The Amazon Kindle War Against Piracy
goodereader.com
goodereader.com
There is no strong political pushback from the parties/voters to this large scale collective theft of IP by cooperations, is there?
I would expect some sort of taxation and redistribution to the content creators like there is with music content etc.
If for instance you consider anything that can be legally and uniterraly taken away from you as not owned, that definition becomes really really small, short of you being a diplomat or some special entity.
Many see "owning" things in a more colloquial way, but that's also how Amazon gets by with their shenanigans, as it still feels like ownership day to day.
As sister comment points out, civil forfeiture is one. Your car being involved in a criminal investigation and getting saved for perpetuity as evidence would be another.
Funnier examples: let's say it's a self driving car, as you proudly admire your brand new car delivered car, firmware is overwritten by error and is sent to another home, who also closes the delivery. Factory management software is buggy as hell and your car got reassigned some random info of another lost car, but marked as delivered to you anyway, so the burden of proof is now on your side.
You might be fighting that car maker in court for the rest of your life without ever seeing any compensation or getting back "your" car.
> mortgaged home
If it's mortgaged it's just not yours in the first place. I'm sure you have clauses in your loan contract detailing how the loaner can unilateraly decide that circumstances changed, you're now too much of a risk, and request near inmediate full repay of the rest of loan or else they liquidate the property.
Land laws have also their funnier clauses, where someone squatting your property for a decade can request legal ownership, depending on the local arrangements.
I have no issues with the author mentioning the film, not the book. I was rather curious why not the book, but the film, solely because of this ‘wood’ story told in both. The author said they haven’t finished the book yet, so that’s fine with me. I just find it ironic they did not mention the book (and the author too), considering the story it tells.
Ouch. This is how I deliver a lot of my DRM-free purchases to the Kindle app.
I want properly created files the kindle can render with the options I want, not a pdf that forces a layout.
https://help.kobo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019527954-Downloa...
Other than that, not really? There are plenty of ways in which you can buy _a_ drm free book, but not some large range (or even bandcamp-quality range, where there are authors you've heard of, just not Dan Brown / Stephen King sized ones) site.
I haven't got around to solving this problem so am also interested. I already own a kindle, I don't want to generate ewaste by changing physical device.
The bonus part is Calibre keeps a local copy on your PC, so now all my book purchases are backupped and without DRM.
Lots of cons still but no one is going to pull your ebooks from your device and it's still their 1st gen and only device they have. I just hope they ship export functionality for their custom app so that you can keep local copies of the documents you send to their backend.
It's great this was mentioned in a podcast once which got me curious about it in the first place. And without the blue lights you actually can read in bed without ruining your circadian rhythm.
That said still buying. Their daily sales are (occasionally) just too good value for money even of if I know it’s locked.
So unless the book is checked out a thousand times over and its lifetime, buying it still dominates overall.
Piracy -> Friendly ways to buy -> Unfriendly ways to buy -> Piracy -> ...
Unfortunately, giving money back to writers involves hopping through piracy. At that point, a new, consumer-friendly service will sprout up. Everyone will use it.
Over time, the service will want to profit-maximize, and will adopt anti-consumer techniques. Leading people to go to Pirate Bay. Leading to friendly services.
Rinse, repeat.
There are other possibilities, such as people simply not writing as much anymore, or higher quality writers existing the market due to lack of sufficient return.
Similar thing happened with music, only rather than piracy, it landed on legal / free (e.g. Youtube). Youtube is just starting to do the consumer-unfriendly thing (but it's got a long ways to go before piracy comes out competitive).
Similar in books.
I'll mention: A lot of these are consumer-unfriendly in some ways (e.g. Netflix DRM), but friendly in others. $20/month for all the movies you can watch beats piracy.
You're making an argument that empowers the likes of Amazon, not "writers", and it's by design that you've been fed that story.
Individuals who pirate my books are also more likely to buy them in the future.
Piracy is just about accessibility and trust. If the person can't afford to take a chance, they pirate. And if you win them there, they'll buy.
(Nit: Zero of that applies to corps. Thanks Anthropic, Meta, and everyone else.)
Unfortunately, I'm Australian, and my government saw fit to narrow their interpretation of current laws, to make AI scraping of illegally obtained data, legal.
You now have to prove direct harm - not the indirect harm happening to the entire industry.
[0] https://www.oaic.gov.au/news/media-centre/global-expectation...
It would be interesting to see at what point of notoriety that is no longer true. Like is this still a factor for Stephen King, or at that point is it really just lost sales?
As for scale... There is only a tiny fraction of the industry that can support their life on writer's income, let alone be a household name.
It probably does become just lost sales at that point, but to reach that, you're probably already beyond most competitive forces, leaving only piracy around.
You think more piracy leads to more sales, but surely this is correlation, not causation? It seems far more plausible that popular books get pirated and bought more, hence the correlation.
But if you're not Stephen King, then more piracy is going to make a direct, causal, positive impact on your sales.
Piracy creates an invested reader. Its not much different than games selling by offering free demos.
There is a _causation_ there, because the reader likely never would have discovered me, otherwise.
If I’ll ever to become an author myself, I don’t see any issue with that.
In the end I pirated more often. I am not proud of that, but I also don't see how any of this makes any difference. It's not like I'll ever buy the book with my own money.
Reminiscent of #bookz on Undernet.
Its great hardware.
It’s super compact (great for travel), has a good screen, reads anything I’ve thrown at it, runs Android apps, and is simple to send files to over its (local) web interface.
Also the Kindle is marketed as allowing you to put your own documents on it.
Yes Amazon want to stop you reading books licensed from then on anything but a Kindle but not the other way around.
They may market it like that now, but that can change. If Google can stop you sideloading apps on Android, I have no doubt Amazon could try to stop you sideloading books on your Kindle.
1) sell device at break even/loss to gain market share
2) retrospectively lock out all content not from amazon
Or buy the physical book, download from AA, and give the book to charity when you’re done.
When I do, I subsequently remove wifi passwords and delete the networks.
Additionally, I disable software updates if possible.
This phrase "software update" is mentioned several times
Usually this refers to soneone other than the comuter owner being able to remotely access and install software on the owner's computer, often without the explicit, non-compulsory consent of the owner
Get that it’s not e-ink, but I’ve found a setting that does not fatigue me (black text on tan background - just like hacker news!) and have never looked back.
Piracy can be illegal, may be considered unethical by some, but it definitely isn’t stealing.
If you're going to pirate books, it is easy enough to just do it on your iPad or purchase a Boox tablet.
I own an iPad and I've often considered getting a e-ink android tablet just for reading pdfs.
Using keys stored in hardware for DRM is industry standard. It's not draconian.
What amazon could block is getting books from other sources onto a kindle. But there's plenty of devices. I use an iPad.
Would you prefer what current OCR does and just suddenly sentences go 2#!@%7Q&*@3 ladfk !@$?
Or would you rather have a reasonable completion of a sentence that is nearly always (but not quite always) correct, that even actually takes the context into account?
Yes, actually. I'd rather be aware that the OCR tool failed somewhere than have the tool silently fabricate part of the text, or "correct" perceived errors which were present in the source document.
In practice and at scale, the guesses of the LLM are the superior outcome.
Well, if you assume that you're never going to read the book, then sure. But in that case it's even more efficient to not OCR the book either. You'll never know the difference.
If you do read the book, you'll know where the failures are. And they're easy to correct if you can edit the document. I usually file reports of printing errors in Kindle books when I encounter them.
(Do the errors get corrected? No.)
Oh, and to pirate textbooks. The issue is that an LLM-entered (as in in context) version of part of a textbook is something that I can talk to, write to, and have it judge my skills. Normally I'd have to find someone who'd be willing to spend a short time talking to me about a subject, and correct me, and who's willing to spend hours correcting assignments from me. Even when paying, that's essentially unavailable.
Now I take a few pages, let's say up to a chapter but usually less, load it into ChatGPT-5, tell it to ask me progressively harder questions when I activate voice mode. Or I take one of those for-teacher "how to grade X" notes, write an assignment, scan the whole thing into ChatGPT, and tell it to correct my assignment, justifying everything on the teacher note and deliver a final grade. I tell it to be way too strict, and this has helped me, among other things, get very good, and one perfect score on language certs. I can prove that I am fluent in 4 languages (en, fr, de, and my mother tongue). If we're talking anything but specialized language it's even true.