Hacker News Reader

Comment by pipes | Hacker News Reader

Look, fair enough from your perspective. But a lot of those books probably wouldn't exist if the author couldn't make some money from their work.

I can't find the post but years ago on Reddit an author posted stats showing when her book turned up pirates online, real sales for it collapsed.

Because of this I make a point of buying books, programming books especially. Yes I download pdfs, I use them as previews. This has led to buying way more than I would have.

Anyway, I appreciate this doesn't apply if you live somewhere that these books can't be purchased. But everyone praising these sorts of sites tends to look at them from only a positive perspective.

View on HN

> But a lot of those books probably wouldn't exist if the author couldn't make some money from their work.

I think that's at least a bit debatable. People thought that about (normal) libraries back in the day, but it ended up having the opposite effect.

Not to mention out of print books or academic books which is a big usage of sites like these, since lots of people prefer physical books and only reach for pdfs as a last resort.

Can you imagine if we didn’t have libraries and someone tried to create them today? From publishers to right wingers, they would be painted as communist plots to destroy creativity.

The Internet Archive tried, at great cost and peril, to defend its ability to lend books as an online library due to format shift (physical books get first sale doctrine, ebooks are licensed, you cannot own them), and were told no by the system, so “pirating” it is until copyright changes and becomes more reasonable. Disk is cheap, and the Internet global. Global distributed storage system durability and availability is the path to success until laws change imho.

(Archiving culture alone is not the same as also enabling universal access to the culture and knowledge one is acting as custodian for and serving to global citizens)

The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41447758 - September 2024 (793 comments)

https://archive.org/details/brewsterkahlelongnowfoundation

Totally unrelated: Dweb camp 2026 is coming up for those interested: https://dwebcamp.org/

(no affiliation with any person or entity mentioned in this comment)

As a wise man once said, if “buying” isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing. Words to live by, arrrrrrrr.

I think I agree, the FAR bigger impact on my book's sales was Google search deciding not to surface it in search results. Presence on pirate websites had no effect, and eventually I switched to the PDF as "pay what you want."

Libraries spend like $2B / year buying books https://www.imls.gov/sites/default/files/2021-08/fy19-pls-re..., which is like 10% of the total book market. So even if no one ever bought a book because they first encountered the book, author, or genre in the library that's already a signficant difference

I live in Iran and the administrative hurdles the op was mentioned are not an issue here because you just can't even buy intwrnationally to begin with so there is no hurdle you might need to circumvent. The few English books I have are largely illegal reprints of a pirated version or some old ancient printed version that have somehow gotten imported (no clue how or is there an actual legal way)

I remember opening "thinking fast and slow" and noticing the weird paging. After checking the official version's page count and seeing how the version in my hand doesn't match, my best guess was that someone had printed a pirated epub version.

I rambled so much that I forgot to say what I laid all that introduction for.

I'm not part of the market for these products. I don't have access to them nor even if I buy some imported (probably illegally and by single persons) or printed version, am I going to benefit them since I'm disconnected monetarily from yhe author.

Me reading pirated versions of these books has no negative effects on the earnings of the authors.

You can definitely justify using pirated versions more than most people.

Please say more about accessing HN from Iran, I’m very curious.

Not gonna argue with the point that we need to support authors, but “can be purchased” is a relative concept.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com