I know this won't be a popular take on HN, but while I can understand and to a certain extent sympathize with pirating movies (the intentional friction and arbitrary geographic limitations on access imposed by the multinational movie-industry conglomerates), I can't see stealing some poor author's work in the same light.
Sure, people get hung-up about DRM (which can easily be removed by widely-accessible tools), but e-books can be purchased pretty much anywhere in the world. I'm in Sweden but buy most of my e-books from the US. But often buy books directly from publishers (hopefully they, and the author, get a better cut that way).
The fact these people were trying to personally profit (some other HN:ers have documented this), while trying to present themselves as some sort of "information wants to be free" info-warriors doesn't make the whole thing any better.
An enormous amount of work goes into producing a book - through a close friend who works in book-publishing I know a couple of authors who pretty much starve for a year or two to produce their work - and then the editing, typesetting, designing, proof-reading etc is all an enormous and personal investment.
In spite of what people think, authors are not all budding J.K.Rowlings with movie-deals and a couple of billion in the bank, and if we don't buy their books, they won't be able to produce the next one for people to pirate.
> but e-books can be purchased pretty much anywhere in the world. I'm in Sweden
Sorry, but by "pretty much anywhere in the world" you clearly mean "first world". If you live outside of US/Canada and EU it is much harder to obtain books legally. Publishing agreements usually cover specific countries, and no-one cares about, for example, selling books in English in Central Asia. So even if you have means to pay for the book (which can be challenging - and I'm not talking about "having money" here, I'm talking about "technical possiblity" - Visa and Mastercard are not as universal as they might seem from the first world), most of the time no-one can or wish to sell it to you legally.
Interesting that Steam solved most of that problems for game distribution though. They have worldwide publishing agreements, regional prices AND good support of local payment providers in many countries. I think a lot of people underestimate how these factors allowed Steam to overtake piracy.
Let's not forget the pricing, as well. Older games are actually priced lower than most books and movies, which are still being artificially inflated by their respective distributors.
> If you live outside of US/Canada and EU it is much harder to obtain books legally
I completely agree and even though I imagine countries outside of these have it much worse, even within the EU you can find massive differences between countries. For example, there is a much smaller selection in Eastern European countries vs. Western, and books are the same price or sometimes even pricier while wages are significantly lower.
>Interesting that Steam solved most of that problems for game distribution though. They have worldwide publishing agreements, regional prices AND good support of local payment providers in many countries. I think a lot of people underestimate how these factors allowed Steam to overtake piracy.
Sadly it is being ruined by people from first-world using VPNs. Many AAA stopped using regional prices and we're stuck paying the same cost as in the first world.
From the other side it feels just as unfair. When I lived of ~AU$200 a month, $100 towards rent, a new game was ~$100 in Aus. It was often much cheaper to buy physical copies from Asia and import.
It's very simple actually. You (and most of HN) live in a tech industry bubble. Living wages in the U.S are terrible and disposable income is non-existent. I work a 9-5 just like everyone else but when it comes down to it I don't have the money to buy new books. I can either buy used paperback from a second-hand store, go to the library, or pirate an epub. None of these options pay the original author and are effectively the same. Given that I was never going to pay anyways, why do you find the third option unethical? It hurts absolutely no one but greatly enhances my quality of life and (in some cases) helps society by making me a more educated individual. The only thing piracy costs authors is opportunity (which in my case was always 0).
If you're pirating Stephen King or a 300$ textbook from a guy who has tenure at Harvard I doubt anyone probably including the author cares but a fair amount of authors aren't making any more than you make.
Friend of mine published her own graphic novel basically living in her parents attic and a day after it was out someone had ripped it and thrown it on a comic piracy site. That's not ethical.
If you live on a 12-15/hour salary which I have too you still can afford the occassional book here and there, you can't tell me you spend zero on recreational stuff. I don't care if anyone fleeces Marvel studios but if people start pirating independent works from people no better off, often worse, that's iffy.
I appreciate your sentiment, and trust me I really do want to support people like your friend, but no I literally do not have any money for recreational activities (and if I did I would buy a videogame or boardgame because it would last longer). I make $13.50 / h (which is above minimum wage here in Arizona) and go to school full-time. Rent is $1,000 (absolute cheapest I have found in my college town), groceries are roughly $500, gas is $50-$100 depending on world affairs, utilities are $250,public transportation (so that I don't have to pay for parking at shool) is $50, and the list goes on tbh. I'm lucky enough to have a Prius that was given to me by my family so no car payment even. I'm one of the lucky ones for being in college at all. This is the America that most people live in. Well even that isn't true, I have it way better than most.
Checking out from a library and grabbing a pirated version are different in that checking out from a library generates demand. The library may respond by buying additional copies of a given work, and you can put in requests to your local library to buy work if they don't currently stock it. Even if a library refuses to buy the work, it's common for libraries to loan works to each other-- so a library from another city or further out may buy the book and let you borrow it for example. It all generates demand for libraries to buy more.
There are no objective ethics. It's an open problem.
There's a whole lot of words to be said about that, but it's hardly worth discussion because ultimately the result would be wasted breath.
Anyway, the sphere of economics is the least ethical domain of humanity there is. My dollar is not equal to your dollar, and our dollars aren't equal to Musk or Bezos. We pretend that is the case. There never were and never will be equivocality in exchange unless it's one idea for another.
What privilege you must enjoy to have such fucking stupid "ethics" lmao. You wouldn't last a day in my shoes. Money only gets you so far in life, kindness and mutual aid goes a lot further.
Large-scale pirates that can actually reach a significant amount of people almost never rip-off indie creators, and even if they do, they are the least likely to impact sales - people are unlikely bother acquiring illegitimate copies of obscure indie works as against big-brand stuff whose names they have actually heard of.
I really doubt the sales of the graphic novel that friend of yours were impacted in any non-negligible way by it being ended up on a piracy site. If anything, it might as well have worked as an advertisement.
> People who pirate would not pay for that stuff anyway.
How can then Steam, Nerflix, etc. reduce piracy by orders of magnitude? That means that at least 99% of the people getting stuff without paying would instead... pay?
No. People who wouldn't pay otherwise now have easy and relatively cheap access which reduces the friction so much, it doesn't make sense to scour the web for keygens and cracks and what not.
Now, with a gazillion streaming services we'll see piracy ruse again because of friction and cost.
Or, simply, these services brought in the otherwise non-paying crowd.
We already had this discussed and explained many times over. Why are we at it again?
Quote: "In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU. However, it never ended up showing it to the public except for one cherry-picked section. That's possibly because the study concluded that there was no evidence that piracy affects copyrighted sales, and in the case of video games, might actually help them."
Overall the question is complex, and this is a good study: https://www.ivir.nl/publicaties/download/Global-Online-Pirac... which shows that it's not clear-cut, depends on income and availability etc. And that piracy may have both negative impacts (4% fewer visits to cinema) and positive impacts (increased visits to life concerts etc.)
However, quote, "an increase in illegal consumption over time is found to correlate with an increase in legal consumption and vice versa". The reason is: most decisions are done on the spot, and consumers chose the path of least resistance.
BetterWorldBooks.com is excellent. I have bought from them for years. I recommend you try it.
Also, you wrote: <<None of these options pay the original author>> Libraries buy millions of books per year in the US -- expensive hardbacks. They must be the single largest buying group. That money pays authors. Also, I never once saw an author upset that a library was lending their book. The same is true for second hand book selling.
I'm going to pretend you are serious and genuine so:
- living wages in the US are something most of the rest of world only dreams about. And most can afford to buy a book once in a while, even new (of course it depends on the book). Source: eastern Europe.
- second hand and library books have generated revenue for the author already. Going full piracy and decreasing demand for the those two hurts the author, hurts the second book stores and hurts the libraries.
I pirate books as well but at least I'm honest about the consequences of my actions.
I am absolutely genuine, and I think you do not understand the average American. The rest of the world may dream about our wages but it's still putting lipstick on a pig. Most the people I know can't even feed their families right now, let alone buy a book for pleasure. I'm not sure where you are getting your information from but the lives of college-educated middle-class Americans and above are not representative of the majority. I will clarify, I obviously DO NOT think that my situation compares to someone in another country, specifically under-developed ones. In the context of books and recreational activities, however, I think you are vastly overestimating the US.
I agree with you, even if it is unethical to pirate books I'd make the case that pirating books you can't afford to buy is what helped a non-trivial amount of people escape the generational cycle of poverty. In this particular case, stealing knowledge for a chance at a better career, the end might justify the means.
Programmers from poor countries and poor backgrounds are were they are today making a good living from this career probably because of torrents with collections of programming books back from 10 years ago or more when free video learning on YouTube wasn't as developed as it is today.
I made some sweeping generalizations but I hope I got my point across at least. This criminal avenue of pirating books and stealing potential revenue from authors is what allows some people to enjoy a better living.
Median household income in the US in 2022 is $78,000. The average American has adequate income and can't justify pirating movies, books, music, porn, etc. on the basis of poverty.
That is a wildly skewed outlook. The per-capita income in America is $35,000 (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/SEX255221). Household income, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, includes the gross cash income of all people ages 15 years or older occupying the same housing unit, regardless of how they are related, if at all. Meaning my household income is somewhere above $100K because I have 3 roommates. Typically, the lower your income the more roommates you have. Median household income is a useless figure for determining how well the average American is doing.
This context free numbers isn't illustrative or even useful. The world isn't populated by median Americans earning median salaries in a median cost of living area. Imagine 5 households in areas where the poverty line for their household size are 30k 50k and 70k 70k 70k
We have could have learned from the sample that the majority live in areas where wages are higher but so are costs of living and the median value is 70k which seems like a lot of money until we figure out that rent alone costs most of this money and all parties are on food stamps. This also ignores just how far below that median value many of the bottom half actually are. The bottom half lest we forget is 169 million Americans many just getting by as their entire segment of the population shares about 10% of the total income and virtually none of its wealth. None of these facts about the actual distribution of wealth and income is captured by looking at a median income and making up a fiction about what an imaginary American can afford.
>None of these facts about the actual distribution of wealth and income is captured by looking at a median income and making up a fiction about what an imaginary American can afford.
Funny you would end by writing of making up a fiction about what an imaginary American can afford when both this comment and your other one are imaginary realities. You say rent takes up most of some $70k, it doesn't. You say "all parties" at that income level are on food stamps, they're not, the percentage of Americans using food stamps varies by year but is 13-15%. You say 169 million Americans are below the median income, no, because we're talking about household income. And, you know, why would you put the 72 million children into this as they generally have $0 income and their expenses are paid by their parents. As well, I'm quite aware of what the distribution of income as I've looked it up in the past. The Congressional Budget Office does a regular report on the distribution of household income and taxes. In the last such report, 2018, the average pretax household income for the bottom quintile before taxes is $22k, after taxes and means tested transfers their income is $38k (yes, they do have a negative net tax rate.) Which is sufficient to live in most big cities in the US.
These [0] people did an analysis of the cost of living in the largest 74 cities in the US. The most expensive among these cities was Irvine, CA with a monthly cost of living of $3062 and a median individual income of $55k. Americans don't have to fight rats for scraps of food from the trash.
Seems I didn't make myself clear the point is that looking at the median income tells you nothing about the actual distribution of disposable income because someone barely making it in a high income zone could trivially have what seems like a high income and have little disposable income. This is especially true with rent and cost of living both rising faster than most people's incomes. The bottom half has little disposable income everywhere except for your projections.
Before I get to some numbers nobody will read the fact is I doubt very much that most readers here have anything but a passing understanding of what its like to actually be at the bottom.
Lets zoom on down to irving and imagine we are dealing with a parent or 2 and 1 kid and need a 2 bedroom apartment. Going on a brief peruse of apartments.com I'm seeing a 2 br apartment starts at about 2600 USDA thrifty food plan would suggest about 780 per month for 3 people depending on age and sex.
If we can't actually deal with both people working while using just public transit we will have to probably burn 800 a month for car payment, insurance, upkeep and gas.
Electricity/water another 300-350
Phones another 60 minimum, internet 80
Now lets talk about health insurance we are probably going to pay about $500 and easily more like 750 for something that isn't a complete joke.
Now lets talk about savings because if we don't have any the first time the car needs to be repaired we're all going to lose our jobs and end up homeless plus at some point we will have to retire so allocate $500 for that.
We are at about 6000 a month while still only sketching out the outline of a life. I'm assuming our fictional family would also like to wear cloths, by toilet paper, wash their clothes, have some form of entertainment and enlightenment, maybe even engage in the normal family activity of having a pet animal of some sort bigger than a hamster.
We would probably be able to live a reasonable life for more like 7000 a month or 84,000. This means Joe median+ is probably OK but again ONE HALF OF PEOPLE ARE BELOW THE MEDIAN BY DEFINITION AND THEY ARE NOT EVENLY DISTRIBUTED IN TOTAL OR DISPOSABLE INCOME. Most of the poor folks are seeing their already insufficient wages and the cost of health insurance and rent going up and wondering if they can afford to pay rent and health care in 5 years while you insist they have plenty of money to spare. You don't live in the same universe. Going to move.org gives you an incredibly shitty approximation of what it actually costs to live your life. You know less by far than you think you do.
> The US has the largest gap between its top earners and everyone else. The Netherlands actually surpasses the US for GDP per-capita of the bottom 99%, and the difference between Germany and the US narrows considerably.
A. The economy is not zero sum. Lebron James making lots of money doesn't take anything away from you.
B. Median: the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution. It's not an average, there are no outliers dragging the median up. It's just an ordered listing and then looking at the one in the middle and seeing how much they make per year. If you removed all the billionaires and their income from the chart it wouldn't change the median income at all because the position of the median would only move 350 places. If you took away the top ten percent the median position would shift to the left 5% and the median annual income decreases a few thousand dollars per year. But in no way is the typical American living in poverty and desperation. (Turns out that only 11% of the US live in poverty.)
How do you define poverty? The federal poverty line is a figure that where most people live would afford you a fine living commuting between your 2 jobs and your tent living as a hobo and the public library where you give yourself a sponge bath.
I bought a Kobo for its easy public library integration. Jokes on me. My public library doesn't have most of the books I want, and the way ebooks are leased to public libraries is a disgrace-- something I only found out after buying the Kobo. So, what's a guy to do? I buy the books wherever I can find them at the cheapest price (usually on the used market, sometimes via Kindle store, sometimes via Kobo store). Then, I pirate it, since that's a much more convenient way to get a DRM-free format that actually works on my device.
In my case, at least, I paid for every z-library book I ever downloaded--with one exception. Z-library also made it easy to browse books the way you would in a physical book store. Sometimes, you think, "Looks interesting." You open it up, read a few pages and realize, "Not for me." Z-library was a good way to do this.
Both of those are legitimate use cases. Probably not the most common use case, but it sure was handy, and now I've got to find a replacement.
Many of the books I am interested in have actually been financed by tax payers, because their authors are professors. These days publishers are not adding much value here, actually they often make high quality publishing harder by terrible off-shore handling of LaTeX.
I've bought quite a few ebooks from the AMS (American Mathematical Society), just to get very angry about the annoying small print on the bottom of EVERY FREAKING PAGE stating that I am the owner of this book. I don't feel bad about replacing these damaged goods with the real deal.
Not only that, but many publishers, specifically scientific ones, seem to get in the way of the natural near-0 marginal cost of digital publishing. Information should be available to all by default, because the value of having it freely available is much more than even what people could be expected to individually all pay for it. In the end, having a million paywalls and restricting information for disadvantaged individuals is not rational (or ethical), or effective for a society.
A lot of the usage I see of these sites is in the academic world. Academic publishing is a nightmare (especially on the journal side).
The books are often not available at all in the region you’re in or if they are, they might be priced differently. It’s especially difficult because you’re going to skim a book to see if it has any relevant material, then move on to the next one. Usually university libraries are the only way of doing this, but not everyone has access to one. No individual is going to buy a dozen books nominally priced at >100 usd each just to write a paper for their masters degree or similar
>The books are often not available at all in the region you’re in or if they are, they might be priced differently.
Also, "the region you're in" can even mean the same country as the publisher, or even anywhere in the world. Publishers may be unwilling to sell the books to individuals at all, or may sell them only as part of larger sets with very high prices. They may only be willing to sell hardcover copies, for a premium, even if they do produce softcover ones. It's simply not feasible, in most cases, to purchase the books you need to do scholarly research as an individual. And if you're looking at digital publications, the situation becomes even worse.
I recently had someone tell me that their father, in the US, had been looking, not wanting to ask them, for a copy of a book they had just published a chapter in. The book could only be purchased by individuals as a set of six books, all in hardcover, for around $500.
Part of the problem here is that individuals are often not the target customers for academic publishing: libraries are. Publishers can be worried that if they do sell in ways that are convenient to individuals, that might reduce their profits from libraries. If they sell books individually, instead of as larger sets, then university libraries can order only the volumes that people request, rather than needing to purchase all of them. If they sell softcover copies, libraries can buy them and rebind them in-house, or simply have them as softcover, rather than needing to pay that premium. If they have prices that are reasonable for individuals choosing books to buy with their own money, the prices will need to be far lower than what they can be for libraries being instructed to buy books by others and needing to figure out how.
And, as you mention, the journal (and reference) side is even worse. Outside of very high profile journals, which are simply expensive for individual subscriptions, many otherwise quite reasonable journals from reputable publishers simply won't offer subscriptions to individuals at all: their only option for individuals may well be article-level purchases at prices that would be utterly absurd for actual research. In some cases, they also won't offer subscriptions to institutions, except as a (potentially very large) package of journals. At a small university, I can remember the library pointing out that getting access to one yearly proceedings publication very important for our field would cost a five figure yearly amount per year, because it was only sold as a package of hundreds of publications. Larger universities can have problems with this in the six or seven figures.
Ultimately the answer will be about rights and really suggesting the author can put arbitrary restrictions in content that's been purchased.
Those restrictions exist for financial reasons not moral. As such this is not theft in any ethical sense but a quirk of the laws. A law apparently many people disagree with...
What people fail to realize is that ebooks sometimes cost libraries more money than physical books. The libraries buy them with cost of degradation in mind, so after x number of lends, they have to repurchase the book in order to keep making it available to their patrons. This is how they're able to make an agreement with the publisher in order to legally provide you with a digital lending library.
Careful there, you might burst the libertarian-leaning conceit behind the "difference" between libraries & unregulated e-books: if libraries didn't already exist today with centuries of tradition in their foundations, the very suggestion of an institution like them would be met with howls of the inevitable destruction of the written word and bankrupting of our already starved wordsmiths.
I'm pretty sure that the law does not permit you to re-sell digital copies. As when you purchase a digital book (DRM or not), you don't own the digital copy - you're only granted a license to use it for your own use. This license does not extend to reselling it (what your suggestion would be doing).
Every person in the world doesnt use a single library with a single copy. Every local library purchases one or more. How many did Zlib purchase? How many Zlibs are there?
I think you need to specify what context you're talking in.
Do you see it as...
1. Criminal
2. Immoral
3. Having downsides
I think we agree it's not criminal (as scale doesn't apply to a binary criminality judgement stealing a penny is as criminal as stealing a pound though punishment will vary).
Are you suggesting it's immoral? Because I can't see where you make such an argument.
Or are you saying well it has downsides as authors may earn less? It's likely book purchases are affected by libraries. I don't think the effect is as profound as people think.
Without that context it's quite hard to discuss this topic.
That's a logical race to the bottom that makes me think you have never checked out a book from a US library. If you were to calculate how much an author makes from their book being in libraries it's miniscule. For starters most library books are donated secondhand and not purchased new by libraries. Secondly, most libraries only have a single copy of a given book unless it is a major title (It's not uncommon for waitlists to be booked up for months where I live). Additionally, most titles are shared across multiple libraries in a state or city. Where I live you can return a book to any library because they just circulate copies around the state. Regardless, there are roughly 9,000 public libraries in the U.S. let's pretend that every single library purchases 1 copy of a given book new (an extremely generous estimate). Most authors are not self-published and earn 10-12% royalties, but let's pretend this author is self-published and earns around 40% from their printer before operational expenses. Let's also pretend it's an absolute banger of a book and is selling for a whopping $20/copy. That means they make $8/copy before taxes, bookstore fees, shipping, and other expenses that the self-publisher does not pay for. Let's be generous and say they somehow make $8/copy after all of that. If every library bought 1 copy (which, again. They do NOT) the author would earn $72,000. That's absolute peanuts compared to what they earn on Amazon from people who can afford firsthand books. The point of libraries and piracy is not to stop people who CAN afford books from buying them. It's supposed to enable those who CANNOT. A more productive approach would be to publicly fund authors but according to Americans that's filthy communism.
One nit to pick. In my experience (NYC and Boston areas), libraries almost only buy their books new and specifically request for people to not donate their used books to them.
Other libraries I've been in have used book sales with donated books to raise funds for the library.
>A more productive approach would be to publicly fund authors but according to Americans that's filthy communism.
That's how you get books written by authors who are good at filling out government forms, not books written by good authors. See the many terrible pieces of public art that is required in many places as part of public construction projects as an example of what I'm talking about.
It goes back to opportunity though. Most people who pirate books don't have the income or ability to purchase them new. The scale is irrelevant if the per-user profit opportunity is 0. The only thing that changes is more people read and further their education.
Imagine the person who cannot afford a book or paper on a particular topic. Should they not have access to the information?
I agree, as always there is nuance, but zlib et al fulfill a need for certain people. In b4 public libraries, they aren't equal around the world, depend on geographic proximity and add latency to the learning process.
The key question is, what proportion of zlibrary users would have purchased the books legitimately if piracy didn't exist, or would have been able to afford it? Anecdotally I suspect most pirates have little income for books but I can't find data on this.
The error in this argument is assuming that the price of a good must equal its marginal cost. Software, for example, also has a marginal cost of zero -- it can be reproduced with the same technology as electronic text, and yet developing software is expensive, so the price of each copy is set above the marginal cost so that the developer gets paid. By denying the developer the right to set a price for their work, you are in effect forcing them to work for someone else for free. It does not matter what the marginal cost is.
Now there's a lot of open source software, and a lot of open access publications and free books out there, as well as systems in place -- we call them "libraries" -- by which taxpayers purchase works on behalf of the public and make them available in limited quantities for no charge. And here I need to reiterate the bane of badly construed interventions is trying to control prices rather than adjusting incomes. Stop messing with prices. The way we help the poor is with income support, not by creating a parallel price system for the poor.
I don’t think anyone should work for free, I don’t know what the right answer is. It’s a shame when someone doesn’t get paid for their work due to piracy, but also a shame if someone can’t access an important work to them that is free to deliver but they just can’t afford (like a student/researcher, etc). Ideally digital works should be free and donation supported, where people voluntarily contribute what they feel the work is worth, limited by what they can afford. But I won’t delude myself into thinking something like that would actually work.
You're not - they can just not do the work. You can argue that a business model is being destroyed; you can't argue that anyone is "forced to work for free" by piracy, because they're not forced to work in the first place.
“Imagine a completely different question! Check mate!”
GP asked a simple yes or no question: Do you think knowledge should be denied to people that can’t afford it?
Your answer is “yes.” I don’t see the added value of trying feeble linguistic jiu jitsu to justify your position that yes, society should deny knowledge to those who can’t afford it.
> which can easily be removed by widely-accessible tools
Even if that were true today, it's a cat-and-mouse game and it may not always be true.
I don't know if FairPlay DRM that Apple uses or Adobe's DRM has been thoroughly cracked, but last time I checked, Amazon's KFX hasn't truly been cracked yet. The best I've seen are workarounds to get Amazon to deliver the book in an older format that has been cracked, but then you lose the typography improvements that are tied to the new format.
I'm french. I occasionally buy ebooks, but the price of eBooks is maintained artificially higher to protect traditional (paper) channels. The things is, that extra money does _not_ go to the authors, which I would finance way more wholeheartedly. Basically you get taxed because of your medium preferences, and the money is pocketed by the worse actor of the whole business.
> if we don't buy their books, they won't be able to produce the next one for people to pirate.
This is a false dichotomy. Book piracy and traditional book publishing co-exist. If book publishing wants to better compete with piracy, they can innovate like other industries have. As well, your implied prediction —- that if we don’t “stop all the downloading” [0] then books will disappear —- is decidedly ahistorical. Books have existed since long before publishing houses existed, and indeed it’s easier than ever to publish a book and get money for it.
Put another way, there's no difference in profit between:
10,000 book sales and zero pirated copies.
10,000 book sales and 10 million pirated copies.
The only thing left to argue about is what percentage of those pirated copies would have turned into book sales if the free versions had not been available.
Artificial scarcity is still bad. Imagine a world where books are free for everybody, not just for people who live in prosperous areas with good libraries. Would you then advocate making books nonfree thereby placing books out of reach for 2/3rd of the world population, which is more or less where we are today?
For fiction, I almost exclusively read online serialized fanfiction/webfiction. This is already the world I live in. And I can confirm: it's pretty great.
Getting access to books for instance in SEA or Africa is an entirely different story to one of the richest countries in the world with some of the highest standards of living (in your case Sweden but could apply to most EU/NA/AU/NZ).
I would say the vast majority pirating couldn't afford the work in the first place, meaning nothing is lost from the perspective of the author. It's not a sale stolen, it's someone that would otherwise simply go without.
Although I fully agree with the points you make I just want to point out that being wealthy (from a world average wealth standpoint) is dissociated from being white.
The issue is limited access to resources due to lack of wealth, or geo-location with bizantine distribution contracts. Race has little to do with this discussion. Plenty of white poor people across the globe, plenty of non-white rich people across the globe.
It's human culture. The idea that it should be the sole provenance of rich multi-nationals to decide who can afford to read is disgusting. It should all be freely accessible.
Removing money from the equation would also solve other quality issues.
A huge majority of book authors (especially for technical writing) are not professional authors, and barely get any money from book sales. Ask any university professor that has had a book published.
It's 'disgusting' to suggest others should have to labour for you for free - and suggesting 'removing money from the issue would solve' issues is more than naive, it's glib.
IP is not 'corporate protectionism'.
The entire system absolutely depends on it, moreover, the vast majority of IP holders are very small entities.
Particularly in this case, authors.
The internet is actually a greatly liberating opportunity for authors, especially those on the 'long tail' to develop an audience that they would never have an opportunity to otherwise.
And of course - anyone who wants to create for free, as many do, can do that.
But if there's no concept of IP, then it implies 'creative work goes unpaid' and paradoxically, flushes surpluses into those that have much more material power in the value chain - a bit like 'open source' devs who work tirelessly on projects whereupon the surpluses are mostly captured by large corporate institutions.
Of course there's always grey areas, and on some level 'release valves' for information is appropriate, but on the whole, IP protections are reasonable.
Vast amount of the works we are used to in our daily lives both professional and private, upon which we depend, would immediately vanish, lacking any kind of viable business model.
Finally - there's much ado in Africa on so many fronts, if you want to help to solve IP distribution issues there related to price discrimination, there's a lot of opportunity there.
Yes, indeed, government-mandated monopolies are really the best way to make sure the "creative works" of fundamentally indeterminable values get paid and the "free-market" is upheld /s.
This moronic notion that IP somehow encourages creativity is so delusional it's not even funny. Did Michelangelo and Shakespeare need copyrights to their works to make money? Have thinkers and authors who contributed most to human intellectual evolution across the Golden Ages and Renaissances of science, arts and philosophies ever needed state-enforced punishments against non-consensual copying? Good works are not funded using abusive laws to crack down on those trying to share them, they get sponsored by communities that value them.
There are countless examples of absolutely garbage works that end up making a lot of money and there are countless awesome works that are completely free to the public. IP does nothing to reward good productions, all it does is help publishers and governments abuse individual rights and control information. NOBODY HAS THE RIGHT TO HAVE A MONOPOLY ON IDEAS AND INFORMATION. You are free to keep your ideas and information private, but if you make them public they are NOT your private property anymore. IP laws are probably among the worst inventions the west has ever introduced to the world that has single-handedly held back unfathomable amounts of progress.
This is objectively and demonstratively wrong; the lurid ad hominem only adds to embarrassment.
If 'money was not involved' then Shakespeare, Michelangelo et. al. would not have made most of their works.
Moreover, you've used two examples of artists creating physical things for money, whereupon the very notion of 'IP' is not hugely relevant.
Obviously, people need an income to survive, and most great works require incredible investment of time, labour, materials etc..
The Sistine Chapel and The Statue of David - were both commissioned aka 'commercial works', and the works of those artists (along with Bach, Beethoven, and innumerable composers and artists since the dawn of time) are paid for by the Church, state officials, private organizations, or wealthy individuals. Only more recently from the public purse (Universities and most research institutions were socialized in the late 20th century).
If the Opera del Duomo / Florence Cathedral did not pay for Michelangelo - it would not exist. It was their idea in the first place.
Shakespeare was a populist playwright - if he did not entertain paying audiences at The Globe - most of his works would never have existed.
Even the Eiffel Tower - a magnificent centrepiece to the city of Paris, was almost entirely a commercial project.
Nobody is suggesting that 'creative works' ought to be inherently limited by IP, as I directly indicated in my point.
Nobody is suggesting that IP and other commercial aspects are primary drivers of creative impetus.
Nobody is suggesting that people would 'not do' at some creative work without being paid.
Nobody is suggesting that some kinds of information don't belong inherently in the public domain.
However - if people are not able to be compensated for their works, then only a tiny fraction of creative work will be done.
'Journalism' is a fairly important industry, and they've come under incredible duress due to the proliferation of information, there are many benefits from that, however, the lack of professional journalists is on the whole, a bad thing. Without some form of IP basis it would likely be impossible for them to exist.
The entire entertainment and sports industries would mostly cease to exist without IP, and even most non-fiction works would not be authored. Most productions, especially those involving more than one person are involved, such as film or TV, can only move froward knowing they will have a material income. If publishing were really some kind of toxic businesses grabbing all of the surpluses then a lot of people would be doing it. Clearly, that's not the case. The MBA's are flocking to the Wall Street and Valley, not to the Publishing Industry.
That a lot of content out there is 'not very good' is a bit besides the point, it's not your right to tell people how they want to be entertained.
If you want to see what a world would look like without IP rights, visit the National Film Board of Canada and contemplate that's pretty much all that would exist: the totality of entertainment. They do a few good bits, but most of it is frankly not very good (as evidenced by the complete lack of interest in this content). And that would be all of your Netflix/Disney/ESPN etc. put together.
There's always room to debate about IP rights obviously, but what's shocking is how ostensibly intelligent people can't grasp how foundational IP rights are.
> If 'money was not involved' then Shakespeare, Michelangelo et. al. would not have made most of their works.
Yes, but wasn’t their model one of patronage rather than “intellectual property”? William Shakespeare predated the Statute of Anne, Britain’s first copyright law, by one hundred years.
So let's totally remove the heat-transfer agent from the thermodynamic machine of society and instead rely on an army of maxwell demons to decide how much food and floor space each human element in the system should be given for its work, right?
That was called 'communism', had been attempted to implement, resulted in millions of deaths and miserably failed regardless due to the physics of the process.
The heat transfer agent is not the problem per se, it's the ability of some entities to create it out of thin air and pump into the system, as well as shady mechanisms of its distribution.
Maybe I'm thinking wrong but I expected digital editions of books to be like $3 or something since there are no printing/shipping costs of the equivalent printed book.
In the old analog world, authors might expect 15% of gross sales. You figure the publisher needed the 85% to cover printing, shipping of the physical book. (Oh, and they should make a profit there too.)
But if you no longer have to deal with pulp, I would naively expect an electronic book to sell for something like 30% of the cost of the physical book — splitting the sale between author and publisher. Presumably both parties still make a comparable profit.
I know I've dropped advertising on the floor in the above discussion and perhaps that counts for a significant cost to the publisher. But at the same time, assuming DRM, a digital book sale should benefit the publisher/author as it is typically non-transferable (unlike the physical books that end up in Little Libraries or Goodwill).
I might add that if eBooks dropped to $0.99 a book, I would be buying them faster than music tracks. Maybe Jobs got two things right. ;-)
Most of the cost of a book is not the physical pulp or ink that went into making the book, it is in the editing, typesetting, and marketing that went into making the book ready for sale, so ebooks generally should not be much cheaper than physical books.
Having read several self‐published Kindle Direct books that are incredibly deficient in the editing and typesetting departments (compared to earlier traditionally‐published works from the same authors), I find the fact rather obvious.
Download video games have the same issue. same price as physical release, cant resell it, never goes on sale, still the same price it started at 4 years later when a physical copy is 50% discounted. Already have a physical copy? no you cant download it.
Games have been AU$110 on release for current gen Xbox, while the in-store releases can be grabbed for $80-90 typically. Digital on-sale prices tends to track the physical normal/used prices too.
Never going on sale might be more of a Nintendo thing though, which is even worse. On the other hand, their cartridges at least let you play the game in whatever form it shipped - usually.
And the app apparently became worse. I wanted to buy some manga on comiXology, but when I downloaded the free trial chapter, it had a bunch of weird borders, which made it unenjoyable to read.
According to the reviews, the previous version of the app was much better, but the current version is just a reskin of the Kindle app.
I'm an author. Steal my book. The whole point of writing is to hopefully help anyone learn something that you've shared. Authors aren't writing for the money those who do are selling at such volumes that they'll never even notice the dip. In most cases they'd be trying to get blood from stone.
This is the simplest solution, get a drm ebook, and pay the person who wrote it directly, they'll get way more money from you that way than if you bought the book
Not sure the authors are getting much money, compared to the publishers. Perhaps it depends on the nice - I heard sci-fi is rather low margin, whereas academic publishing tends to be rent-seeking.
Still, with the world wide web, it's possible to cut out the middleman, get the book and directly support the author is he puts a Stripe button on his site. Not sure why we need the publishing company middleman anymore.
Not only that, I looked into republishing some books from the 80s, it is impossible to know who currently could possibly have legitimate rights to do so!
For any work out of print, one should be able to republish it and pay a nominal fee directly to the library of congress.
> I can't see stealing some poor author's work in the same light.
I sympathize with this sentiment. I have writers in my family.
Anyone who wants to be making money in writing is either (1) doing something else, like being a celebrity, and selling a book directly to their pre-existing audience (2) writing for TV, movies or went to law school. So few authors make money on their books, that the existence (or non-existence) of piracy has no impact on the aggregate experience of authors.
> if we don't buy their books
The truth is there is no audience for the vast majority of paid-up-front books, games, movies, music or other creative media. There is a large audience for TikToks. Part of the journey is coming to terms with this. The reality is people are writing because they like to, and the money doesn't matter, and the piracy doesn't matter, and they are not on Hacker News complaining about it anyway.
That said, I believe these sentiments, expressed elsewhere, about being American and being poor or whatever. The commenters have limited empathy and bandwidth.
Media publishers (and I use the term in the broadest sense) knew, going in, that the Internet was designed to distribute and copy information, in many cases completely anonymously. But they embraced the platform and chose that business model because they knew that it would lower their costs dramatically, even once piracy was taken into account, and they've been largely successful.
Also in my experience CEOs really know their businesses, which makes me think they also understand the economics and dynamics of piracy to a greater extent than the rest of us, even pirates. From what observe, I think that they see pirates largely as hobbyists and influencers rather than lost customers or individuals out for economic gain, and are really only concerned with piracy at scale, like in this Z library case.
> e-books can be purchased pretty much anywhere in the world
That would be true if and only if there's an ebook version for the book you want.
There are lots of books (even essential works for some fields) out there for which there are no legal ebooks. Your only hope would be to get a digitized PDF from zlibrary or libgen. Even if you had the cash to spare for purchasing it, you can't.
One interesting case is what happened with books such as James Livingston's "Modern Christian Thought" (Fortress Press). I need it as an ebook. Well, they have (and I have purchased) volume I as an ebook, but they have Volume II only as paperback.
I reached out to the publisher to inquire whether they are going to release Volume II as an ebook. Someone there answered, telling me that they "forgot" to release Volume II in electronic format, and that they plan to release it "soon". I'm still waiting...
>>An enormous amount of work goes into producing a book
So your saying books should be protected because they take alot of work, but movies should not because they dont?
I am highly confused by your ethical position here. Either creative works should be protected by copyright or they should not.
It seems your personal connection to authors have clouded your judgement in favor of that medium over other creatives mediums, I wonder if you would feel the same if you had personal relationships with independent film maker, to toss your analogy back, not ever filmmaker has a J.K Rowling book to make a film about which comes with a built in audience
Now me personally I think copyright is WAY over protective, I think the US original copyright law was a good balance, 14 years, with 1 extension if the physical person that created the work requests it (i.e corporations get 14 years only, individuals can get up to 28 years of protection)
10 USD is the average cost for an e-book from my anecdotal experience, some even 20. 200 USD our average salary range approximately.
It's not easy for us, you can say "well if you can't afford them then tough luck" which I could understand but that'd be your point for most of the third world. There's a reason Steam videogames regional prices exist for example (which people with VPNs ruined it exploting the system)
Sure, people get hung-up about DRM (which can easily be removed by widely-accessible tools), but e-books can be purchased pretty much anywhere in the world. I'm in Sweden but buy most of my e-books from the US. But often buy books directly from publishers (hopefully they, and the author, get a better cut that way).
The fact these people were trying to personally profit (some other HN:ers have documented this), while trying to present themselves as some sort of "information wants to be free" info-warriors doesn't make the whole thing any better.
An enormous amount of work goes into producing a book - through a close friend who works in book-publishing I know a couple of authors who pretty much starve for a year or two to produce their work - and then the editing, typesetting, designing, proof-reading etc is all an enormous and personal investment.
In spite of what people think, authors are not all budding J.K.Rowlings with movie-deals and a couple of billion in the bank, and if we don't buy their books, they won't be able to produce the next one for people to pirate.