What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?
reprog.wordpress.com
reprog.wordpress.com
> - Find the book I want on Amazon.
> - Buy it.
> - Find the same book on a torrent site.
> - Download it.
> - Physically copy it onto the Kindle via a USB cable.
Wait a second... you're rewarding Amazon and the publisher for their bad behavior by continuing to buy from Amazon? Nothing about this plan is discouraging the problem.
Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.
> And it can hardly escape anyone’s notice that I would achieve exactly the same end-state — the book on my Kindle — if I just skipped the first two stages.
They're deaf to anything besides pain. If you want to help your fellow humans, you need to inflict that pain. Otherwise the company won't change.
It does feel cumbersome to execute the argument in this manner but it feels rationally defensive.
> So it looks as though this move — both mean-spirited and commercially incompetent — will result in the loss of about 50 book sales per year.
Probably because doing what you suggest would not look great in court:
"Dear Jeff Bezos,
Here is my signed confession letter of intellectual property theft.
Yours Truly, Mike Taylor"
They purchased the right to distribute the books on their terms.
You don’t like the terms, so you call them predatory. You want the product, so you just take it on your own terms.
Morally, that’s no different than your employer just deciding to pay you less than your contract states, because he decides he doesn’t like the terms of the agreement anymore.
You don’t gain a right to take things just because you want them or need them.
One case is more complex than the other, but that does not change the fundamental.
Two cases: 1) Two parties agree to a trade under certain terms, one party decides he does not like the terms, and decides he wants to take the benefit without complying with the agreement. 2) One party decides he does not like the offered terms, does not accept the agreement, but takes the benefit anyway.
With that said, I think you have a point that the current way EULAs work are questionable under contract law. They're specifically designed to be unreadable and to encourage people not to read them, not to keep up with updates, and generally to be unaware of terms they've agreed to. I'd be interested in some smart legislative reform here and I'm hoping you can point me to some people doing good work in this area.
There's a live issue here, but the fact that contract law has flaws does not give anyone the right to defraud or steal.
Genuine rights cannot be transferred. Everything else is just an attempt to somehow determine who is allowed to make money from what. You shouldn’t take this too seriously, and certainly shouldn’t turn it into a fetish. You should treat it like traffic rules: if no one is watching and it’s obvious that no one can get hurt, then you can basically do whatever you want. It’s very important to clearly distinguish true morality from this false morality, which is nothing more than the preservation of existing privileges. Those who fail to make this distinction tend to neglect true morality.
You can easily transfer a right of ownership. You can bake a cake and I can buy it from you; once that happens, it is theft for you to take the cake and eat it.
Both of these are expressions of an inalienable right to property.
In the modern context, this is pretty easy to project.
Surely you agree that you have a property right to your computer. How did you get it? You purchased it from the manufacturer (or a retailer, who purchased it from them). The laptop itself was their property from the moment it was made.
What about the factory that made it? Surely, the factory is their property, too. It would be theft for you to get a gang to go and take it over, just as it would be theft for you to loot its machinery and supplies. A factory, though, isn't just a building. It's a set of processes, designs, and techniques that a company uses to build products. For the same reasons and in the same way, those ideas — that intellectual property — belong to the company.
Similarly, a book on your shelf is yours. The store bought it from the printer, who was contracted by a publisher, who paid the author to write it. The fact that _you don't like these middlemen_ doesn't give you the right to steal from all of them.
To those of you who rationalize your thieving behavior: It makes you an entitled child.
The ideas in the book are the author's intellectual property, and only because that exists, you can claim any right to own your copy of the book as physical property.
So, no, you cannot have strong property rights for physical goods while simultaneously having no intellectual property rights. That is a complete contradiction.
No, it's for fundamentally different reasons.
Physical property rights exist to protect people.
IP rights exist to benefit society other than the IP rights holders - either by a) incentivizing inventions (patents, that expire) or b) incentivizing creative works (copyright, that expire) or c) trademarks (that explicitly exist to prevent consumer confusion).
"Processes" and "techniques" that aren't patentable don't "belong" to a company with a factory in any legal or moral sense, and if they are patentable, they only belong to the company for the defined term of the patent, after which they belong to the public via public domain.
For all practical purposes, copyrights no longer expire.
Any creative work made in your lifetime is unlikely to enter the public domain within your lifetime unless it was made during your childhood, the author holds the copyright rather than assigning it to a corporation, and the author already has one foot in the grave at the time of its creation.
Average US life expectancy is 79 years, humans develop their capacity for memory between 3-7 years, and copyright in the US lasts for 70 years after the author dies, so any creative work you'd remember from your childhood will only enter the public domain in your lifetime if the author dies within 2-6 years of creating it.
But even if copyright takes a long time to expire, there's still a pile of culturally significant stuff coming into public domain every year. e.g. it's good that the works of Arthur Conan Doyle are now in the public domain.
Intellectual property rights came about when The Church wanted to use them to prevent people from using printing presses to distribute the wrong kind of bible. They have nothing to do with property in the sense of something that you lose access to when it gets stolen.
My existing post already precludes your point.
I wonder if your question is facetious or ignorant, but I will answer you as though it is earnest: I get it from great thinkers such as John Locke, George Mason, and Thomas Jefferson. To the extent that you support any kind of civilizational progress, you have these thinkers and their ideas to thank.
That’s not very nice. I can assure you that I read everything you write here with the same contempt and accuse you of at least the same intellectual dishonesty. I just wouldn’t have put it so bluntly.
If I’m hungry, I’ll just take a piece of your cake and eat it, no matter who it belongs to. Everyone should do that. And if you refuse to share the cake, you should (and will) receive a just punishment for it.
If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?
On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?
Maybe because those middlemen platforms provide a combination of discoverability, user review rating system, network effect, convenience, and trusted return policy at scale that's valuable to both consumers and developers/authors enough for both parties to tolerate it as the status quo even if it's not perfect, it's just good enough to be the default.
Some do!
Oh that's coming, don;t you worry, the legislative part just hasn't caught up with the LLM business yet since none of them are making much profit yet so there's nothing you can shake out of them yet
What I mean by this is, in many EU countries, the unions of creative artist have lobbied the government to make us pay a "piracy tax" on all storage devices sold in the country, from blank CDs and HHDs to SSDs and mobile phones with EMMC/NAND. The same thing will happen with AI companies, once they become profitable enough, they'll force the consumers subscription prices to include an extra tax that will go back to the major rights holder part of the unions.
I'm not convinced about discoverability, I don't browse random books or look for recommendations on Amazon; to me Amazon is the final stop once I know the ebook I want to buy. Literally a search bar for the book I already want. I don't use Amazon as a shelf of books to peruse, and I never look for recommended products (especially not books).
I think it's mostly the integration with Kindle, and the reputation ("I trust Amazon so I'll enter my credit card"). This should be feasible to overcome by a better platform. And Amazon seem hell bent on ruining their reputation...
Never Amazon! I also don't know anyone who goes to Amazon to look for book recommendations, but that might be my bubble.
I buy a LOT of books in brick and mortar stores, my preferred method of browsing books.
Occasionally indie authors beat the system like Andy Weir with the Martian, but that took both good writing and a lot of traction from his online community for it to go viral and for it to get recognition.
Friend's recommendations aren't gamified. Actual friends I mean, not facebook contacts.
In any case, these were just examples that Amazon is NOT the place to go for browsing books. I'm sure people must do it, but I don't know of anyone who goes to Amazon to look for book recommendations...
If it's so trivial as you claim, then you can put your money where your mouth is and become a millionaire/billionaire by delivering this. Especially now with LLMs, the coding part of the problem should be easier than ever.
I have no desire to become a millionaire and I already have a job, and do I need to remind you of the HN guidelines you've clearly forgotten?
Now you're shying away from this fact pretending it's snark and invoking then HN rules as a defense shield. What a wiesel.
You claimed I said it was "trivial" which I didn't, I said it was "relatively easy".
Then you went into that nonsense of if it's so easy then why don't you do it and become a millionaire yadda yadda, which is a dumb cliche and also uncalled for, since I was merely writing my opinion, not challenging you or calling you out.
> and invoking then HN rules as a defense shield. What a wiesel.
The HN guidelines ask you to reply to the most charitable interpretation of a comment. Do you honestly think that's what you did with your millionaire comment?
> someone else would have attempted it already.
You don't know that it hasn't (or isn't being attempted), and in any case, everything hasn't happened until it does. Like you said, especially now in the age of LLMs, and especially with Amazon become worse and worse.
- A vast gulf separates the potential exposure on established platforms vs smaller or DIY platforms, and that dramatically affects income. Same with usability of the platform on a whole. When a nontechnical person sees that they have to put down their phone, boot up a computer (which they might not even own,) download a couple of programs, etc. etc. etc. they’ll be on Amazon, seconds later, pricing out the new kindles. That sucks, but if you make media of any sort for a living, you can’t just pretend that isn’t true.
- There‘a a huge difference in strategy between being a hobbyist/side hustler and being a full-time professional. You can’t just scale your hobby business up like that.
- Wanting to make a living as a writer, designer, artist, musician, etc. is not a moral failure. Few would deride developers who want to be paid for their work instead of exclusively making FOSS software and hoping for donations. I’m not sure why creatives doing the same thing are seen as greedy.
> On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?
We're needlessly making this into a general problem. Why hastily discuss ideal models? The current model is fine and the issue isn't generalized. We're talking about having the option to skip asshole middlemen, or to be more specific, Amazon. A company so big that solving this special case on its own leaps us a huge portion of the way into solving the problem at large.
Is the general sentiment that Steam is also an asshole?
You can also buy DRM free self-published books quite easily nowadays. Amazon doesn't have a monopoly on e-commerce, not yet at least.
Haha yes, they are even more evil en masse.
But never feel bad about not sending money to Amazon.
I’ve seen an argument that buying an album from a musician (or a physical media or merch) and pirating the rest of their library in most cases more profitable to the musician than streaming.
I suppose there’s a similar dynamic in publishing where the overhead created by all the intermediaries is significant compared to the actual work done by the author, editor, designers, and so on.
> I’ve seen an argument that buying an album from a musician (or a physical media or merch) and pirating the rest of their library in most cases more profitable to the musician than streaming.
Streaming is a particularly brutal example for musicians. Book authors make quite a bit more per book sale than musicians make per stream.
It would be a great way to demonstrate how broken the funding model is, and all of that money would be money that didn't contribute to the surveillance/censorship tech that copyright is used to justify.
Edit: hah, only 15 minutes late with my attempt at Socratic spiel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810056
If an author living at place X sells directly to a reader living at place Y and it is not true that for all governments G PlaceInJurisdictionOf(X,G) == PlaceInJurisdictionOf(Y,G), then the author is making a cross border sale which can have annoying tax considerations.
The internet made it very easy for someone to physically run a small business that conducts transactions across dozens or even hundreds of borders, especially if they are selling intangible goods, but as far as I know the legal environment has not been updated for that.
Hence it is a lot easier to use a middleman who handles the legal stuff with cross border transactions and you only have to deal with the middleman.
I'd love it if voluntary payment could be mobilized to the point where it's more profitable to authors than the shit treatment they're getting from Amazon. For many, piracy is about rejecting the problematic distribution mechanism, not stinginess. It would be great to have a way to provably put our money where our mouths are (provably, because making Amazon look bad is part of the fun).
(I guess if I really wanted to, at my rough reading pace of one book per week, I could place a hold on two books per week, and on average every week I'd get two books available, pick one to read, and just cycle the other back into the hold queue.)
If you don't want to resort to piracy, there are many vendors that sell epubs with weak DRM and presumably give money to publishers. Ebooks.com is one. If you have not already, I would recommend looking into calibre for managing such titles.
(I did this even when I used to buy from Kindle, first thing I would do is break the DRM and put it into calibre even if I was only reading on Amazon devices, because I never trusted Amazon in the first place. But supposedly the DRM breaking flow is broken with new kindle releases.)
And yeah, it sucks. But it’s the ecosystem you bought into when you bought a kindle. This is what drm does. If you care about open systems, support them.
Yes, you prevent him from selling a copy to your friend, but he already has your money!
The public library is of course an option as many mention, assuming they have the book in their inventory. You might also be able to check it out from https://openlibrary.org/
They don't have it, because they've limited shelf space and only stock popular books that are on best-seller lists. The History of Scruggs Biplanes 1907-1919 isn't one of them.
Buy books at Kobo or bookshop.org
There are so many functional kindles out there, this could be the event that changes the power dynamic and puts the author-reader relationship back in the center instead of the publisher/distributor.
It's what's slowly happening in the Movie industry now: The studios learn that they can't create sustainable value by just spending money and adding stars to a production. But directors create value. So they are suddenly put front and center and actively promoted.
Not to argue rich people never did anything useful for humanity. The pun is that one may be promoted to great status for doing great things but after that there is no obligation to continue doing great things.
We are in an endless war against the great void and we've appointed many generals who at best couldn't care less about the war and at worse joined the dark side.
You've paid the man and now you get to see books you like fly into the great nothingness. Funny as hell! He showed non of the kindness and generosity he is known for?
You should give him more money, maybe something different happens next time.
haha
I wouldn't attribute this phenomenon to biology. But in a healthy world, there would have been an intervention by now—at the very least with pitchforks, but ideally through institutional channels. I'm curious to see if that will still happen, or if we'll simply hand the world over to our new feudal overlords without putting up a fight.
We will again (proverbially) ride our horse to the saloon with our gun (or sword) hanging from our belt, we will play poker, smoke, drink, sing, dance and hang out with the guys - only to have each one of those things taken away again.
- First they stopped allowing download of purchased books for cable-transfer to kindle in 2025.
- Then they amped up their effort to avoid jailbreaking by suddenly releasing more firmware updates than before.
- Now they stopped supporting a wide range of kindles.
Amazon obviously assumes that they sufficiently killed the competition so they don't need to worry about customers leaving.
As for me, I managed to exit on-time, applied a jailbreak on my kindle touch and now buy my books elsewhere...
My understanding is that it's only downloading via the amazon kindle store that is no longer supported for devices that are considered end-of-life, which makes sense to me personally. The kindle web browser is probably based on an ancient android version of chrome. That browser is not going to last forever.
Kindle, for many years and I think even now, does not actually support EPUB, for likely unethical reasons you can probably guess; I believe the Kindle email address method hides a conversion to the AZW / AZW3 format.
The Amazon ecosystem isn’t uniquely untrustworthy, but it’s not where I want to keep future electronic purchases.
It’s straight up greed, IMHO.
1. But the book on kobo or ebooks 2. Convert it to mobi and transfer it Kindle using calibre
This is incidentally after a kindle phase terminated by Amazon after I returned too much of their third rate junk that didn’t work for me to remain a profitable customer.
Fuck ‘em.
- Buy nearly any audiobook that's on Audible or other services
- Donate to your favorite local bookstore
- Get the downloadable audio file without DRM
1. Also called a loan-library in some areas - basically a box that random folks can put books into and take books out of without any strings attached.