrong if the copyright system was reasonable. As is, it's the lesser of two evils compared to following the law as written.

No argument from me around copyright being too long.

My point was mainly saying the publishers are working hard to avoid their Napster moment, but missing that it wasn't only about 'free' music, but convenience. The harder publishers make it to use their content legally, the more people they will push to the pirate sites.

Well it does - if the business of Amazon is immoral, buying from them is immoral. Therefore piracy becomes the lesser evil.

Or patronize your local library.

I think the library would get upset at the way I highlight my books.

well, patreon definitely sustains the industry

people on royalroad make $10K a month, many more make over $1K...

and then there's AO3, the monster in the dark with everything for everyone

I would at least suggest buying a copy (not from Amazon) first, the author deserves a cut IMO and books tend to be relatively cheap. Kobo's store does have DRM, but it's easily bypassed by Calibre, or you can buy elsewhere (local is always good if possible) and then pirate an ebook copy.

I think there's an ethical way to both get free use of what should be yours to use, and also support the people who made it.

> Kobo's store does have DRM, but it's easily bypassed by Calibre

See, but that's not actually the same thing as DRM-free. It's adversarial interop that's temporarily allowed to work, but if said interop becomes popular enough the publishers will force Kobo to fix it.

At this point I'm really only interested in spending money on books that I can actually own—either physical copies or (where available) fully and legally DRM-free ebooks. I want my purchases to send the right message to publishers: that DRM-free can work.

A fair number of the books I've bought for my Kobo are drm free.

Yeah, and that's great! Where that's an option I'll definitely go for it. I'm just uninterested in spending money on a book that has DRM, regardless of how easy it is to bypass. I think it sends the wrong message.

Is there a way to know beforehand if the e-book from Kobo is DRM or not? I thought they were all DRM free, but the last book I bought suddenly was DRM and haven't yet bothered to research (I have a couple of different size e-readers and just copying the file over has been handy.)

If they're DRM free it will be in the description. If you want to get rid of that DRM all you need is Calibre, a plugin called DeDRM... you open the ASCM file in the Adobe Editions program, copy the file from the root folder into Calibre, and that's it. DRM gone.

Sure, then you can always buy a physical copy and pirate a digital one.

Kobo actually offers plenty of DRM-free books too. Google Play Books work the same way as well - either no DRM or Adobe's.

> Kobo's store does have DRM, but it's easily bypassed by Calibre

I'd say this is the case for Amazon as well, if you have an actual Kindle. I was able to convert my whole library to standard epubs last weekend using Calibre.

You’re lucky. There are now some KFX protected files that the DeDRM plugins don’t work against. I expect it to get tougher and tougher going forward.

I suspect it won't end up mattering too much for most people anyway.

Eventually, we'll just end up in the same situation as we are now with video DRM; DRM being hard enough to bypass that the methods of doing so will be closely guarded scene secrets, but the output of those methods will hit Z-lib / LibGen / AnnasArchive / all the usual places.

The thing with books is that they're small by todays bandwidth and disk capacity standards, so it's really hard to stop their proliferation.

This is one of the reasons I ditched Amazon for Kobo a couple of years ago: not only was it getting harder to strip DRM (which I did regularly), but harder to get non-Kindle books onto the device. My Kobo Clara B&W is comparable to a Paperwhite, and I don't miss Amazon or Kindle at all.

How were you able to do that? You can still download to USB but that is going away. I'm not aware of any way to convert the files on a recent Kindle to epub, does that exist?

Yeah I believe calibre can pull the files from the kindle as well as push to it. But I've only got an old kindle not a new one.

Only until Feb 26th. After that they will be permanently locked.

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/download-kindle-books-to-comput...

Only if you have Meta's budget for lawyers.

Or $5/mo. Just enough for a VPN

A VPN won’t protect you.

If they start logging and one of their customers gets sued, their entire business model is finished. So, why do you say it won't protect you for pirating?

Fingerprinting is pretty effective, no VPN will stop that.

How exactly does a bitorrent client fingerprint help anyone track you down?

Are there even any effective device fingerprinting methods for torrent clients? Given that it's a UDP protocol it's probably going to be pretty hard to get much useful information about the device aside from what the client might intentionally provide.

Only if you don't get caught.

It's not really the same thing. A VPN is a way to avoid getting caught. Meta's legal defense is an attempt to avoid getting punished after getting caught.

There are so many incredible works of literature that I’ve yet to read available in glorious DRM free epub on Standard EBooks and Project Gutenberg, I don’t know why I’d deal with this shit for imaginative fiction .

No argument, but there are incredible works of literature being created now, by living authors (who want to continue living, so need to eat) as well. We will likely always the classics, but we need living authors to create new classics.

Is it still worth the terrible compromises to our digital freedoms we as a society have to make in order "to promote the progress of science and useful arts"?

I'd argue that the pendulum has swung so far to the side of IP holders that this trade-off is one I no longer support. IP laws were designed for a different world, and in our current age they are often used to lock down content, control devices, and restrict how we interact with technology.

I think the idea that things have swung far to the side of the IP holder is a valid argument. But I don't think it's so much that the IP laws were designed for a different world as it is that large and powerful IP holders (Disney is the canonical example, but far from the only one) hijacked the copyright process for their own ends, blind to the way the world works today. The core concern, to my mind, is that creators be compensated fairly for their labor, however we end up defining that. Burning down the current system is likely the only way to find our way out of the mess we're in.

IP laws were designed in a world without the means to effectively make infinite copies for free using only hardware that everyone carries on their person at all times.

You may say that you think copyright still works for the world we are in today (I don't agree) but that it was designed for a different world is undeniable.

We don't need new classics. They are nice to have but not a need.

We really don't need so many new books that we have to pay people to write them full time.

We absolutely don't need so many new books that we have to give authors the right to extract money after publishing instead of having to rely on crowdfunding/patronage and other up front payments.

If copyright ended right now, culture would go on undisturbed.

Seed from a VPN or VPS in a non-extradition country. Otherwise, you're just a leech.

Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi.

edit: haha, someone already made the comment further down the thread

combine Meta's statement with the WEF statement "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy". And you'll start to get a feel for the asymmetric "rules based order" the elites envision for the plebs.

It’s funny but predictable that the same website that has always said that piracy is a-okay changes its mind as soon as it’s Facebook who’s caught pirating stuff.

Are we using the same website? I mostly see fervent anti-piracy and pro-pay-for-everything sentiment.

UPD: 17 day old account. I was had.

Zuck?

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