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Comment by slt2021 | Hacker News Reader

slt2021

Anna's archives is possibly the greatest site ever.

Infinite love to the team <3

Kind of... the fact that they have the actual data behind a "soft" paywall (waiting times and terribly slow transfers otherwise) makes me a bit skeptic of their "goodwill".

Bandwidth isn’t free of charge

and hosting

Especially the type of bandwidth where you can host felony contempts of business model without getting a life sentence.

Their backdoor plan to get rich! Not going to fool me this time VCs!!

Everyone involved is taking on significant personal liability and hosting expenses. Not sure what more you expect.

Yes spot on, crazy that asking for an optional pittance for less bandwidth throttling on such a huge and risky project can be seen as exploitative.

No such thing as free when bandwidth costs money. Any service online that is handing out things for free without restriction is getting their return through scrupulus means and shouldnt be trusted. Anna's Archive straddles the line enough to allow people to download books for free but not at too great an expense to the volunteers who pay out of pocket to support the project.

So what about the authors and creators of the works? They did it for free?

Information and well-crafted sentences are available on the Language Tree, easily plucked by anyone at zero cost. It's greedy for those so-called novelists and subject matter experts to expect a living wage.

"Information wants to be free," which means that any cost of producing that information can be abstracted away due to ideological inconvenience.

Then show me the easily available "information on the langauge tree" to solve the unsolved problems in science. Btw. books are not mere information, they are also products of effort and sacrifice and intentions. They are also embedded in an economic system of paper, books, ink, transport and what not producers.

So you are either poor or too lazy to buy a book from the store. But this doesn't justify mind theft or it's distribution.

My comment was sarcastic.

they already work almost for free, since all the money goes to the publisher and retailer.

out of $20 book, the authors earn about $1 - $1.5, for e-books its about $1.7 - $2

The value from book sales goes to retailer and publisher: two large corporations, and in case of amazon - a single big corporation

so please cry me a river about amazon's lost profits earned at the back of the book authors

Governments. You forgot governments. They take the bulk of the money, especially in Europe.

~25% VAT and then the publishers and retailers take their cut. The government takes another 40% in income and payroll taxes from that. The leftovers are what the author gets.

Buying from yourself is probably the biggest markup you can get.

yes, if you add VAT and remove taxes from authors' incomes, it becomes even more laughable.

its really might be better to publish for free and create a buy me a coffee

Then what's the economic interest for writing a book

Very little. Aside from high-profile/best-selling authors who do make a decent amount of money, the vast majority of writers do it because they love doing it, not because they expect to become rich.

Now you can publish independently through Kindle or through learnpub. Would that not cut out the intermediary fees?

not by much, kindle authors earn 70% royalty only if they price the book between $3-$10.

outside that range they get 35% royalty

so it is marginally better, but overall I cannot say that anyone got rich off of slaving away for Amazon Kindle, Inc

This is a problem of publishers and retailers, and not a justification for distribution of mind theft.

yes, exactly, annas-archive is the modern robin-hood that frees up the knowledge.

it is not a theft, because people using annas-archive were not going to buy a book in the first place and publishers incomes didnt drop due to annas-archive

you should ask for a refund!

I believe you only hit the paywall when you try to use the search engine & download individual files. They still offer the underlying data for free archival/mirroring via torrents.

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