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It's easier and faster to pirate an e-book, than it is to buy it
615 points by leoff on Dec 29, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 482 comments
The end of the year is coming, and I have some funds left from my company learning budget. I wanted to give it back to some of the authors that still help me in my developer journey, by buying some of their work online and hopefully contributing to their income, but the following happened:

1. I went to Amazon, since I have a kindle and didn't want to buy physical books. Amazon doesn't have a shopping card for kindle books, so I started buying them one by one. My company uses Spendesk for managing funds, so for each of the purchase I created a new virtual card and bought them. After a few minutes my Amazon account is blocked for suspicious activity, and ALL my kindle library is wiped, and the funds are returned to my company.

2. Not wanting to give up, I go to a different online store, Thalia, to buy the books again. After buying them, I download the files, which are in an .acsm format, and can only be opened on the Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) software. Once opened, an .epub file is downloaded, and even though I can't transfer the files to my kindle on ADE, I download Calibre to transfer them. Once I try opening them on Calibre, I get an error message saying the files are protected by DRM. Funnily enough, it's possible to remove this DRM protection, but it's also not something completely legal, and makes me question why did I decide to legally buy the e-books in the first place.

After spending hours trying to buy e-books, having my Amazon account blocked, and downloading files that can't be transferred to my Kindle, the only conclusion I come to, is that I'm never buying e-books again.




I'm getting happier with my decision to embrace piracy again by the minute.

This isn't just true for books. Streaming film/TV is essentially cable TV at this point: you either pay out your arse for all streaming services or you have to constantly micromanage different subscriptions. Even if you are happy with the former, there is no way to centrally browse everything so you need 7 different apps.

Not to mention series being removed from streaming platforms because of profit: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/westworld-removed-from-hbo...

You can't even rely on being able to access the media you want in the future if you do it legally. It's insane.


Piracy is the answer.

I'm a big fan of old scifi films and series and the more obscure ones are getting harder to track down. Quite a lot of the stuff produced in the early 70s is sometimes available on DVD which can easily be ripped, but it depends on whether it was popular enough for them to issue it.

With some old BBC series, I'm in the position of paying for a license, but not everything is available. Just before Xmas, I was searching for M.R.James Christmas Ghost Story adaptations and whilst I was able to get the newer Mark Gatiss produced ones from iPlayer, the older "Tractate Middoth" isn't available (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03n2rnf).

There's going to be so many lost productions unless pirates get together to hoard old media.


I think society as a whole should have a long and in depth discussion on piracy in the first place. Piracy in the digital age is a weasel word used by vested interests. For instance datahoarding could be seen as a service to society.

There is no actual pirating going on when you copy a digital file. Now there could be a loss of income if it grows out of control and artists are not being compensated. So obviously the discussion should focus on that.

Steam already solved piracy for gaming. Make it easy to download and manage your games. Apparently the same hasn’t played out for movies and songs on the whole.


> There is no actual pirating going on when you copy a digital file.

I can't tell if you're taking the word literally or not. For the sake of argument:

Obviously there is no boat-stealing or plundering involved - no Johnny Depp or kraken here. But separately from whatever meaning you attach to the word "piracy" - illegally downloading creative works is theft. You are not entitled to someone else's creative work under any conditions other than those that they set, period.

Unless an artist explicitly says "here's this public domain artwork, share it however you want" (which some people do!), pirating is stealing - you are taking the work of someone's hands without paying them for it, and it literally doesn't matter if you wouldn't have paid for it in the first place, because the work does not belong to you - it belongs to the creator and they get to set the terms of use.

If you want a game or a TV show or a movie so badly - make it yourself. Put your own effort and time and resources and creative energy into it - then you can set whatever terms you want on its distribution.

Believing that you have the right to take whatever creative work that someone else put their effort into that you can get away with not paying for is one of the most extreme cases of entitlement I've ever witnessed, and it demonstrates an extreme selfishness and lack of respect for other human beings as equals.

I would be very interested to hear what moral axioms could justify the position of "I can take whatever I want from other people as long as it doesn't deprive them of a physical good".


I liked the Windows spin it: "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting."

Because they're right, the closest physical equivalent of software "piracy" isn't stealing, which takes the existing item and deprives someone of it, it's forgery, which creates a new "copy" of the item that certainly doesn't have the right provenance and incidentally might, possibly, differ in functional characteristics as well. It devalues legitimate copies of the item in the same ways that counterfeiting does, not the way that theft does.


Illegally downloading creative works is most assuredly _not_ theft, according to either the dictionary or the legal definitions, as no possessions are being taken and no one is being deprived of their property. Downloading creative works may or may not constitute copyright infringement; Relabeling it as "theft" is nothing more than a dishonest attempt at re-framing the conversation in a way that maximally benefits corporate interests.


It's similar to theft only in the sense that you get stuff for free without permission.

Before electronic copies, the only way to do that would be to physically steal such a thing. However, if it were possible to make copies of things via magic, without depriving people of such things, I don't think people would consider it theft. In literature, people tended to look on the idea of such things as wonderful miracles, to be celebrated -- feeding a herd of people from only a few fish, or a fairy godmother spinning fancy clothes via magic. No one ever reading Cinderella has ever considered it immoral for the fairy godmother to generate such a thing, and I suspect that most of society would similarly view it as natural and moral to let friends have copies of things that we have.

Imagine being able to say, "Oh, yeah, this desk has perfect ergonomics for me! here's the pattern/recipe and you can print one once you get home", or "oh yeah, I like this TV design way better than my old one, here's how you can make one too" -- in short, we _absolutely_ would download a car, or give someone else a copy of our car.

Now if only we could figure out how to pass value to creators and inventors in a way that isn't threatened by that, or by the advent of inventing-things-via-AI.


You are wrong about copying. It was perfectly normal to photocopy books at schools and universities since these were long out of print, the libraries didn't have enough copies, or whatever other reason, in some areas of the world even before computers.


Your points strongly align with my views, and “how to pass value” is why I have been so excited by contract-native blockchains.

I can imagine a world where each creative negotiates their public contract associated with a work, then when the work is released anyone in the world can pay/donate anything they want to the wallet in direct recognition and know without question that every creator will get a fair piece of it.

“Piracy” would be the same as the radio (a convenient way to get exposure), and I suspect that people who do the actual work would see much less drama.


> Before electronic copies, the only way to do that would be to physically steal such a thing.

Or buy a knockoff for cheap.


As the sibling to yours said, it is closest to forgery or counterfeiting, rather than theft. I don't think that changes it much re. maximally benefiting corporate interests. It might benefit them a little less maximally, but not by much.


You’re right. That one time my employer didn’t pay me for 3 pay circles- it wasn’t theft, it was piracy or copyright infringement. Simply a breach in contract.


Not the same thing.


While you do disclaim that no stealing occurs when pirating at the start of your post, you do not internalize what that means throughout the rest of your comment. This is evident throughout the rest of your comment through your continued choice of using the word "take". No "taking" occurs by making a copy of a file.

Stealing is bad for a specific reason: it's a zero sum game. If you are to benefit from stealing somebody else has to lose something. Stealing is parasitism (benefiting while harming someone else) on other people / society. But if I could magically create a copy of something you own (e.g. your TV), and we both keep our own copy, there is nothing morally wrong with that, even if there are arbitrary laws that make it illegal.

Piracy is closer to the second case. Me making a copy of a file does not limit others from using that file. It is not a zero sum game. It's commensalism (benefiting without harming or benefiting anyone else), not parasitism. Morally it is at worst neutral.

Not to mention that copyright hasn't been a thing for the wast majority of human history and we did just fine. Standing up to arbitrary, unjust laws is a moral good.


Wouldn’t cloning a TV deprive the manufacturer (and all associated parties) of revenue?

Doesn’t copying a digital work without consent deprive the creator (and all associated parties) of revenue?

Isn’t deliberately depriving a person or persons of remuneration for their work stealing?

The laws against making digital copies of a work without the consent of the rights holder are not arbitrary. They’re in place to ensure those who invested time and money into creating something can earn money from the thing they create.


>Wouldn’t cloning a TV deprive the manufacturer (and all associated parties) of revenue?

>Doesn’t copying a digital work without consent deprive the creator (and all associated parties) of revenue?

Depriving of revenue is not stealing, as I outlined in my previous post. The author still has access to their work and the ability to sell it if there is sufficient demand. If something had been stolen neither of those are the case. If "depriving of revenue" constituted stealing I could ask you for $100, you could refuse, and that would be theft because you "deprive me of revenue". This would be ridiculous for obvious reasons.

>Isn’t deliberately depriving a person or persons of remuneration for their work stealing?

No, as I outlined clearly in my previous comment.

>The laws against making digital copies of a work without the consent of the rights holder are not arbitrary. They’re in place to ensure those who invested time and money into creating something can earn money from the thing they create.

You might have had a case here if copyright ended with the death of the author and was limited to a reasonable time frame within the lifespan of an author, but this has not been the case for a long time. Copyright in the US is up to 70 years after the authors death. That is an arbitrary and unjust law that only benefits mega corps. Hence it is morally right to stand against the law through civil disobedience.


I just can’t accept that depriving someone of revenue for hard work (toil, stress, exhaustion, etc.) isn’t stealing.

The act of people stealing the work is a clear demonstration of sufficient demand, no? If the price is too high or supply too low, that doesn’t excuse theft. It never has.

Wage theft is stealing. If I tell you I’ll paint your house for $100 and then paint your house and you don’t pay me, that’s theft, which is stealing.

Piracy is equivalent to wage theft, which is stealing. A bunch of people did a bunch of work and ask that people pay for the output of their labor. Those who decide to take that output without paying are stealing. They are thieves.

The length of copyright laws is a separate matter. Yeah, they protect major artists and labels with millions, but they also protect small artists who live off their work.

If you take a digital copy of something for free that you should have paid for, you are not a pirate and you are not Robin Hood, you are a thief. The same as someone who walks into a store and steals or snatches a purse off a park bench.

I’ve been seeing people deflect morality over stealing digital copies for most of my life and it’s always amazed me how it’s the only act of thievery that people openly discuss and brag about.

Somehow stealing copies of art is okay, but stealing cars is not.


> I’ve been seeing people deflect morality over stealing digital copies for most of my life and it’s always amazed me how it’s the only act of thievery that people openly discuss and brag about.

Maybe you should try considering why this is so. Perhaps it's not actually thievery?


I agree with this. Theft of digital copies is still theft.

Someone made something with the intention of selling _copies_ of said thing.

Taking a copy for free deprives the creator (or the rights owner) of revenue. That is stealing.

Yeah it’s often exceedingly inconvenient or sometimes impossible to legally obtain a copy of a movie, song, book or software. But that still doesn’t justify stealing a copy.

The availability of copies of digital products to you is at the discretion of the rights holder. You don’t get to decide that you now have the right to take a free copy.

If you decide to take a free copy of a digital product without the rights holder’s consent, you are stealing, which is wrong, no matter how much you want the thing or how expensive or difficult it is to obtain.


I'd be more receptive to copyright if it was the rightful creators who owned rights, and investors could only lease limited rights from the owner. Instead, the capital owners have written the law, and the creators are lucky to get pennies from sale of their work. I see no reason to pay to corp C who bought "rights" from corp B who bought rights from corp A who strongarmed a bookwriter into a one-sided contract where the corp gets all the rights. Taking from robbers isn't theft, it's rightful redistribution of knowledge in our society.


This is a convenient assumption for those who choose to pirate. Even if we assume that it's appropriate to dictate what kinds of contracts artists should or shouldn't enter into with publishers and whether you think they're "strongarmed" or not, this specific scenario only really holds water if you take the time to confirm whether the structure you describe is the one being used in practice before pirating the work.

Self-publishing is growing year over year. More and more authors are publishing their own work on platforms where they get 70% (in case of KDP)-100% (in case of direct sales) royalties. Along with the time to write the actual thing this also usually involves paying out of pocket for things like editors and covers. If you're genuinely committed to this scenario you're describing, I hope you check whether you're actually "taking from robbers" or taking from the author who created the book you're enjoying.


Not so simple; how many times have I been told by someone they won’t buy my book, they’ll check it out from the library. This is not theft or piracy, but it’s taking the total value of something without compensation to the creator


This is absurd. Libraries are a legal construct that artists accept in order to provide a tradeoff between profit and benefit to society, the library still purchases copies of the work, and as those copies wear out over time and new ones need to be purchase, an individual is still indirectly and effectively paying a small amount to the artist (although, again, even if they weren't it wouldn't matter, because the creator agreed to the terms of the library, unlike with digital theft). They're not remotely comparable to piracy.


> the creator agreed to the terms of the library

Really? When/where?


Check your contracts with the publisher of your book.


Can you link to an example of such a contract? And besides, I thought the First Sale Doctrine meant that no matter what your contract said, once the book was sold that the copyright holder didn't have any say over that copy of it anymore.


I’ve always wondered about this. In need to do some Googling, unless someone knows the answer.

Are libraries entitled to loan any book on the market? Do they need permission? Do they ever provide compensation?


> Are libraries entitled to loan any book on the market? Do they need permission? Do they ever provide compensation?

My understanding is the answers are yes, no, and nothing besides the normal purchase price of the book.


Amd no comparison was made to piracy


It might be entitlement. But I dont f*cking care anymore.

Having to manage 7 subscription services for the 5 movies I watch per month and having to divide by zero to transfer my files from one device to another is hell.

I don't buy digital goods anymore, except games. And you know why? Because everything is on steam and available with one click.


Nonsense.

When these so called “creatives” (read: administrators) are making billions upon billions nickel and diming every little resemblance to “their work” (read: administrators and investors paying actual creators that lack negotiation skills jack diddly) at the cost of all of society (how far does copyright go these days?), they can stick it.

By pirating, a user is not TAKING something from someone. That is like trying to own an idea and suing people for having the same idea. Digital data is easily duplicated and hurts no one to duplicate. If you wanted to be a twat and micromanage your works, you shouldn’t have digitized it. Go be a traditional oil artist or an opera singer or a circus performer, where in person experiences matter.

If you want all the benefits of the digital world, then suck it up and be ready for digital works to be duplicated.


That's like saying if we want the benefits of markets, be ready for theft. Society was ready for theft, and so created laws to make it illegal. That way we can have the benefit of a market with a low probability of being robbed on the way home. Seems to work out.


> But separately from whatever meaning you attach to the word "piracy" - illegally downloading creative works is theft.

Can you look up the legal definition of theft in your country and post it.

Here's mine (Canada)

https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/section-322.ht...

" 322 (1) Every one commits theft who fraudulently and without colour of right takes, or fraudulently and without colour of right converts to his use or to the use of another person, anything, whether animate or inanimate, with intent

(a) to deprive, temporarily or absolutely, the owner of it, or a person who has a special property or interest in it, of the thing or of his property or interest in it;

(b) to pledge it or deposit it as security;

(c) to part with it under a condition with respect to its return that the person who parts with it may be unable to perform; or

(d) to deal with it in such a manner that it cannot be restored in the condition in which it was at the time it was taken or converted. "

Please outline how downloading a movie meets that definition.

I'm not advocating piracy, but lets stop with the "theft" rhetoric which clearly it fails to meet the legal definition.


I can absolutely see that piracy could fit under (a).

"to deprive the owner of it" it being copyright

They have the right over copies, and to make money from it if they choose.

Are you hung up on that it has to be some physical object?

Edit: to be clear, in this reasoning, the thing deprived from someone is not your copy of the movie, but rather the right of copying.


My rule is I try to pay you, and if you refuse my money, I get it elsewhere. If a movie is in cinemas in my home town, I will pay to watch. Netflix accepts my money, so I pay them every month. Disney, HBO, Hulu, etc. do not (they do not operate in my country), so I do not feel any guilt watching their media by "some other means". After all, I'm not depriving you of any revenue if you don't want any revenue from me to begin with.


>Obviously there is no boat-stealing or plundering involved - no Johnny Depp or kraken here. But separately from whatever meaning you attach to the word "piracy" - illegally downloading creative works is theft. You are not entitled to someone else's creative work under any conditions other than those that they set, period.

Well, you've bought into the lie. It is not theft because you are not depriving the original owner of it. it's breach of contract at the very most and it's an incredibly harmful to society contract that will likely never be fixed legally because entrenched interested have too much invested in keeping that system broken and abusing monopoly to rent seek excess profits from the masses.

Believing that you have the right to deprive me of the fruits of my own labor copying something is one of the most extreme cases of entitlement I've ever witnessed. No one is taking anything from anyone. The creator of the work still has their own copy of their work. People are spending their own effort making copies of data released into the wild by the creator and that's it.

Further, the economics of any particular created work where the marginal cost of copying is effectively zero are incredibly clear. The largest welfare improvement is from distributing that created work to everyone for the marginal cost (aka zero) and allowing everyone to create derivative works if they choose. The only reason to have any sort of copyright is to encourage additional works to be created and that should be tempered to the minimum time needed given the massive dead weight loss from distributing said works at above marginal cost. So, how long does a copyright term need to be to encourage new works? I am extremely skeptical of any claim beyond high single digit numbers of years and it is extremely clear that copyright terms measured in decades (or worse in author's life time plus decades) cause massive dead weight loss and are utter insanity.


It is not theft.

You really need to use the right word, and that word is infringement.

Theft requires someone somewhere be denied something they own and that does not happen when an unauthorized copy is performed.

Using the right words might lead us to better laws we all can live with. Starting with the wrong ones will continue to hurt everyone.


If I "steal" a production that was made in the 1970s, so what? Who am I hurting?


Corporations that have long outlived the original creator and cry about you not paying them. The horror!


> There is no actual pirating going on when you copy a digital file

Note we did have this conversation, years if not decades before. Everyone "in the know" already understands this. I bet most HN readers understand this.

It's just that general consumers don't, and there was a successful propaganda campaign by media owners and distributors to label this as "piracy", and the name stuck.

It seems educating users is an uphill battle when fighting against a propaganda campaign by companies with deep pockets.


> Steam already solved piracy for gaming. Make it easy to download and manage your games.

Honest question, if Steam suddenly ceases to be, are these downloaded games playable?


If the game itself doesn't implement some sort of mandatory Steam login or DRM, then it's as easy as finding and running the executable from the downloaded game files.

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/1355117576985...


You can literarry find everything, but for rarest stuff you need to search for dedicated private commune.

FYI: https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5940948


Thank you, kind stranger, but I've already sailed across the pira-seas and have obtained a copy. My point was that as a BBC license fee payer (for many years), I have paid for that programme to be produced and by all rights it should be available on iPlayer.

(I'm not even going to mention the complete rights cluster-duck that is Monkey Dust (and yes, I've already got a copy of all the series))


Can you name some of the obscure 70s sci-fi? I would like to watch them. My downloads are TV series for Logan’s Run, Planet of the Apes, Battlestar Galactica, etc, but it’s limited and probably not too obscure and also… American besides the 70s Doctor Who saved Survivors (was that 80s?)


The TV series of Logan's Run and Planet of the Apes are reasonably obscure because they weren't too popular (I've got hold of both them, by the way).

Some other titles to pique your interest:

1981 BBC version of The Day of the Triffids

1979 Tales of the Unexpected (not scifi really)

1979 Sapphire & Steel (with the most annoying introduction - they are not elements!)

1979 Quatermass series

1979 The Omega Factor

1978 Blake's 7 (should not really count as obscure due to the impact the series had)

1977 The Fantastic Journey

1977 Children of the Stones

1977 Beasts (anthology series by Nigel Kneale)

1975 Sky

1975 The Invisible Man (really cheesy, featuring David McCallum)

1975 The Changes

1974 Zodiac

1973 The Tomorrow People

1970 Timeslip

1969 The Owl Service

1968 The Champions

1966 The Time Tunnel

1966 Mission: Impossible

1965 Out of the Unknown

1960 The Strange World of Gurney Slade

1958 Quatermass and the Pit mini-series

1955 Quatermass II


BBC version of the Triffids is legendary in my book. Don't forget 1975 BBC show Survivors.


I do happen to be a John Wyndham fan and try to track down adaptations, and yes, the BBC one is the best (I remember watching it when it was first aired). The newer remake with Eddie Izzard was disappointing. I'm often surprised that his stories don't get more adaptations - where's Kraken Wakes and The Chrysalids? (Chocky was made into a good kids TV series back in the day).

I hadn't heard of Survivors, but that looks right up my street. I used to be massively into Doctor Who and the Terry Nation novels. I can only find the first season easily.


I had to buy The Survivors on DVD because no one was seeding it, and no one was streaming it, either. I wonder how common that is for obscure TV shows?

Where do you find these seeded? I only know about Pirate Bay and 1337x.


I found season 1 of The Survivors easily enough, although it looks like season 3 might be available as well. I use prowlarr (https://wiki.servarr.com/en/prowlarr) which searches a big list of various sites and integrates easily enough with qbittorrent.

There's a handful of old British TV that I've bought on DVD because I couldn't find anyone seeding it.

(Just bought the three seasons of Survivor on DVD now)


Thanks for the prowlarr tip. Enjoy The Survivors! I did.


Two more entries for your really nice list:

1976 Gemini Man [another Invisible Man adaptation]

1976 Star Maidens


Have you tried BritBox? Some of those shows are available legally on there.


No, I haven't tried it. Being a subscription service, it kind of proves my point that even BBC shows financed via the TV license payers (including me) are now being locked behind paywalls and the more obscure ones will just disappear. (To make that list I just pulled some titles from my TV series library, so I don't need to locate any of them).


Sure, its a scam, like bunch of other things.


Just the other day, I've been searching for the Open University video of "Hotel Hilbert" from 1996: https://www.open.ac.uk/library/digital-archive/program/video...

Can't find that anywhere though I was hopeful that BFI might have had a copy: https://www2.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b80e92d21


I grabbed those old M.R.James Christmas Ghost Stories years ago (no idea where I downloaded them from but they were obviously rips from fairly recent BBC broadcasts). BBC used to have an online shop where you could buy things legitimately but they shut it down. No idea why.

Tractate Middoth adaptation is awful Gatiss tripe. (He's so hit-and-miss, and this is a miss for me). It's also on YouTube:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5MlQgGu6nCU

My favorite of those M R.James adaptations, by far, is A View From A Hill. It's on YouTube.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lGh0ybk-xyk


I agree about Gatiss. I really enjoyed the original 1972 version of "The Amazing Mr Blunden" and was excited to see it getting remade last year (by Gatiss) but it was just meh.

I went on a scavenge hunt for M.R. James productions after catching Robert Lloyd Parry's (https://www.nunkie.co.uk/the-mr-james-project) reading of two stories in the basement of Bristol Cathedral. I've got hold of A View From A Hill but haven't seen it yet. Incidentally, I did enjoy the recent Count Magnus.


And for most non-English books and movies, good luck buying them anywhere in the English-speaking world.


>I'm a big fan of old scifi films and series and the more obscure ones are getting harder to track down.

Gets even harder when you're dealing with hearing loss and it's nearly impossible to find subtitles for some older releases, despite there having been such when they were available....even for some non-obscure stuff. Some stuff is sitting in streaming-rights purgatory, the last release was on DVD and no one has it any more, etc etc...

The people at OpenSubtitles.org do their best to curate a good collection but those are only as good as the people who upload them.


Doesn't the BBC offer a service where you can request recordings of any historic broadcast?

The German public-service broadcasters like ARD, ZDF and many regional ones offer such a service. I can request a program from the 70ies, tell the name and (helpfully) where and when it was broadcasted. Then they search through their massive archive, make a copy on DVD and send them to you. It's not cheap (up to 40€ per hour of program), but it is legal for personal use. No need here to pirate anything, except very very old broadcasts from before ... around 1967.


I assume you have already found this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MlQgGu6nCU

I have been told that the BBC have a massive digital vault of shows that are available to producers obviously since iPlayer came into being any shows listed are there, just not available. And they are constantly archiving old material.


In the meantime:

    1. Rarbg or rutracker to dwn anything in minutes
    2. mpv to watch anything in minutes with subtitles and bunch of flexible options that propriatery or FOSS tools like plex can only dream to have
    3. enjoy life without commercials ever and hord stuff if you want it and pay for things after the fact
For books replace 1. with libgen and 2. with calibre reader.

Yes, its 100x easier.

Games could be in some cases easier to buy, especially since you realy must test those for viruses and other malcious stuff, not something you should be concerned with multimedia.


Since I game on Linux, Steam provides enough value since most games with Proton are one-click install. Don't use other stores though.


Steam+Proton is magical these days, I have no problem supporting creators and buying their games.

With Steam, GOG and Humble Bundle, it's never been easier to game on Linux. It feels like paradise.

In a way, gaming is in much better shape (re: convenience) than streaming TV shows these days. Yes, DRM for online play can be problematic for Proton -- but fuck those games!


Steam provides something else too - up to date and patched games for latest systems. Its hard to follow those otherwise.

However, I am sure it will turn out to be scam one day and you will lose access to all/most games you bought.


Lutris makes it easy to install GOG and Epic store games as well. Epic has been giving away a lot of games the past year or two, so it's a great option for Linux. Amazon Prime also gives away games that usually redeem on GOG or other stores. Great time to be a patient gamer. I have a huge, 100% legal collection of games that were all free thanks to these stores competing to build up their reputation.


Unfortunately libgen is pretty hit-or-miss for me, especially for fairly recent, or non-English, or pre-digital-age (badly scanned, if at all present) publications, or stuff like ISO standards.


There is a torrent of all ISO standards out there somewhere.


Presumably with some cutoff date?


You might be interested in this then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34176479


Z-Library, while larger than LibGen, is still very incomplete as well.


is rutracker relatively secure for torrent downloads?


I have used Rutracker for almost ten years without one bit of malware.


You can use Windows sandbox or Sandboxie to test it out and do a sanity check, but in general, yes, it seesm OK. You never know though, given the current state of afairs in the world.

On the other hand, you can find almost anything there, faaar more then on most other places.


If you're downloading tv or books, then you should be okay as you won't be executing anything. I wouldn't trust software pirated from there (or other places).


Are books and video generally low probability as attack vectors then? Are PDFs harder to exploit?


Ofcourse they are. Majority of that stuff isn't executable, or if it is, it relies on exploits of viewers, so by using something else you are probably safe.

Also, there are sandboxes if you are unsure and you can convert to safer formats.

Anyway, I yet have to meet somebody that was fucked up this way, I guess there are numerious easier options.

Its way more probably that your country will hunt you, if you live in that lame country in which case VPN is a thing :)


Adobe Acrobat (Reader) opens PDFs from download locations in “Protected View” by default, which disables potentially dangerous dynamic features, and also by default opens all PDFs in a “Protected Mode” sandbox which restricts otherwise possible system access. You want to make sure that those are active. I believe that’s on Windows only, not sure what the implications are on other systems.

Without those restrictions, PDFs can execute embedded JavaScript on open, which can access and execute local files.


Preview on a Mac doesn't execute JavaScript in PDFs. To make sure you are not spreading anything to anyone, open the PDF in Preview and print it.


Same thing with Word.

Not sure how ebook readers handle js or xml exploits.


Regarding 2, what is MPV here?


Probably this: https://mpv.io/


Or, use SMPlayer, the nice x-platform frontend: https://www.smplayer.info/

It has awesome integration with open subtitles and remembers everything you do on a video so if it crashes or you stop, it just continues with everything set like volume, position subtitle sync etc.


smplayer is/started as a frontend for mplayer, but it looks like you can set it to use mpv as its backend.


Netflix could have done it. We all watched as piracy freed people from the nonsense rules of cable and DVDs (inconvenient times, waiting for releases, region locks to name a few)...

And then Netflix solved a lot of those problems for a reasonable price.

And then through paying attention to the goldmine of watch data, they did it even better than piracy.

We knew that the licensing model would catch people off-guard eventually, but for a time they had actually solved it.

Then, they lost the contracts.

And media companies saw them as competitors instead of partners.

And Netflix brought back region locks (some not their fault, but some that was).

And the prices started to go up in chorus with the anti-consumer practices.

And now we’re back to the fragmented battleground that was cable TV.

And the book industry has somehow stayed just as bad the whole time, in many ways more draconian than Hollywood...

Maybe next time the pendulum swings back in favour of the consumers, we’ll end up with better contracts so we can avoid this sort thing as it swings over to producers again.


Also worth mentioning, Plex UI and UX is so much better than any of the apps I’m paying subscription fees to (7 currently!!!).

To pile up onto your example of Westworld, I was super annoyed when I subscribed to AMC+ to catch up on The Walking Dead, just to find out that only last few episodes of current season are available and since I was waiting for more to air, I am now SOL.


Posting here to plug jellyfin (and swiftfin in TestFlight) - it’s really nice to have a full FOSS option on the AppleTV/iPhone.

My issue with Plex is their unceasing dark patterns and attempts to monetize users. Forcing centralized accounts and constantly re-pinning their “value add” channels made me leave them. Also eroded my trust with them, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that they log all the media I watch in their app…


I like Jellyfin for what it is. I actually switched from Jellyfin to Plex recently because of frequent issues with crashing transcoder (the issue may have been on my side) and inability to download content for offline use on the phone or tablet. As far as the organization itself, I liked it more than Plex.


One beautiful bit of the Plex UX is having the clock time in the top right corner of the HUD in the player. It's very convenient and I don't think any other service (in the UK) has it.


no no no no no no... its all shit really. You can't really expect that "lets have everything here" tools get into tiny details of specialized tools.


Pirate streams of NHL hockey games seem to come from the source before it goes to the networks who overlay it with additional scoreboards, scores of other games, and other junk on the screen. When they cut to commercial, it goes to a sequence of black and white slow motion footage of ice and rink preparation. It looks like the placeholder that the networks then put their ads on top of during breaks.

Why is it not possible to pay for this version of the stream? Even if I sign up for ESPN through Comcast or whatever hoops I have to jump through to access live sports, I still get the version with the ads and screen junk. Pirate streams are higher def and just more pleasant to watch. Sometimes you can even choose streams with no commentation at all, just the sounds of the sport. Where are these options in the paid streaming service?


> Why is it not possible to pay for this version of the stream?

Because they want both your money and ad money.

I don't know why people ever accepted advertising on pay cable TV. Pay to watch ads?

Ads made sense on over-the-air broadcast because there was no way to earn revenue from that other than a BBC-style "license" tax that wouldn't really fly in the US (though we do have NPR so...)


Don't forget that you don't even know which streaming service something is on. Americans will tweet something is on HBO or Peacock or whatever, but where the hell is it in Australia?

And Amazon is now doing this shady thing where the subscription includes every episode except the hold the last episode of each season hostage and make you buy it separately.


> Don't forget that you don't even know which streaming service something is on [...] where the hell is it in Australia?

I think your best bet would be to just use a website like https://www.justwatch.com/au


I never buy e-books unless they include it with the purchase of a dead tree book. If I'm going to pirate a book, I'll at least buy the paper copy to support the author and publisher. For all other media, excluding games because steam is so easy, piracy it is.


This is an interesting approach since you're likely paying more to buy the paper copy than you would to buy the ebook. This seems like it would be a pretty uncommon practice. However, as a self-published writer, knowing there are people like you out there is encouragement for me to release paperback versions despite the additional initial expense of paperback covers.


Many ebooks are surprisingly expensive these days, often costing more than the paper copy, at least on Amazon. Since I'm a Kindle owner, that's where I buy ebooks...and later strip DRM so I can actually own what I've purchased.


I exclusively buy physical books and then pirate the ebook. If I'm going to own a book, I'm going to OWN the book. Reading on a proper e-ink device is just too nice to give up, though.


But then you use a service (reading a digital version) which you did not pay for. You only paid for the paper version.


That's morally acceptable for me and probably for the GP.


For what it's worth, I do the same and I have multiple friends who also do this. We also buy band t-shirts and pirate music.

Lots of people want to support the artist and have a convenient system.


The Google TV app (at least on Android) can show where everything is, and will even link directly to it in another app if you've got it installed. You can also buy/rent things that aren't available for streaming anywhere, or even just not anywhere you're subscribed. As someone who has come to terms with having too many subscriptions and their apps installed, it works great for me.


Butchered It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (we all know why) on streaming platforms. My pirated version is still the original hilarious versions.


I didn’t know this. I’m sure they chopped a half dozen episodes out. Did the network edit and re-release more than that?


This is the reason why I don't feel bad about piracy. If you as a company can't even approach the comfyness of piracy while your app is the flick of a finger away to open you have failed.


> or you have to constantly micromanage different subscriptions.

To me that's the killer app right now, one-place-to-toggle-them-all, with a running tally of what you're paying this month. Unfortunately streaming companies have no vested interest in making it easier for people to turn on and off their subscriptions, so even if it could be done it'd be a constant arms race.


You can pause your subscription at Netflix or Disney+.


Yes, ironic that the breakdown of the Netflix monopoly will create such a scattering of services that piracy is a solution


I understand that different companies may want a part of the pie, and that's fine. Competition is good. But for us consumers, there should be a central place, where we can find everything, and they those companies that offer shows can still compete with each other somehow. The problem is devising such a system.


> there is no way to centrally browse everything so you need 7 different apps.

The Apple TV App (on iOS/iPadOS) does this. It even links you directly to the show in the app, assuming you have a valid subscription on that app. If it's not streamable, you can almost always "buy" or rent it.

It's not perfect, but it's the best there is that I'm aware of.

I basically agree with everything else you said.


I’ve been feeling the same. I wanted to watch about 5 or some movies this year that were a) not available on any streaming platform, b) only available on one specific streaming platform exclusively (which I didn’t have a sub to), c) You straight up could not purchase it on YouTube/Amazon/ITunes.

I’m not playing this game.


Who said you need to watch ALL streaming services?


For the average person, it isn't. For the average person with a Kindle, buying a book from Amazon is a very smooth process. My 83 year-old mother does it easily. I pirate e-books and it's kind of a pain in the ass to get the book, convert it to MOBI format, and then transfer it to my Kindle.


I also like the Kindle purchase experience. I usually put a sample in the Kindle, check it out, and then with a single click I can have the full book in minutes without going to my computer or phone.

Calibre provides a very good service, but it can be a bit puzzling in terms of UX, also getting certain pirate books is a big chore and might require visiting dodgy sites. But the reason I stopped downloading books is that I often ran into small issues, like footnotes or a table of contents that didn't work correctly. The last book I remember downloading was "Thinking Fast and Slow"... I ended up purchasing it on Amazon because every half page it had a word duplicated, with the duplicate slightly scrambled srcambled. It was maddening... probably planted by the author , Daniel Kahneman, as a psy-ops DRM device.


kindle handles epub books just fine (not sure how recent that is).

They also provide an email address where, if you send an email with some epubs attached, they make them magically appear on your kindle.

I was pleasantly surprised by this last week, since I got a kindle and I thought it was going to be a hassle, but nope.


I recently transferred an epub to my Kindle Reader app, and it worked, but there was a message saying that epub capability would be removed "later this year." Make of that what you will.


Internally the Kindle Paperwhite still uses MOBI: https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/2/23053408/amazon-epub-kindl...

When I tried emailing an epub this way, Amazon messed up the conversion. I've had good luck converting pirated epubs to MOBI using an online converter so I haven't changed my practice.


This seems to be changing.

I have an older Paperwhite; my GF has a newer one. I uploaded MOBIs to both last night (via USB) - it worked on hers, and they didn’t show on mine. I had to convert them to AZW3 and reupload for them to show in the listing.

(I’ve not checked, but it’s plausible my older model has more up-to-date firmware.)


No they don't use mobi. Amazon has two formats newer than mobi, AZW3 and KFX. Both support more features. Using mobi is like saving your Word docs as RTF these days.


This is a fairly new thing and for me has worked smoothly. I can attach a bunch of DRM-free epubs to an email addressed to my Kindle account, Amazon asks for confirmation that it's me sending them, and within about five minutes I have clean, well-formatted copies of those files on my Paperwhite.


this is new (as of may 2022) and doesn't always assume the correct epub encoding, which can insert artifacts (eg see https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/issues/2508).


This is what I do with my base model Kindle. I have its email address saved as a contact so it is super easy to send it ePubs (or PDFs!) from my phone.


I'm sure you're aware that amazon can discontinue this at any moment. My ebook reader just reads an sd card or I can use a usb cable to transfer files. That's harder to remotely kill.


You can use usb cable to transfer to kindle too


I'm aware. If they discontinue it then I'll just stick to Kindle books. That's all I'm expecting from this device anyway. For everything else I have an iPad Pro.


I use a Boox eink tablet, which supports epub, mobi and pdf quite well. The large size makes pdfs useful.

Because of this support I can download directly from libgen without converting or using a different device. For books that are only available through Amazon, I have the Kindle app installed.


One could argue that you're not buying the book though, as Amazon can remove the book from your device later without your consent. And as we know, that's that a theoretical threat, it happened with the book 1984 in 2009. While you could keep your Kindle in airplane mode all the time to prevent that, if you do you will miss out on the ability to easy "purchase" and go back to a world where you have to side-load.


That's a "failing" of Amazon, not of piracy. It benefits them to make it inconvenient to put things on it manually; it encourages you to use their store instead. The Kobo supports ePub natively.


True. Not to mention most average people nowadays doing things via their smartdevice, so anything that doesn't remotely 'prepackaged' become a big hurdle to cross for them, and their time.

It remind me of whenever people discuss about OS and someone said their grandmother can use Linux just fine, hell, I'm quite sure she's just browsing with Firefox and not doing command line kung-fu.


Kindle devices support epub now, don't they? Aren't they deprecating .mobi?

If you use an Amazon account you can email them to a specific email address to get them on your device.


I don't believe they actually use ePub...they accept ePub sent via email and convert them to internal formats. Mobi is deprecated, however, though you can still read your old mobi files on Kindle.


Not sure if you over complicated it because mailing yourself the epub will convert it and send it to your kindle


A pain in the ass?

Download file > Add to Calibre > Transfer to Kindle

We're talking four clicks.


This is more complicated than it sounds. Amazon is continually trying to stay ahead of de-DRM software. In many cases you have to use older versions of the Kindle software to download, or use de-DRM software external to Calibre to do the DRM removal. I download recent purchases from Amazon directly to my Mac and the de-DRM addins in Calibre didn't do a thing to them. I haven't yet tried standalone de-DRM scripts on them.


Not once in my many years of pirating books have I come across a book I need to remove DRM from.


> so for each of the purchase I created a new virtual card and bought them. After a few minutes my Amazon account is blocked for suspicious activity, and ALL my kindle library is wiped, and the funds are returned to my company.

I understand generating a virtual card for a per company basis, but what's the point of generating a card for every book you're buying? Besides the added hassle for little benefit, surely you can understand why such behavior might be considered "suspicious"?


Guessing that the virtual cards are only able to be used for a single purchase. And because there is no shopping cart on Kindle allowing books to be bought together, multiple cards were required for the individual purchases.


From what I have used my virtual card for my Apple Card that seems correct. Virtual cards really should be generated once per purchase because if you aren't doing this its going to trigger a fraud detection system for the payment processor.


Yes, this is correct.


It sounded odd to me as well, seems to be just the way their spend management solution works: https://www.spendesk.com/en/product/virtual-cards.


Why would it be considered suspicious?


Usually when someone uses lots of different cards to make purchases on a website, they're testing stolen cards. 2-3 cards is fine, but if you have over ~5 cards in a day, it's over 90% chance that they're stolen. You simply don't run an ecommerce platform of any size without a system to automatically flag and block those transactions.

I haven't checked the logs, but I guarantee there have been people/bots trying to do card testing on our site in the past 24 hours. It's pretty nearly a non-stop barrage, so you have to auto-detect and auto-block.


Exactly this, especially for small purchases like ebooks. This was a big fraud signal for us, I think over 5 cards would auto flag every subsequent order for human review. Probably the most effective signal we had.


Could be a person testing out stolen cards with a low-value purchase, to verify that the cards are legitimate. They then can use them elsewhere for much larger purchases.


> for each of the purchase I created a new virtual card and bought them

Well there's your problem. Look Amazon is a shady company and I completely understand not wanting to hand over any more money to Bezos. But one account making N orders on N different cards in quick succession is going to trigger any rudimentary anti-fraud protection


Which wouldn't have been an issue if you could have paid for all the books at once... It's still a stupidly designed system by Amazon.


It also wouldn’t be an issue if you just didn’t create a new card for every transaction. I feel like I’m missing context on why anyone would do that.


It's clearly stated in the OP:

>My company uses Spendesk for managing funds, so for each of the purchase I created a new virtual card and bought them.

Presumably Spendesk doesn't allow using the same virtual card multiple times?


one card == one transaction


Sounds like a niche case. For average people who buy one book at a time, Amazon's purchase process is single-click. All of the Kindle books I've gotten in recent memory have been DRM-free. I'm having trouble feeling any outrage here, I think most retailers would have flagged your account if you used a bunch of different credit cards, one for each item you bought.


Since chargebacks due to fraud costs the retailer extra (thus they must do fraud checking and magic heuristics) as far as I understand, does that make it the credit card system's fault?

Using a ton of different cards indeed would sound like a database leak to me, so with the retailer being liable for the user's and/or bank's failure to design a system under which the user can keep their credentials secure, this behavior being not allowed is understandable. This is all relatively foreign to me as a European who just pays with iDeal (Dutch system) that doesn't know fraud chargebacks or anything, and where it's on the banks (rather than retailers) to refund fraud from e.g. phishing so it's in their own interest to design a secure system, so correct me if I misunderstood something about how credit cards work.


Kindle purchase on Amazon is sub-par.

The "single click" is in fact super annoying in my use case. I have an account with Amazon, with two different cards, one for professional purchases and one for personal ones[0].

When I buy a physical thing I can choose the card when paying. But for Kindles that's not possible, so I have to change the default card before buy. Very annoyging.

Also, for some reason, as described by the OP, one can't add a Kindle book to any cart to buy more than one at a time... or even save it for later! Which is completely absurd and user hostile.

[0] It's also possible to have two different accounts, but that comes with different problems; I have a pro account with Amazon but never use it.


This is me at Christmas. I got a ton of Amazon gift cards and spent them all on Kindle books the same day, because it's a hassle changing my default payment method to ignore cards. Don't want to spend my Christmas money on the next Amazon subscription shipment of Kind Bars, toothpaste and Kickstarts!


I agree, niche cases are niche, and when the experience is optimized for Joe Average then your niche case may very well become less convenient.


Average people like me, who visit a bookstore once in six months or so tend to stock up on books. Never had a bookstore bar me from entering because I bought too many books. On the contrary, they asked me if they could help out by delivering them to my house for free...


To be completely fair if you use a new card for every book it will rise some eyebrows


Yeah, the human being behind the counter will probably ask "why the hell are you ringing up each book on a new credit card," to which the OP would presumably answer "I'm buying books for work and this is how they make me do expense reports," and both would continue to go about their day. Perhaps part of the OP's point is that the efficiency gains of Amazon over B&M retailers (from the POV of the company owners and investors, at least) come at a very real cost to the customer experience.


When I was younger, in my teens and early 20s, carding was a thing. Good old stolen credit cards used in person at retail. This was in the late 80s, before the Internet became A Thing. If you had walked into a store and started swiping multiple cards, they'd most likely have called the cops.


Even if they all had the same name?


This reminds me of the back and forth discussion on EVs vs ICEVs. Yes, if your use case requires you to go to a remote location to buy the product, your purchase pattern is going to reflect that. You refuel your car once a week or so, I refuel every single night. You go buy multiple books at a time at a bookstore, I buy them on the fly at the moment I want them.


Try buying ebooks on Amazon for kindle app from another country (in my case Latin America), they essentially force you to get the book under their kindle unlimited crap and there's no easy way to remove its DRMif you buy it like that. Because I emphatically do remove DRM from ebooks I buy (they're mine now, I "bought" them, no?), this makes it a no-go.


What I ended up doing was buying my books wherever they were cheapest (e.g. a used bookstore or the kindle shop or whatever) and then pirating a non-DRM e-pub version so that I didn’t have any hassle and could read as I pleased.

That way, my conscience was clear (subjectively).

Then, the FBI or someone took down z-library. So, I’m not sure what my next move will be.


Use annas-archive.org to search across pirate sites. Works well; no login neededs.


z-lib is still up on Tor. Check wikipedia for the links.

You do need to login with an email though which sucks.


I’ve always used libgen. I mostly used it for textbooks so I can’t speak to its volume of literature, but I have found novels I’ve needed before.


Here is an alternative: http://libgen.is/


I'm amazed this hasn't gotten taken down. it's been around for years and years


Authors aren't benefited by second hand sales.

Have you considered libby? Nowadays libraries around the world provide you with an account that gives you access to their catalogue for free.


> Authors aren't benefited by second hand sales.

While I like the idea of authors making more money rather than less, I see no fundamental reason why they _should_ benefit from second hand sales. When I buy any given object <X>, use it for what I need it for, then sell it to someone else; the original producer does not make anything off that second sale. And that's normal/expected.


My point wasn’t that they should, my point is that if the only reason you’re buying physical is to avoid feeling guilty for pirating then used bookstores might not be the best choice. There is no effect to the author buying or not.


>Authors aren't benefited by second hand sales.

Authors should benefit from secondhand sales at least a little bit.

The more demand there is for a used book, the higher sellers can price the used book. And as the price of a used book increases, more buyers will choose the new version over the used version.

It's not as beneficial as buying a new copy, but it benefits the author more than just pirating it. Libby is similarly beneficial in an indirect way.


Generally, the price premium of goods already reflects the resale value. One could see this with automobiles. Make/models with higher resale value get priced higher on the initial sale.

Also, you would be amazed at the amount of book returns that exists in the industry. Publishers routinely bake the cost of those returns into the hard/paperback's retail price and deduct the cost of the returns from royalties paid to authors. Most unsold pbooks are <gasp>destroyed!</gasp> This is because this is the relatively lowest direct cost option compared to the bookseller returning the book back to the publisher.

For an example with self-publishers, see: https://www.ingramspark.com/blog/making-your-book-returnable

If a self-publisher chooses to have the book returned to them (in the hopes that they can directly sell it from their author website), they are also charged the shipping & handling (deducted from the royalties).

The reason I bring this up is because, the publishers would rather the used books sales completely disappeared. That is part of the reason why they don't hesitate to destroy the returned books to avoid crashing the price.


Would you propose this for all goods? Or just books?


Yeah, I think it's true for most goods.


Assuming your idea were implemented: when I buy clothes from some large retailer you expect they are going to send a bit more of the 2nd hand money back to the sweatshop that made it in the first place?


To clarify, I'm not proposing for anything to be implemented. I'm saying that I think the market works this way already.

The scenario you're describing sounds different than what I'm talking about, though. You're talking a retailer selling a new product and then passing back commissions on the sale to vendors upstream in the supply chain? I'm not seeing the connection between that and the price effect of used goods on their corresponding new goods.


>>>> Authors aren't benefited by second hand sales.

>>> Authors should benefit from secondhand sales

>> Would you propose this for all goods?

> Yeah, I think it's true for most goods.

You suggested that "most goods" already have money from 2nd hand sales flowing back to the "authors". I asked the obvious question about physical goods. Who would get the money? Now I obviously think it is ridiculous idea and "authors" shouldn't be profiting from 2nd hand sales of their works whether those are books or clothes. I am asking you, someone who seems to think it is a good idea, who gets that money from 2nd hand sales of physical goods? The retailer? The manufacturer? The laborer?


Oh, sorry. I think the confusion is coming from the ambiguity of the word "should."

When I said "should" I meant "logically should," not "morally should." I wasn't wishing for a world where this is true but rather describing our current world where this is already true. Like, "Hitting a lightbulb with a hammer should cause the bulb to break."

It might help to have a more fleshed out example.

Imagine a system where there are only two ways to buy my book. You can either buy it new directly from my website or buy it used on eBay. I sell it on my website for $60, but the current price for a used copy on eBay is $30.

Suppose 100 buyers decide to start buying used copies on eBay. eBay sellers increase the price from $30 to $50 to match the increased demand. I, the author, still receive $0 on every sale of the used copy, so I don't see any new money directly.

But there are buyers who are open to either a used copy or a new copy, depending on the price. As the price of used copies approaches the price of new copies, more buyers will choose to purchase new directly from me rather than from eBay.

Even though the 100 new eBay buyers didn't benefit me directly as the author, it indirectly benefitted me by pushing up the used price and influencing other buyers to purchase the new copy instead of the used copy.


Libby and similar services are designed to bleed libraries dry. Libraries are prohibited from buying a normal / retail eBook license, and have to buy a special library license. These licenses are more expensive and expire after they are checked out a few times.

I'll check out a physical book from the library, grab an epub, and delete it when I return the book.


For my library at least there are very few modern technical books in their Libby subscription.


I wish more people knew about fraud protection and how not to trigger it. If you want to pay in an unusual way, ask support if it's allowed or causes issues.

If you just try and imitate the average customer you will almost always be on the happy path, but ordering multiple books with multiple cards in a short period... I think that would trigger any decent fraud protection and not just at Amazon scale.


For most services (I'd assume even Amazon) they likely wouldn't be able to tell you what would trip their fraud detection. Most of the time fraud detection happens at the payment processor or issuing bank level, and even if it is detected directly by the service, usually the support department doesn't have much access to the fraud department, and fraud departments are usually very protective around details of how they detect fraud.


To be fair, it seems like their only option was to look like someone running stolen credit card numbers, due to how two systems outside their control worked—the work payment system that issued one card number per transaction; Amazon not letting you buy more than one ebook at a time.


This would have been somewhat funny piece of sarcasm but I fear you are being serious.

Next step: force customers to submit to a full cavity search upon payment


Funny enough while I agree with your points I think you're being a little facetious given the premise. If someone came into my store and bought a different item with different credit cards for multiple transactions I'd be suspicious too. Fraud is super hard to fight back.


I also understand this, I just wish Amazon had a shopping cart so I could use my single use card only one time.


Everyone saying it's your fault for not knowing about fraud detection and using multiple cards: I disagree. The issue here is simply that amazon has no cart for ebooks. Period. And that they did not reach out about the transactions before taking action (or even after blocking, who knows… they could have reversed the block).

Using Spendesk means generating a new card for each transaction. Having a single transaction to load "credit", and then use up that credit means more accounting work and simply adds friction, which is the original point of the post.


I'm sorry but this sounds like a pebkac. You created a new virtual card for each purchase rather than just create a single card, load it up with £50 and use that. Why? Making multiple purchases on multiple cards in a short period of time is absolutely classic fraudulent behaviour. Of course your account got suspended. You can probably get it easily un suspended by contacting customer support.


It's just the (not great) way Spenddesk works.


Looks like you can create cards for online subscriptions with Spendesk. Presumably you could set a reasonable monthly amount or something. If not, sounds like the product is poorly thought out. Every other solution for virtual cards I've seen has something akin to a reusable card for a specific vendor.


Ok yes all true. But if authors cannot make a living then what?

What if the content was sourcecode for your non-open-source software - would you still feel the same way?

In order for ideas to be free there has to be some new way to compensate authors for their hard work. Voluntary donations don’t work well enough.

Perhaps the solution is an “idea tax” that everyone pays a small amount into every year - and the proceeds are distributed pro rata to authors based on the relative proportions of their content in all downloads?

You can’t just liberate all content and not also find a way to compensate people who work to make the content as their paying jobs. That isn’t sustainable.

There is a missing idea in your plan. I think it can be solved somehow - but might require an equally radical and blanket solution on the economic side.


> Ok yes all true. But if authors cannot make a living then what?

97% of authors do not make a living off their writing. (https://authorscast.com/how-many-writers-make-a-living-writi...)

> What if the content was sourcecode for your non-open-source software - would you still feel the same way?

Personally I like to write code, not run a business. I let others pay me to do that so I don't have to deal with that when I work on my own projects. I like this arrangement as a creator as work keeps me exercising my writing so I can build more interesting things. I find I'm more creative when I stay in that programming mindset.

-

I think the best idea we (humanity) has had for supporting the arts has been patronage. It lets artists build up a following over time who might include enough people willing to contribute to supporting them produce more work. The internet gives this idea a lot more power than it used to have and has become the default model for many artists on the net.

TLRD; support the people directly without holding their work prisoner


After writing 10 books for major publishers, I just self publish now. My newer eBooks are always available to read for free in my website [1]. I used to also provide free PDF downloads on my website but I was getting 1 book sale for every approximately 50 free downloads. Making people read for free via HTML pages is not as convenient for them but I now get about twice the paid for sales each month. This is a compromise that I am happy with.

[1] https://markwatson.com


The idea isn't missing, you just didn't see it.

He (and I as well), want to be able to easily buy non DRM'ed epubs so we can transfer them from one reader to another, sometimes offline.

After getting increasingly aggravated by Amazon over the years, I transfered my files out of Amazon into Calibre and onto my Kobo. I am not at all interested in connecting Amazon to my Kobo. I explicitly do not want Amazon to know I bought a Kobo, they can of course see I am not buying any more books from them. [I buy them from multiple competitors these days.]

It was solved already in the distant past. It is called first sale doctrine. You sell me a copy. That copy is mine, we no longer need to speak to one another unless I want to buy something else from you.

"Oh, but what if you copy it and give out many copies?" So you're assuming I'm a criminal and using that to justify ruining the perfectly good relationship we had before? If I'm treated like a criminal anyways and get a better experience by actually being a criminal--well it is better to be a criminal and treated like one than an honest person treated like a criminal.


> the proceeds are distributed pro rata to authors based on the relative proportions of their content in all downloads?

That way we get the content farms we have already on Insta/YT/TikTok etc. Just flooding the platforms with random stuff with shit background music, shitty autocaptions and robot narrators until something sticks. Then produce more of the same.


The idea is to provide a system that "Just Works".

I know what OP is talking about. Managing ebooks is a pain in the ass. I want to buy books directly from the author and put them on my reading device, but I barely ever have the option to. Often the only source for ebooks is Amazon, which I dont really want to buy from for several reasons.

There are other stores, but often their ebooks are locked to their specific devices, essentially locking you in to whatever platform you pick. God forbid the one you picked doesnt have a particular book you want to read.

I end up buying a paper copy, because I dont have to deal with yet another shitty ebook that may or may not work.


Just pirate the book and send money to author directly. In the end they are getting peanuts from book price.

https://forum.mobilism.org/viewforum.php?f=106


If the book is self-published and priced over 99c, the author will be getting 70% royalties from a Kindle purchase.


I really don't understand why people buy Kindle. I bought Kobo reader in 2015. It still works perfectly and receives software updates. Transferring books or PDFs is as easy as plugging the device into my computer.


I also own a Kobo reader, and I'm especially delighted with the unofficial KOReader software. I've installed it aside the official Kobo software which I don't use anymore. http://koreader.rocks

I believe it is suitable for power users that want more control on their reader (gestures, shortcuts, navigation, override text presentation...). I prefer to organize the ebooks in a hierarchy of directories while ignoring completely the categories, and this is the way KOReader works.


Some of us bought (or were gifted) Kindles when they were brand new, and pretty much the only game in town...my sister handed down her Kindle 1 to me she moved to a Kindle DX.

A few years ago I bought a Likebook Mars (an e-ink tablet) and sent it back a few days later, because the Android-based reader software (Kindle reading app and others) was awful compared to the Kindle itself, and even the iOS version of the Kindle software.


I use the Kindle store because it has the content I want and it's dead simple to use.

Kobo doesn't have the Kindle Unlimited books that I like reading.


I really don't understand why people buy Kobo. I bought a Pocketbook from 2007. It still works perfectly and does not need software updates (nor does it have internet). Transferring books or PDFs is as easy as plugging the device into my computer.


Both are very much fine :D


This sounds like a Spendesk problem, not an ebook problem.


While I don't agree it's a Spendesk problem, it's definitely a hard position to take that Spendesk shouldn't fix it themselves. When a large (I'd guess, at minimum, double digit) percentage of your virtual card traffic goes through Amazon specifically, having your product trigger Amazon's fraud detection system, however broken it is, isn't a great look, and borders on being a bug. At the end of the day, the customer doesn't really care whether what Spendesk does is perfectly reasonable - they only care if it works.

We have some other examples of this in software:

* There was an article here on HN a couple of days ago, regarding how Windows 95 detected SimCity and treated memory allocations differently if it was running. (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/windows-95-went-the-...)

* Excel still treats 1900 as a leap year, which it was not, for greater compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/...

* The Linux kernel has an extremely strict policy of not breaking userland - to the point of keeping buggy behavior in place (I can't find a reference for this one, but I believe it one notorious case involved PulseAudio and one of Linus's earlier "moments").


Except for the part where Amazon (software) agents break into your home and steal your books.


I work in ebook production, and Amazon, Spendesk, and even drm are not part of the epub standard. Those are imposed externalities best avoided if you can.


Sounds like kindle is pretty broken


1. You bought the books fast/easy on Amazon... That is incredibly suspicious activity though, buying everything with different cards... You can get this fixed by dealing with Amazon support.

2. You bought them pretty fast/easy here too... Without knowing if you can transfer that format to your device.

The title is misleading and inaccurate.


Ehhh... OP is riffing on a theme that's been playing a long time.

Back around mid aughts, it was pretty easy to pirate movies. Doesn't really matter how but it wasn't hard (still isn't actually, but that's beside my point).

At the time I was still avidly collecting physical media, and I observed at some point, as did many others, that it became an absurd choice of getting an xvid, double clicking, and there's the movie, vs. load the DVD, sit through previews which, even if skippable, just no. And then the warnings of course, which again, sometimes skipping or fast forwarding would be disabled again.

So your reward for playing by the rules was wasted time looking at or skipping - forever - the marketing for whatever garbage they had coming out that season.

I understand that not everyone wants to embrace the Cory Doctorow professional model, but I sure don't mind giving him my money.


The goofiest part was how, often, one of the unskippable things making paid media worse was an anti-piracy notice! The only people to be pestered with them were those who'd paid for the thing—pirates never saw that crap.


Don't forget that the unskippable piracy notice had uncredited unlicensed music.


I had a similar problem with Amazon 2 years ago.

Back then I recently updated my email, but still used my old card (that I paid with before) to buy some books for my Kindle. After I bought them, I got a message saying that suspicious activity has been detected on my account and that they will block it.

They requested me to send them documents proving that I own the card within the next 24 hours, threatening with the account being deleted. If I recall correctly, they also specifically requested to not include more information into the documents than needed. I was able to generate a bank statement through my bank app. Not much I could do in terms of configuring what was shown there. The bank agreed to help to make a custom document if such need occurs.

However, the thing is... after I sent the email to Amazon with the document, they kept replying that there is something wrong with the documents, but not saying what they didn't like. All replies were the same with little difference in them, and my subsequent attempts were not very successful. And they kept sending threatening emails with "we'll delete everything if you don't reply within 24 hours".

In the end I gave up and started sending them the same bunch of documents over and over again, and finally when they stopped sending their threatening emails, some time passed and they unblocked the account, "reverting the malicious email change and purchases".

What I hate the most in this story is that I have never been able to speak to a single person in Amazon. In fact, I was blocked from accessing their "famous" human support entirely -- the moment I tried to log in with my account, it would display the request for documents.

Subsequently I still needed an account there, but I decided to delete the old one and create a new one with the email I needed instead, because I didn't want the story repeating.

Thinking about this makes me really nervous for all the things that are tied to my google account and I am considering leaving it, but also thinking how much of an overwhelming hassle it will be.


In Poland there is no DRM on ebooks. Nobody uses Amazon, there is plenty of e-bookstores that sell them in all 3 formats (PDF, mobi, epub) and You can just download them od send via email form bookstore to device.

examples: - https://virtualo.pl/ebooki/ - https://ebookpoint.pl/kategorie/ebooki


I have the same feeling with streaming movies - it is often easier to watch them illegally then to pay for them and watch them legally. But I also suspect I can’t be the only one in this situation, so I assume the problem has go be global and thus a global solution will be found as there is money to be made there. Until then I will pay for what is available and pirate what is not, without feeling bad about it.


Personally, I've bought quite a few (non-fiction) books eBooks.com, all of which can be downloaded as DRM-free PDF and EPUB files. Not their whole catalog is available in DRM-free editions, but enough to satisfy my needs are.


If you’re looking for software dev books, check out Manning. They are amazing and their ebooks are PDF without DRM.

https://www.manning.com/


You should have bought a paper copy, put archive.org as the delivery address and thus you would have donated them. Then you should proceed to pirate them with no moral issue and minimal legal issue


I recently bought a Kindle to read Legend of Drizzt. The Kindle came with Kindle Unlimited at no cost, however, Kindle "Unlimited" is indeed very limited, as Amazon only includes certain titles with KU.

I bought a few of the books for $8/book, but since they can't be resold or donated, it seemed kinda dumb. So I found out that I can rent Kindle books with my local library card. In Indiana, a bunch of public libraries are in a digital consortium that shares access to books. So for the Drizzt series, there are usually 4-5 copies of each book that can be rented for 3 weeks. It's been pretty great so far, and much better than shelling out ~$300 to read the whole series of 38 books. I will not read this again, won't use them as reference material, so "buying"/licensing them for $8 each really didn't make sense. In fact, I deleted the few I did buy after I read them.


If buying and consuming DRM-protected media was easy and fast, then it would mean that DRM is not working as intended. Because then it would be easy and fast to copy the file, and even if it'll always be possible to pirate one way or another, they'll try to block it anyway and these restrictions will impact paying customers 99% of the time.

No matter what happens, the ones who pay will be the ones who pay.

Why do you think Netflix is restricting offline viewing? It would be so convenient to download first and watch it during travel when Internet connection is impossible or too expensive, but no, that's why I don't have Netflix anymore (it's been a while). I've heard they've allowed it since, but I'm not getting Netflix again.


It's easier and a much better experience to buy games on steam than to pirate them. And you can play them offline too.

The exception is maybe Denuvo, but steam warns you on the purchase page if it uses Denuvo.


I'd prefer to have the option to give or sell the used games away after playing them. You can't give a Steam game to a friend after you've played it, and you can't pass your entire game collection on to your heirs when you die.

But you don't own anything, and you're happy -- which apparently is meant to be the new normal.


I've also noticed e-books from Amazon are very nearly the same price as paper books now. Sometimes they're even more expensive. Since most people understand that bits should be cheaper than atoms, this is not going to be sustainable.


It's not just Amazon. Kobo has gone Adobe corrupted too and now instead of epub downloads, or even just the basic consideration of telling you what format the book is in you first have to pay for the book then you get to find out weather you're getting actual text or just some shell of a drm file pointing to adobe's servers (.acsm).

I've had to sit through a couple 30 minute chat holds with Kobo in order to get refunds recently due to their lack of proper labeling.

When there is no option to buy the actual text of a book I will try pirating and it is almost always simpler and faster. If pirating fails too then I have to find an old paperback to buy and send off to a scanner/OCR company.


There are other forms of stupidity in the book business, too.

I live in a South American country. One day I needed a two volume book, and specifically, I needed vol. 2 more than vol. 1. Now, the publisher released a Kindle version for volume 1, but not for volume 2. You could get only a paper copy of vol. 2.

I spoke with someone from the publisher and inquired about this circumstance. The person told me that they "forgot" to release vol. 2 in Kindle format and that they would release it "soon". Well, that was about 4 years ago, if not more.

Just think about it. You can have the Vol. 1 ebook, but no Vol. 2 for ya.


That is strange that Amazon does not let you “shopping cart” Kindle books since they support batch buying audio books on Audible.

Some people here mentioned that Kindle books can be taken away, like 1984 was. I try to split eBook purchases between Kindle, Apple Books, and Google Play Books. Google Play Books have the advantage that they are almost always shareable with family members.

Also, I write in the Leanpub.com platform and I also buy a fair number of other people’s leanpub books. You get 3 formats without DRM: Kindle, ePub, and PDF. Authors also get 80% royalties.


I've been checking ebooks out of the library and stripping the DRM from them. That gives me the best experience with minimal hassle, and I can use Calibre to customize the format to what works best for my e-ink devices.

Sometimes I have to wait a few weeks in a queue because the library has a license for a limited number of copies to be "loaned" out at once, but I have a backlog longer than I have time to read what I already have. I figure the publishers get paid the same whether I read the book during the time I have it checked out, whether I scan my ebook reader page-by-page, whether I do absolutely nothing with the digital file and let the loan period expire (probably happens all the time with other patrons), or whether I strip the DRM and keep the epub file around until I get around to reading it later.

The act of checking out the ebook from the library signals demand and leads to my tax dollars and local library donations (yes, I do in fact donate to my local library) being allocated toward the publishers of those books.

I've heard there are pirate web sites that host pre-stripped epub files, but I don't want my IP address logged or tracked with pirate sites, I don't want the hassle of a VPN just for the occasional ebook, and I want my taxes and donations to veer toward the publishers of the books that I prefer to read.


This reminds me of a paper I came across recently that suggests that copyright isn't Halaal [0]. They had a broad term of Poly-Existentials to cover all things that are easily replicated, and therefore not property.

[0]http://www.by-star.net/content/generated/doc.free/mohsen/PLP...


I recommend buying actual books from local bookstores (bookshop.org can middleman) and then giving them away to a local library when you're finished with them.

Piracy is for children.


Do you mean paper books? They are incredibly impractical: bulky, heavy, unsearchable...

I wrote a historical novel last year that I self-published on Amazon, on paper as well as Kindle. To my surprise, 80% of my sales are paper. It's in French, and the French are notoriously conservative, but still...

I don't care one way or the other what other people do, but for me the only time I buy paper books is if there is no electronic version, or the ebook is priced something like €15 and it's possible to find a used copy for 50 cents.


I don't think either are _incredibly_ impractical. They're both impractical in different ways to different people. The downsides of e-books are dealing with digital files, the many technological shortcomings of e-ink screens, and the e-book reader itself is a high-value item that attracts unwanted attention.

I understand some of those are hand-waived away on a Hacker Forum full of technologists, but they describe the uncanny valley of e-book reading for many book readers. Your novel's statistics don't surprise me!


I'm reading "Infinite Jest" on my still-new Kobo, and after the 50th time using the built-in dictionary to figure out what I'm seeing, this is my new favorite thing in the world.


> Piracy is for children.

Ignoring peoples' concerns and writing them off with a pejorative is for children.


No, I mean this literally. Children don't have any income and can't access the content as the artist intends. What they do have is lots of free time, which can be used to learn how to run piracy software. They also have not yet developed empathy, so they have no problem stealing from artists.

If the highly paid adult readers of Hacker News are pirating artists' creative works, and take offense to me pointing out that piracy is for developing brains who can't afford things, then it's a conversation they need to have with themselves, not me.


No, see, I was speaking literally as well.

Being unable to process the argumentative positions of other human beings and factor those in to your responses when interacting with other human beings is a behavior exhibited by developing brains that can't grasp basic adult communication.


Many of the physical books I want to read are too large to hold comfortably, and have typefaces too small for me to read easily. Neither of these are problems I have with ebooks.


Well, it's easier to shoplift something than buy it, too. No need to wait in line to check out. No need to have a credit card or get cash from an ATM, either.


What?? No, it isn't!


> Amazon doesn't have a shopping card for kindle books

I don't know what this means. What is a 'shopping card for kindle books'?

EDIT: OK - thanks all. Likely a typo of 'cart', unless the OP explains further. That was an initial thought, but the next line mentions 'so for each of the purchase I created a new virtual card and bought them'... so wasn't sure what the 'card' connection was.


I think it's a typo, probably should read "cart."

For whatever reason, Amazon doesn't seem to have a way to place Kindle books in your shopping cart and do a single, large purchase. Rather you find the book you want and buy using their 1-click purchase option then go find the next book and purchase with 1-click.


Probably means shopping cart.

I'm a Kobo user so haven't bought Kindle books in many years, but IIRC you can only click to buy a single book at a time, rather than add them into a cart for a bulk buy.


Probably a typo, i think than OP mean "shopping carT". It's how my brain have auto-correct it.


most likely a typo. i assume they meant shopping cart, as in they couldn't purchase multiple books in one transaction.


Buy directly from the publisher’s website. Only O’Reilly doesn’t sell books, they have only an expensive subscription. Manning puts your name and email at the bottom of every page. Apress and Packt for example don’t. There is no DRM. After Thanksgiving there are big discounts. Packt’s sale is still ongoing - $5 an ebook. Apress’s books are only $7 after Thanksgiving, I think both for ebooks and print.


I don't think that's true for most people, but for me the difference isn't large enough to matter.

It probably takes most people 1 or 2 minutes to click the one click buy button on Amazon and download a book. I can get a book from Z-Library on telegram, upload it to Dropbox, and have it downloaded to my Kobo in 3-4 minutes -- not a big deal on book reading time scales.


All the comments here on buying vs. leasing are giving me an odd thought experiment:

Suppose you "buy" a paperback book. We all know that purchase doesn't give you the right to replicate the text of the book -- probably not even as a backup copy. So if you have a house fire and the book burns, you no longer have the book you bought, and no recourse.

But paperbacks don't have to burn to be useless. Hundred year old books are generally very fragile. So granted, Stephen King doesn't have the ability to remotely wipe your paperback of The Stand, but it's not eternal.

It's a distinction without (much of) a difference, since the paperback will outlive you and probably your grandchildren, but it's not eternal, and so technically you don't own it, the same way you don't own digital copies. The time frame over which you don't own it is just longer.


> the paperback will outlive you and probably your grandchildren

On Monday I had in my hands a book bought in 1843 by an ancestor of mine, 6 generations ago IIRC. A few page were damaged, but it could still be read. So a book lasts far more than 3 generations.

> We all know that purchase doesn't give you the right to replicate the text of the book -- probably not even as a backup copy.

A backup copy is legal in my country, and IIRC it's the same in most countries. More importantly, it's also legal to share the book with family and friends, to give it, and to sell it. That very different from a lease where the rights depend on the contract (and the aptitude of the leaser).

> the paperback will outlive you and probably your grandchildren, but it's not eternal, and so technically you don't own it.

There's a confusion between the text and the paperback. When I buy a physical book, I own the object. The seller can't take it back from me, and I'm allowed to share the object and do whatever I want with it, just like any physical object that I own.

But I can not own a text, unless I'm the sole author or it is in the public domain: the copyright holder can forbid me from sharing the text. This is the same for anything patented you buy: you own the object, but if you replicate it, you do not fully own these copies. This concept of copyright appeared during the 18th century in Europe.


> On Monday I had in my hands a book bought in 1843 by an ancestor of mine,

Of course there will be exceptions, but the majority of paperbacks published today likely won't exist in 180 years.

> A backup copy is legal in my country, and IIRC it's the same in most countries.

This seems to be fuzzy in the U.S.? "if you are making a copy so that you may use a copyrighted product in case the original is stolen, damaged or destroyed, your conduct may fall within the doctrine of fair use." [1] Others seem more confident in a yes answer. [2]

re: the several advantages of physical books: yes, of course. My thought experiment was on the (slight, mostly long-term) impermanence of physical books compared to the potentially infinite, but perhaps revocable nature of digital books.

re: the distinction between the text as a concept and the medium in which it is stored: yes, that was the point I was thinking about: that each has drawbacks.

> The seller can't take it back from me

While true in general at the present, there have been many instances in the past where physical media were confiscated -- albeit generally by governments, and I'm not sure that digital copies would fare any better in that scenario.

    1. https://legalbeagle.com/12719016-copyright-law-making-personal-copies.html
    2. https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-to-digitize-paper-version-books-I-bought-into-PDF-copies


You don't own the text, but you do own the manifestation of the text as a physical book. Sure the text doesn't magical stay with you after a fire burns down your house (like all other items in your house) and it isn't eternal (like all other things aren't) but as long as you don't damage the item you own, it has value: the text.

Weired argument to say that you don't own a thing because it can be damaged or fall apart. You own it even if it is damaged by the way. The paper shreds after the fire are still yours.


I should have been more clear in the final paragraph. I didn't mean you don't own the physical copy of the book. I meant you don't own the text itself. Rephrasing:

It's a distinction without (much of) a difference, since the paperback will outlive you and probably your grandchildren, but [the paperback is] not eternal, and so technically you don't own [the text of the book], the same way you don't own [the text of the book when you only have] digital copies. The time frame over which you don't own [the text of the book] is just longer.


At least, you can extend the shelf life of the paperback, and this is in your hands. With digital coffees, you have lost that ability to extend the shelf life of that copy.

Libraries pay 3 times more for hardbound copies because of both paper quality and the hard bound. This is for the shelf life again. When publishers don't sell library copies(hardbound copies), libraries send paper copies for custom binding.


Yep, agreed -- as I responded to another comment, I should have been more clear at the end that I meant neither a physical book nor a digital copy gives you ownership of the text itself. Both implementations of the text can go away -- in very different ways.


Ownership isn’t a matter of physical existence or duration of some physical property.


Agreed? But my point (poorly phrased) was that neither physical copies nor digital gives you ownership of the physical text. If your physical copy burns there is no provision for replacing it because you have a right to the text itself. It's on you to preserve the physical copy.


I never bought an ebook from Amazon, but I bought at least a dozen Audible audiobooks. Putting aside DRM, not-really-your-audiobook stuff the experience was very good. And I am living in a second world country (Poland). The entire process is just finding an audiobook, clicking pay (with my debit card) and a few minutes later I have the book downloaded to the app and I can start listening.

The only issue that I had with Audible is when I wanted to buy an audiobook in German (for language learning purposes). I bought the book via amazon.de and whoa the book does not show up in my audible because I was logged there using amazon.pl account. After logging to amazon.de account in Audible the book showed up. Now I remember to buy foreign audiobooks always using the same amazon site.

The process is as frictionless as downloading warez from a side like library genesis.

Most local providers in my country have more or less sh_tty systems, where you pay and a few hours later you get an email (sic!) with an audiobook as an attachment (usually you get both epub and mobi). They use a few watermarks techniques to identify your copy - so I am actually scared to share my ebooks with anyone. This year I simply had enough, since I moved to a bigger place I had more place for paper books so I switched to them again. I underestimated how quickly the volume needed by books will grow but I found it refreshing to ditch kindle for a year and be back to paper. Now about 70% of my original book storage is taken, maybe it's time to share my books with my friends?

Now my biggest problem when buying books online: often not even table of contents is available. I can use sites like goodreads to predict if I would like the book, but c'mon table of contents should be considered a must have for online book shops. I also noticed that Amazon book preview is deteriorating, now there is a lot of books when you can't even see a single page, only the cover. This is sad, maybe it's a sign that there is space for Amazon competitor?


> My company uses Spendesk for managing funds, so for each of the purchase I created a new virtual card and bought them. After a few minutes my Amazon account is blocked for suspicious activity

You're surprised that Amazon would suspend your account for using a different virtual credit card for each purchase?


I sure am -- it would be sufficient for them to suspend the ability to make more purchases until the account is manually reviewed. There's absolutely no need to suspend the account entirely.


Related thought: I've hoped that digital rights licensing would someday be improved similar to today's stock markets. The government authorizes a broker to setup a market and sell signed licenses (JSON snippets signed by the broker's key, who cares how it's implemented) for eg "1 person viewership of MOVIE_NAME", "1 room viewership of MOVIE_NAME".

Sellers place limit orders, buyers do the same and/or buy/sell at the current market price. There, you've solved the financing problem in a way that's compatible with every distribution mechanism, including existing piracy platforms. Yes there's an honor system problem, but that's exactly the level of enforcement companies have now.


> it's possible to remove this DRM protection, but it's also not something completely legal

Something is legal or it's not. Is it illegal though? You clearly press on a "buy" button to purchase the book. Unless they have somewhere a clause that says you're not buying the book but license to rent it? In any case it's not immoral, and I doubt it's illegal unless you share it.

Nb: don't agree with the precept, for the general use case it's much easier to buy a book. It takes a couple clicks on Amazon, and removing the DRM if you wanted to (say, if you wanted to switch to a Kobo later on) is straight forward. Finding a pirated version of a book that's not a series-A on the other hand is pretty hard.


Removing copy protection or DRM is illegal in the USA and, upon conviction, is punishable by substantial fines and jail time. I believe that copy protection and DRM is indeed immoral, but nonetheless it is legal.


Got tired of giving Amazon and other big advertising companies my reading list to profile me with. Bought an Android-based eReader. Found it incredibly difficult to find most books off of Amazon. Even harder to find books without DRM. Also never found a satisfactory way to sync book progress between devices (phone and eReader). Eventually gave up and bought a Rakuten Kobo. Comes with DRM and probably sells my data to third parties. Has poor support for books in languages I read. But has a book store with a halfway decent selection of mainstream books and at least I'm not giving my data directly to Amazon. Honestly wondering when Apple is going to come out with a sexy eInk device.


As a long time Pirate of everything, I have found that Gabe Newell was right.

> "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."

As soon as a Store offers a better Solution than pirating it, I tend to buy it. Steam being a Prime example. Took ages to build the trust that when I buy something on Steam, it's safe and mine. Whatever the EULA says, at the end of the day, my Steam Stuff feels safe. Add to that the Linux Compatibility (I'd rather pay for a game and have steam deal with compatibility than do it on my own with a pirated copy).

Same with Spotify. I can't be bothered to maintain my own music library and music piracy is dead these days anyway. As long as Spotify has all the music I'm happy to pay them to deal with keeping everything up-to-date and well sorted. The moment they fuck up and I can't find the music I want it's either to another provider with a better library or back to piracy.

Movies and TV Shows are still broken. Especially here in Germany. Now given the Production Cost I'd arguably accept a little less variety per Service but for me it's more like each Provider has 1-5 things I'm interested in and none has enough to justify buying into them. So Piracy it is. And let's not even talk about the atrocious Quality of the streams we get. Banding everywhere, obvious compression artifacts and annoying DRM Ridden interfaces making it hard to deal with them on Linux. Try watching a Nolan Movie on Netflix on Desktop Linux and fix the horrible Audio Mix via Post Processing. Just Nope. Same is trivial with a pirated Copy (that incidentally also looks better because a 50GB Blue Ray Rip just has more Bits than a Netflix Stream).

I haven't even bothered with books so far...


Didn’t Steve Jobs say something like that to the music industry when starting iTunes? “If people can’t easily buy things, they will steal them.”


The Amazon issue is kinda a unique issue you created by generating a bunch of cc numbers and adding them all to your amazon account. That’s kinda what fraudsters do who buy cc info in bulk.

Did you try contacting amazon support and explaining the issue?


Steam.

It was the case - and may still be - that during a sale if you bought a game, then another, then another that your account would be flagged and purchases blocked, effectively ending your sale. The only way around was to credit your account before the sale and spend through Steam's Wallet.

The 'own' thing is the same for Steam.

I go to my Steam Library and it shows games I 'own', but in reality I own none of them. I simply have a licence to play, a licence which can be revoked by Steam or the Developer or the Publisher or the Online Retail Store where I bought it and at any time they choose.

GOG. Itch.io. I own games that I purchase games there.


Er, if GOG decides to ban you, you'll lose all your stuff on there as well. As for being DRM-free, Steam's DRM is opt-in for developers and there are lists of DRM-free games on Steam (for example: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g...).


> Er, if GOG decides to ban you, you'll lose all your stuff on there as well.

Whenever I get a game on GOG, I download and keep a local copy of the DRM‐free installer. If my account got banned, I would lose nothing except access to future updates.

> Steam's DRM is opt-in for developers and there are lists of DRM-free games on Steam

It’s nice that some Steam games lack runtime DRM, but as far as I’m aware every Steam game uses DRM at install time.


Tangential: I've had good luck over the years with this flow:

  -Buy on Amazon (using a single card!)
  - Install an old version of Kindle for PC (might be able to find an installer online); download/open the book in it
  - install a Calibre de-drm plugin.
  - Open the Kindle file downloaded to a home subdirectory in Calibre. 
  - Convert to epub in Calibre, using one of the big HD formats etc so it won't downscale images 
  - save the epub somewhere you can back up, and also transfer it to your reader.
Yikes ... I guess I wouldn't recommend this as an easy solution!


This was my flow, except instead of PC I was using Mac. But then, that Mac died and I hadn't also happened to save the proper old version of Kindle for PC. And I migrated to a linux desktop instead of replacing the Mac.

I'm a bit uneasy about grabbing some version downloaded from a random website, even if I ran that in a VM I still have to present my Amazon account info.

So my replacement flow would include "get a macos vm running, install an old version of Kindle for Mac (known good since it's my copy) in the VM" and then do everything in the VM and transfer the converted epub out.

I keep hoping the de-drm plugin will be updated to understand how to de-drm the newer Kindle format. :)


The Oatmeal has a relevant comic, but for a TV show: https://www.theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones


This comic is no longer relevant; you can see every Game of Thrones episode in existence by visiting hbo.com, and following a very straightforward streaming sign-up process. The price of admission is cheaper than all the legal options the character tried in the comic.

I guess The Oatmeal author forgot to update their decade-old comic to reflect the current state of things.

They did manage to add an update to the bottom of the website though, which says "Please don't steal." This either contradicts the message in the comic or piracy only matters when it happens to Matthew Inman specifically.


A book series I am a fan of, was available only on fictionwise on my country. (It was available on other countries with other stores).

Barnes e Noble then bought fictionwise and sent me an email explaining I had a few days to download the books I legally bought because their policy was that downloads after the deadline would be allowed only for people physically inside USA and they would even check VPN and proxy usage.

So right now there are 0 legal ways for me to get the books I am a fan of. So piracy it is. I guess the author can't even complain if lost sales since there is literally zero ways for me to pay him.


>Funnily enough, it's possible to remove this DRM protection, but it's also not something completely legal, and makes me question why did I decide to legally buy the e-books in the first place.

Did you seriously stop yourself from saving your books, that you'd bought, from erasure by these shitty systems because of some silly DRM laws that are to begin with grossly unfair in this context?

Please, next time, strip that garbage and be done with it. Regardless of some silly regulations, consider it a basic assertion of concrete and very fair, paid-for ownership.

Or just pirate them.


100%. It's time we start spreading the word that (c)opyright laws are evil and need to go. #LiberateIdeas

The good news is: public domain products are strictly superior: https://breckyunits.com/how-the-public-domain-can-win.html

Amendment to abolish copyright: https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.h...


So if you write a book, and sell it for $20, and I make a copy of your book and sell it for $10, you are ok with this?


What I really wonder is if we replaced copyright laws with plagiarism laws, how would that shake out? That is, you can distribute my work however you want, but you can't claim it's yours, and you can't claim that I'm being compensated if you charge for it.

The question I think is interesting here is: can you still be an author without being lucky enough to gain celebrity that you can slurp value out of (e.g. endorsements, etc.)? Certainly there would be plenty of freeloading. I don't think there would be much reselling, except for extremely low margin stuff on the level of print-on-demand, because it would be easy enough for buyers to just get the content for free. But there would also certainly be social pressure to compensate creators for their work.

What I wonder is how that balances out when CC-BY is the norm and not some weird thing that most consumers are learning about for the first time when they see a donate link.


Interesting idea, and I think social pressure probably would have worked pretty well in the pre internet days. But anonymity for the buyer and seller would ruin it, I think.


What if (and I'm spitballing here) people didn't write to make money?

(That might sound snarky but I don't mean it that way.)

- - - -

It seems to me that we will see a kind of memetic evolution: some folks will develop a culture of giving credit and money to original authors, while others will develop a culture of free-for-all. Often you'll have different standards for different realms or subjects. E.g. I pay for books often and gladly, but software seldom and then only if I truly can't find a FOSS solution (has never yet happened BTW.)

- - - -

Really it's kinda regressive to try to make money selling hardcopies of books: it makes way more economic sense to let the books go where they will and then trade on your fame to sell t-shirts or whatever. ("10k rabid fans" and all that.)


That question and more answered here: https://breckyunits.com/an-unpopular-phrase.html


> "But shouldn't creators be paid for their work?" Yes. Pay them upon delivery.

Not a satisfactory answer. Delivery to whom? Once the creator has “delivered” a digital creation to a paying customer, all other customers can take “delivery” from previous customers and never pay the creator again.

So the question still stands: how does a creator of works (especially digital works) actually get paid for their work without temporary legal monopoly on their creation?


> So the question still stands: how does a creator of works (especially digital works) actually get paid for their work without temporary legal monopoly on their creation?

How do cotton farms still make money even after slavery was abolished in the United States? They found a way! Turns out, you don't need slavery. But I understand, those who have a lot of slaves do not want to give up their power.


Or you could just answer the question here as it was asked instead of getting hits for your site.


> instead of getting hits for your site.

Here you go, get the full site without hitting my web server: `git clone https://github.com/breck7/breckyunits.com`

> just answer the question

>> So if you write a book, and sell it for $20, and I make a copy of your book and sell it for $10, you are ok with this?

If I make a hammer, and sell it for $20, and the person I sell it to uses it to make more hammers that he sells for $10, are you okay with this?

Your question shows a shallowness of thinking. What is a book? Did you come up with 100% of the words in the book? If not, are you tracking down and compensating all the people who invented the words you used (or their ancestors?). What about the letters? Let's talk about the machinery you used to print the book. Are you providing a "royalty" to the printing press manufacturer?

The problem with me wasting my time is that your question is so basic and shows such lack of thought that I can't distinguish whether you are being genuine or are a paid shill by the (c)opywrong regime out there muddying the waters. And yes, there are a tremendous amount of paid shills out there spreading false and dishonest information about (c)opywrongs.


Hammers require physical materials to reproduce. (Aside: there’s nothing in current IP law that precludes a profit by the manufacturer on my physical tool design. A patented design just means I can charge for a license to manufacture my design.)

Back to digital books: how does an author get paid for writing when there’s no legal protection for his work? It costs nothing for any customer to forward along copies. Without laws to allow a temporary monopoly, the author might see a few sales. Pricing one’s time for so few sales (ergo higher prices) will inevitably encourage further free copying. In a society of capitalism, where would the motivation to create (and iterate, and hone) come from without a monopoly on copying?

If the naysayers of IP laws want to advocate for a different, non-capitalist paradigm, that’s fine. But the lack of intellectual rigor behind the “eliminate IP laws” argument isn’t everyone else’s fault when they fail to make it convincing.


> how does an author get paid for writing when there’s no legal protection for his work?

How do cotton farm owners make money if they have to pay their employees? Saying we need (c)opywrong laws to have creative content is like saying we need slavery to have cotton. It's just completely false and absurd.


And yet again you fail to explain. Labor laws make sure employees get paid. It's the farmer's job to price his product with his own margin in it.

So how does this apply to creative digital artists? Are you suggesting that they all need to be employed by someone else? How does THAT person make money on the digital product?

Seems to me you don't have a completely formed thought around this entire concept and therefore can't explain.


Lol.

The United States government employs more knowledge workers than all other companies (see NIH, DoD, CDC, NASA, NOAA, NWS, et cetera). Everything they produce is public domain, by law. And yet, they still get paid!

You are arguing for slavery on behalf of slaveowners. We don't need slavery. We still have cotton even after the 13th Amendment (we actually have more and better cotton now), and we will still have creative works after the passing of the Intellectual Freedom Amendment (we actually will have more and better creative works). You are on the wrong side of history.


Federal government employees get paid with tax money. Are you suggesting digital creators get paid with taxes?

I’ve argued for nothing more than you to produce an argument. And yet you still haven’t.


No, it isn't. Perhaps the point you are trying to make would be clearer if you quoted what in that link answers the question?


Ever wrote a text, drew or filmed something or took a picture, to find that someone else used it without your consent to make money ?


You used 22 unique words and 25 unique characters in that comment. None of them are original. Did you have the consent and pay the creators (or their ancestors) of all of those creations before posting this?


Completely irrelevant . Words and alphabet are common heritage of mankind, like language. They are one way humans communicate, it can’t be « owned ». Your question is like asking « do you have permission for the air you breathe ? », but doesn’t answer mine. Did you ever created something, a creation of your own coming of your own mind, only to find someone used it without your consent ?


> Words and alphabet are common heritage of mankind, like language

Ah yes, they appeared out of thin air and no one had to create them or fight to keep them (Haben Sie bemerkt, dass wir Englisch und nicht Deutsch sprechen?).

> only to find someone used it without your consent

My consent? What are you talking about? Do you think I own slaves? No, I do not. I think slavery is abhorrent. I guess you support slavery though, and like to control other people even when they are in their own homes. So we will disagree. You support slavery. I do not.


> Words and alphabet are common heritage of mankind, like language

"Ah yes, they appeared out of thin air and no one had to create them or fight to keep them (Haben Sie bemerkt, dass wir Englisch und nicht Deutsch sprechen?)."

Hu ?! I think you have a misconception of what creating something is :D Words and letters are human common heritage, it’s so old that no one knows who to credit for their creation :D There is a reason why copyright for original creation last 70 years, then fall into public domain : https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html Although details changes countries to countries… Making an original creation is putting the letters and words together, in original and unique form, like for example poets or writers do... see ? Say for example you're a rockstar, and a orange haired politician uses your best songs for his meetings without asking kindly, would you like it ?... (Et oui, je sais que l’on écrit en anglais, et ça n'a aucun rapport…)

> only to find someone used it without your consent

"My consent? What are you talking about? Do you think I own slaves? No, I do not. I think slavery is abhorrent. I guess you support slavery though, and like to control other people even when they are in their own homes. So we will disagree. You support slavery. I do not."

What ? WTF slaves and slavery as to do with creation and having a say on your original creation ?! Anyway yes… I support slavery, matter of fact I got 20 slaves very cheap at the market yesterday, have to train them to post on HN. You obviously have no idea what copyright is. Too bad, your posts are very creative and original. You own them (true), you should use more of that talent to write longer funny things… Cheers.


commercial interests underpinning research and creativity have to all times been the driving factor behind innovation and art.

See also: Pyramids, Sixteenth chapel, Rambrandt paintings, computers


> all times

How do you explain World wide web and sqlite? They are 100% public domain.


https://www.sqlite.org/support.html


Same with buying digital music. On Amazon's website you can tell it is a legacy business. Songs now appear in the same messy search result than other physical items (so you can't try quickly several results to find the correct version). You need to open the page of each song to get a chance to get a hear a sample. If you click anything on that page you get a modal for trying amazon music unlimited, and this modal will reappear again and aagin on every click.

With such a UX I presume the number of mp3 sales on amazon must be near zero.


The music is beyond frustrating and I can only assume this is deliberate. On my phone, if I search for music that I own and have downloaded, it still returns results from the store/streaming and not the specific song/artist I asked for.

I'm looking for something else to manage mp3's again, preferably with an easy way to backup storage -- and it shouldn't be a monthly service.


Even getting e-books from the library is about 10x harder than just pirating it. It's almost like they go out of their way to make it difficult so that you end up just buying it instead.


> for each of the purchase I created a new virtual card and bought them. After a few minutes my Amazon account is blocked for suspicious activity, and ALL my kindle library is wiped

Accept for the sake of argument that this is a real signal of fraud. If I visit a store five times in a day and present a different physical credit card every time, they can refuse to take it this time or call the police, but they can't just force their way into my house and take back everything I had bought the previous times.


To your story: it sounds more like a problem with Spendesk though. And if your goal is to "give it back to some of the authors", attempt no.2 already achieved that.

To ebook and DRM in general: yeah they suck. But that's kinda like a dead horse at this point.

To the convenience: I don't find buy an ebook on Kindle any hard if your goal is just to read it. And after graduating from uni years ago, I have no idea where to get pirate ebooks, so that's definitely harder for me. I'd assume same goes to the majority of people.


My moral compass has always been to pirate a product, then pay the studios/studio partners once I have a copy. It ensures I'm happy and the original authors get profit, at the detriment of intermediaries. Sometimes you can't pay the studios directly, so things like a Crunchyroll subscription covers my anime pirating, even though I could never use their product for watching anything.

Is it terribly evil? I'm not sure. But I do know it aligns incentives for me to buy stuff and for creators to create stuff.


> subscription covers my anime pirating, even though I could never use their product for watching anything

This breaks down if the service allocates payment based on your usage. Presumably zero usage results in your money being split in some manner such as proportionately across all creators based on their own total play counts, whereas having some usage results in at least some of your money being split based on what you play.

I have no idea how this actually works. Purely speculating.


It's simple: hear or read about a book you like, visit Libgen, search for it under fiction or non-fiction, (more often than not) find it listed and available, click to download. The entire process literally takes seconds and unless your literary tastes are deeply esoteric or specialized (and sometimes even then you'll be fine) you can get nearly any book you like notably faster than if you had paid for it to be locked into Amazon's shitty kindle platform.


I have no qualms about removing the DRM on ePubs that I’ve purchased. The file becomes portable so I can use it on different devices, and future proof of I ever lose access to the account, device, or if Adobe’s auth servers ever shut down.

I’m happy that the author and publisher gets paid, and I get the book I want. To me, toss is preferable to piracy, though I understand why people would just want to skip the extra effort.


Once upon a time - corporate environment - budget for learning - I've sent the title of the book and the link - intention to supporting the author.

The PDF was available on the 1st page of Google. At the end we did not complete the purchase - person responsible for shopping sent me pirated copy.

(I hear what you say)


OP is completely right that this is bad design because the fundamental issue is NOT that multiple giftcards are being made - the issue is you cannot have a Kindle shopping cart.

No matter how you spin it, that's Amazon being difficult in the hopes that a few lazy shoppers will "just" buy things as they see it and not track their spending.

Likewise, .epub is a garbage format. DRM does not belong on books.


Why did you not use the "Buy For Others" option? It is directly under the "Buy now with 1-Click" option. It lets you enter any number of emails and they will send the books directly to them. Or they'll just give you redemption codes you can send out yourself.

https://imgur.com/BJ4ZUCA


> Amazon doesn't have a shopping card for kindle books

I think you mean shopping cart? And yes it's astonishing that on Amazon today you can't add a Kindle book to a regular shopping cart (or any cart), or even save it for later! Which is something I would want to do often.

I don't understand the reasoning (or the technical difficulty). It's just bad service.


> for each of the purchase I created a new virtual card and bought them. After a few minutes my Amazon account is blocked for suspicious activity

This seems totally acceptable from Amazon perspective. Someone who in an extremely short amount of time, keeps buying new products with a different credit card per purchase. How does this not appear to be activity a fraudster would do?


I'm not defending Amazon, but I thought everyone already knew that Amazon owns the books and the "purchaser of the license" doesn't. Honestly, though, it's a little suspicious to an automated system for someone to create a new card for each book getting purchased. There is a lot of fraud involved with those cards. Try purchasing a google play card online from Walmart to see what I mean. Recall that Kindle is Amazon's app or device. Kindle uses Amazon's DRM, and Kindle doesn't allow copying of the digital books out of the Amazon ecosystem. The truth is that you don't purchase a Kindle book. You purchase a license to read a Kindle ebook. That ebook gets updated on your device, which might remove your favorite passages. Also, when an author wants, your ebook can even be completely removed.

At one point I went into the web inteface to Manage Digital Items and selected several thousand ebooks to download onto my desktop device. Then, after they all downloaded to that device, I created local digital copies as backups of those ebooks, using Calibre.

Did you contact Amazon using their live chat in order to explain what happened? Or to ask them how to do what you want? I've found that the people on Amazon's live chat are extremely helpful and always resolve the issue (as long as what I purchased was on Prime or Kindle).


Go to libgen.is, search book name, click download link, then click "Open with Books" and you're done. It takes single-digit seconds. It literally takes longer to log in to Amazon, and the last time I did they blocked me as well for suspected fraud despite it being a 10+ year old Prime account. (I still buy them later to support the authors.)


1. don't use Kindle since it lock you to use a proprietary format made by Amazon. Use a Kobo for example 2. buy ebook in a open format like .epub 3. buy physical copies as an alternative

Remember that the important thing is to support book writers and publishers in their job to bring us stories and information. Doesn't matter if you use Amazon or other stores.


Kobo readers are infamous for their swelling batteries destroying displays, KIndle has better built quality.

The answer should be Kindle+Calibre combo (Calibre can run even own server) and no need any internet connection in Kindle.


Anecdotally my kobo aura is almost a decade old with 0 issues whatsoever, and it has a removable sd card which made sideloading software and files a breeze. I wish they continued making them that way.


Don’t sleep in Manning. DRM-free and simple process. Even the email receipt has a direct link to download ebook in all formats.


On a related note, I started purchasing CD's again - not because I play them on a CD player (though I did also get one of those for my living room audio setup) - but because they are easy to rip at full quality and upload to plex. Now I have a huge collection of HD music that I own completely, with physical backup, for pennies on the dollar


You mention that removing the DRM isn’t exactly legal— is this something that right to repair would address? Are there places where DRM circumvention is legal? I had thought that at least in some jurisdictions breaking the DRM on things you’d bought yourself was a protected activity, but I confess I know next to nothing about where things stand.


In the US, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) made it illegal to bypass DRM[1]. It also set up the ability to get exceptions by presenting at the copyright office. And the exceptions expire after three years and must be argued again.

The practical side of this is that no one is coming after you individually for removing DRM from your own files. They will target the tools people use, or especially online services that are available.

1 - The DRM just has to exist on the file, there’s no need for it to be strong or require massive effort to undo.


THIS. This is especially true for old (and new?) academic books / works. If its really popular book, old academic books are available to buy at exorbitant prices ($100-$1000+) or alternatively you can just get it free as a pirated pdf. Guess what most people will prefer!


You can buy old academic e-books for exorbitant prices? Are you not perhaps thinking of physical copies of out-of-print books?


> since I have a kindle and didn't want to buy physical books. ... and ALL my kindle library is wiped

After too many of these types of stories, yeah, I feel the OP. But then, I like physical books.


Different problem, but I was looking for a book a few days ago that was an absurd $33 for the Kindle version on Amazon. (Paperback was a buck or two more.) I found a PDF of the book on Google after combing through about 10 links.


So you’re telling me you can give Amazon money for their closed book system, give them more money and they can just decide to take away “””your””” books you’ve bought over the years?

Can’t wait for the apologist to appear and explain why this is just totally fine


Reminder: Amazon once secretly remotely wiped 1984 from people’s kindles.

https://gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-ki...

You don’t actually buy digital books, you rent a restricted right to read for an unspecified duration. I think there should be legislation that sets a minimum standard for the rights people acquire when they “buy” a digital work.


You know, for a while this seemed like a non-issue for me. I was naive. I just told myself "a company wouldn't do something like that, that's not how this stuff works". Boy was I wrong. 15 years ago I had nothing but glowing admiration for these large tech companies, now I avoid them at all costs. I pay for Kagi instead of using Google for free. I deleted my amazon account, and now just shop at normal retailers. It's not like the price is much different. I sold my Kindle, and just buy my books from Barnes and Noble. Oh, Netflix only has season 2 of Mr. Robot? Guess I'll just pirate that. I got rid of my Nest cameras (Google COMPLETELY ruined that product) and use Blue Iris locally now. Everything these companies touch turns to poison.

Unfortunately, for now I'm still stuck with google / apple maps and Gmail.


The convenience is great, but I agree. Age has taught me these giant tech companies cannot be stewards of knowledge. The public library system is incredibly important, and under political attack, alas that is a separate discussion. Regardless paper books are a great equalizer. Or companies accepting and ditching DRM. Regardless I have zero moral problems removing DRM from my book libraries on Kindle, etc.


It’s not just the giant companies. I had good experience with YI cameras from Kami and so I purchased about 7 of them. Suddenly they decided to go to a subscription model, and sent me an email

“After years of growing, we are at the point that our systems can no longer support free 6 second video storage for all our users”

I proceeded to remove the cameras and replaced them with on site NVR. After I did this I receive another email-

“ WE ARE SORRY.

Due to a system error, we sent you an email by mistake expressing that we will no longer support free 6 second video for the Yi/Kami Home app. Do not worry, you will still have this feature.”

Too late. I also find myself moving away from subscription based types of experience whenever I can, where the company can just remove feature or content at will. I wonder if there is a name in marketing circles for this behavior.


In my mind, I stay away from subscriptions if there are any physical assets or up-front costs involved. Kagi is a good example of a reasonable subscription model. Up-front costs are where companies can really screw you and take advantage of the sunk cost fallacy. That's where I got screwed by Nest. I spent $400 on their cameras, which worked great until Google bought them. After that, no more free storage, the AI automatic object detection went to absolute crap, I have constant authentication issues where the original Nest account and the Google account keep signing each other out, and now I'm stuck with these cameras.


Hi, I also have a Kami camera, and was entertaining the idea of going off the path with maybe an alternative provider, or just a self-hosted solution. Could you let me know about your new setup?

I was wondering if these cameras are locked-in with the Kami cloud vendor solution, or they use a standard protocol thus trivial to move to another provider, or just something in between those two extremes...


I went to the 4k wired nvr, by Lorex. Upgradebale self hosted etc. it came with 9 or 10 cameras but I only installed 5


Ah yes, “system error”.

I'm sorry, this person stumbled and happened to land with their chest directly on the tip of my knife which I was holding in my hand.


I dropped gmail for fastmail when google originally threatened to drop the grandfathered g-suite plans. Has worked great for me.


I moved to Zoho from Gmail.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/12/28/7458159/encryption-stand...


Ugh I tried to get off of Gmail and went to Kolab. That did not work for me at all. The formatting abilities were severely lacking. Maybe I'll try again since I've spent so much energy on this rant at this point.


I successfully migrated to ProtonMail using a strangulation pattern.

I set up a forwarding policy from GMail -> Protonmail. Whenever I would receive a forwarded email, Id go to the sender and update my email address. After about 6 months the only email coming from my Gmail account was spam.

Then I turned off my forwarding policy and noticed something: I don't really get spam anymore. I don't know what it is about Gmail but it receives several of orders of magnitude more spam than any of my other email accounts. To drive that point home, to crack down on spam, I setup my own domain on protonmail and configured a catch-all. Now everyone gets their own email address (like homedepot@mydomain.com). It lets me reverse track who is sharing my personal info with who for marketing purposes. Turns out: in the 5 years I've been using Protonmail I've had two cases of someone sharing my email address. I had assumed all my spam was from people sharing my email - turns out it was just a Gmail problem.

If your experience ends up being the same as mine, the time you save not dealing with spam on Gmail will cover your migration costs.


I can confirm what this poster said about their business emails not actually getting shared around, but that spam just all goes to gmail... I did a very similar setup and got similar results, but I'm using FastMail, though I'm sure protonmail and mailbox.org would work for this, had I chosen them as well.


Sending decrypted information over an encrypted line makes it relatively much easier to reverse-engineer the private key. If Google has, say, the contents of an email via GMail, and surveillance over the transmission line that carries the encrypted version of that, they would have not much trouble cracking your Protonmail key. It's unlikely that they would gain access to Protonmail's secure servers, but if they can surveil traffic going into and out of Protonmail's servers, they can decrypt the messages they know the keys for. They own more than a few installations and high-throughput (e.g. undersea) cables and it doesn't seem far-fetched to assume they have built systems for extracting information from the massive bitstreams, especially considering all we know about NSA surveillance programs.


This is a great idea. I've been wanting to move off gmail for years, I'll try this. Thank you.


I went to privateemail + k9. It's been fine.


fastmail is great. wish they had a platform for docs and sheets


> for now I'm still stuck with google / apple maps

In many cases OSM-based solutions like Organic Maps or Mapy.cz are good enough (though for car navigation Google Maps is still clearly better).


I'm pretty sure Mapy.cz have their own proprietary data.


Terrain shape model is from elsewhere, but I bet that it is SRTM.

In Czech Republic they use data outside OSM, but last time I checked it was entirely/mostly data released by government of that country.

Roads, buildings, hiking trails, landuse, paths shops outside Czechia are from OpenStreetMap.

Can you give example of anything that is "their own proprietary data"? So far I have not noticed anything like that outside Czechia.


In the Terms and Conditions, they list various different sources and give restrictions on what you can do with them. For example, it's illegal to make screenshots of 3D maps.

https://licence.mapy.cz/?doc=mapy_pu


> Unfortunately, for now I'm still stuck with google / apple maps and Gmail.

Organic Maps.

Migadu or Fastmail.

You're not "stuck" with anything.


Uh, Organic Maps has live traffic?


Where do you think the data for that live traffic comes from?


RMS: "Right to Read" - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html


qwant is way better than google


Then how about banning the word "buy", and any other language that implies the transfer of property? The yellow button in the corner should say "Rent now a restricted right to read for an unspecified duration, which we may later modify... with 1-Click".


Should we eliminate the word “buy” from all licenses and rights-restricted transactions? So like concert tickets (you can’t take video at the concert), physical DVDs (you can’t stream them online for other people), airline tickets (airlines reserve all sorts of rights, and international treaties even more), and houses (even if you pay cash, the local government can take your property for a variety of reasons)?

The ambiguity in digital purchases is a real problem, but if physical goods and services haven’t solved the problem with the semantics of “buy”, I’m not sure that’s a productive approach, unless the idea is to just scare people away from digital specifically by implying it’s materially different than other transactions where “buy” does not mean “receive irrevocable and unrestricted exclusive rights forever”.


I think there is a clear distinction to be drawn here, the simplest being around a physical object or not. Looking at films or music, if you own the physical media and it can’t just be taken away from you (especially if you use a form of the media that is not internet connected, like a cassette tape). Buying the digital version is basically buying a revocable right to watch/listen to the media, rather than the media itself, so I would agree that the term buy is kind of misleading given the implied meaning of the word when it comes to this kind of thing. As the other commenter points out, buying a concert ticket isn’t implying buying the whole concert, and no one would think so, which is unlike what people think when they “buy” a digital movie from Amazon or Apple.


For tickets, the use is correct — you buy the ticket, the physical piece of paper, which gives you restricted access to a place.


Yet strangely, the word "buy" is used in the Kindle store. Seems like straight up commercial fraud.


Incomprehensible to me that not a single country's courts put a stop to this. By now this “straight up commercial fraud” has become established industry practice and the corrupted meaning of “buy” (for “lease”) looks set to not only stay with us but gradually replace the old meaning in all walks of life as increasingly everything becomes “smart” (as the oft-quoted Ubik line goes: '“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”'). I wonder both how far away we once were from some less dystopian alternative timeline and what the chances of escaping our current apparent trajectory are.


It is worth noting that when I buy a physical book, I am not acquiring ownership of the text. I do not have the right to do with the text what I please (e.g. make copies & distribute). The same goes for music. The same goes for software.

What the format (digital+DRM vs. physical) makes possible is more fine grained control by the owner (or their proxy) of the work.


You seem to imply that technological advances have made new forms of contractual agreements about property possible that are not covered well by existing concepts such as "buy" and "lease" and that therefore to extend the meaning of "buy" to cover app store or kindle purchases is reasonable rather than fraudulent.

What an app store or kindle "purchase" provides you with is exactly a lease. You gain a temporary right to utilize a resource (such as a particular physical or digital copy of a work) subject to various restrictions.

By contrast property rights always imply the ability to transfer (via sale, inheritance or gift or voluntary abandonment) as well as to in fact not transfer. Both of which are fundamentally lost here. You can't sell your kindle ebooks, pass them on to your children or even keep them if Amazon decides otherwise (as in the case of 1984).

And there is absolutely no technical or economic reason you can't inherit or sell a DRM protected work.


> You seem to imply that technological advances have made new forms of contractual agreements about property possible that are not covered well by existing concepts such as “buy” and “lease” and that therefore to extend the meaning of “buy” to cover app store or kindle purchases is reasonable rather than fraudulent.

Nope, licenses as a form of intangible personal property long predate the “modern technological advances” being discussed (or, say, the existence of the US, for example), and the meaning of the word “buy” already encompasses buying licenses, which may have a variety of terms, including termination conditions.

It’s just that you seem to be trying to falsely generalize the specialized meaning of “buy” that applies when the object of the purchase is an item of tangible personal property to things which are not tangible personal property.


Do you have a good example of a pre-digital private everyday transaction where people would use "buy" to refer to entering in some complex licensing arrangement which did not grant any transferable rights?

What you write is true and I see where you are coming from. But my contention is that what you refer to as the "specialized meaning of buy" was pretty much the only meaning an average person would have used it in. And that such a person's reasonable and natural assumption when first confronted with a "buy" button for an ebook would be that it pressing it would confer analogous rights of transfer as buying the physical copy. And furthermore that courts and regulators allowing this assumption to be violated was a major oversight. If for no other reason than that it is foolish to the extreme to bring about a system where a single dominant entity having a bad day could in a blink wipe out a large fraction of accessible books.


It is not a lease though. A lease has a specified time. "Buying" in this context has an unspecified time. I have movies I "bought" on these platforms which have been accessible for well over a decade. If this was forced to be a lease which specified a time (say, 1 year? 5 years?) I would have already lost access to it, massively reducing its value to me.


Leases can be and not uncommonly are of unlimited or extremely long duration (e.g. till the leasee's death or exceeding a single human life span).


Extremely long duration != unlimited. Stating "until this person's death" isn't unlimited, it is a very exact end condition which will happen.

A 99 year lease still has an end date on it. These licenses do not have an end date. The only time it is generally supposed to become unavailable is "due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons."

https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490&view-type=c...

Buying a limited license which allows "an indefinite period of time" is still inherently different from renting. It is definitely different from buying a physical good, I do agree. But I still don't seem to be convinced that its "renting" or "leasing".

If Amazon had to put an end date ahead of time on all the movies they listed with "Buy", do you think they'd put that date as 99 years or would they make it more like one year? Personally I'm perfectly fine with the tradeoff that sure, some move I "bought" 15 years ago on Amazon might some day disappear from their service, as I knew it ahead of time that was the trade-off of "buying" a license on their Unbox service versus owning a physical copy of the VHS or DVD at the time. But in the end I felt it was worth the tradeoff for the connivence.

For all we know Amazon may continue on forever, offering some kind of version of its streaming service and continue to offer these movies forever. Its not guaranteed Amazon will lose the rights to some of these movies, its not guaranteed they'll stop offering a streaming service, its not guaranteed they'll eventually be replaced by Walmart which will buy out Weyland-Yutani. There's no real pre-defined end condition to it at all, other than until the rights holders say we can't or until some other situation happens that makes it unavailable.

Its definitely different than owning a physical good, I completely agree. Its still very different from renting or leasing.


Uhm, you are aware that the Kindle license is limited by your death, right? (Outside of Delaware, and maybe a few other places which have passed explicit legislation overriding this to allow for inheritance of ebooks). How is this different in any way from a lifetime lease agreement?


Is it? Where does it say the license terminates at your death? Could you quote it?

It's non-transferable (i.e., can't move it from the account), but it doesn't list death as the end of the license. If a family member of mine dies but has a bunch of "purchased" movies on their account, those licenses don't just disappear. They remain on the account until the account is closed. I don't think the Amazon Terms of Service requires me to have a pulse to continue to have an Amazon account, and the license terms listed in the link I provided above clearly allows family members to access the media licensed to my account as long as it otherwise is allowed under the above terms, which never references death.

I don't see any reason why my spouse wouldn't be able to access Super Troopers on my Amazon account purchased back when the service was Amazon Unbox after my death, assuming Amazon still has a streaming service, and they still have the rights to stream that movie on the platform, etc. If I'm wrong, please feel free to point it out to me on the Amazon ToS.


>It’s non-transferable (i.e., can’t move it from the account), but it doesn’t list death as the end of the license.

Non-transferable doesn’t mean “can’t move from the account”, it means “legally belongs to the original person to whom it is issued, and cannot be transferred to another person”. Transfer by inheritance at death is…still transfer. A non-transferrable license expires when the entity to whom it was issued ceases to legally exist.

> It’s non-transferable (i.e., can’t move it from the account), but it doesn’t list death as the end of the license.

They don’t need to, since the underlying general law requires you to be alive to legally exist and have property rights in anything, including an Amazon account (unless you are a special entity created by law, like a corporation, which has its own rules.)


> How is this different in any way from a lifetime lease agreement?

It’s different from a lifetime lease in that there is nothing to revert. The subject of the lease is not an enduring, rivalrous “thing” (tangible or intangible) which is returned to the owner, it is a use permission which is extinguished.


Related : "Games as a service is fraud" by Ross Scott

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/bhdkvo/comment/el...


Eh, one “buys” the right to temporarily have the item on their device, until Amazon decides to revoke that right.

As OP said,

> I'm never buying e-books again.

I do something similar.

If the book is worth it, I buy it in material form.

If it’s not worth the bookshelf clutter it’ll cause, I just skip it.

But then again, most of my books aren’t on digital subjects, for that I usually rely on specs and articles, as tech is moving too quickly to be worth being nailed down on paper.


> Eh, one “buys” the right to temporarily have the item on their device, until Amazon decides to revoke that right.

Yeah, just like someone can "buy" an empty iPhone box on eBay for $800.


Those listings are usually honest. Misleading, yes, but nowhere in them does it state you are buying anything other than a box. The even more misleading ones, helped by the product name, are selling x-box boxes.

I'd argue that the “buy now” when viewing a Kindle edition listing, or Audible edition, is noticeably less honest, especially as you are usually at most on click away from the dead-tree editions where buy actually does mean buy. I'd have that iphone box that I'd legally bought for as long as I choose to own it, the seller can not revoke access to it arbitrarily like Amazon can, will, and sometimes has (1984 being the most famous and somewhat ironic example) with ebooks and audiobooks.


PSA that audible encryption can be stripped very easily with ffmpeg (`-activation_bytes`; for archival and interop purposes, naturally), and it's faster and easier to crack your personal encryption key than to figure out how to request it from audible servers.


Though obviously you have to do that _before_ access is revoked.

As easy as that may be, the shiver-me-timbers route might be even easier.

(I use audible, if they want me to go pirate instead they know what to do!)


What you describe is a lease. Leasing or renting specifically grants you the right to use something for a period of time without a transfer of ownership. If Amazon are leasing you a book, labelling the button "Buy" is fraud. The problem here is that trade laws were not written for digital-only items so Amazon and their ilk get away with this fraud.


> Leasing or renting specifically grants you the right to use something for a period of time without a transfer of ownership.

What's the stated time period here? 1 year? 5 years?

It is an indeterminate amount of time. It is not a lease.


This is so incredibly wrong I have to comment. Most people's leases roll over into month-to-month. You can easily add clauses to say it goes on for an unlimited time until someone revokes.


So, it's even less rights than a lease because you could lose it at any time, you aren't even guaranteed to keep it the full term of a lease.


Yeah, that's absolutely one way to look at it. It could be less, it could be more. However, I still have access to movies I "bought" well over a decade ago on Amazon Unbox, meanwhile every movie I've "rented" on the service I no longer have access to.

I'd say their record overall points to the license offering potentially more value over the short term defined rentals, if you're planning on watching the content again.

Amazon isn't hiding any of this, there's a link to this that's close to the "Buy" button on their site and they mention you're agreeing to it when you check out. It is pretty easy to read and comprehend, it is not exactly fine print.

https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490&view-type=c...


The period of time is “until they decide they don't want to lease you the book anymore”.


FWIW in the above 1984 example it is because lots of people were publishing it when they had no rights to. I do agree that speaks volumes on Amazon not properly policing their platform and that they mishandled it. They should have instead properly credited people access to the properly licensed version.


> Eh, one “buys” the right to temporarily have the item on their device, until Amazon decides to revoke that right.

By that definition of "buy" renters are home owners.


>renters are home owners.

No, they are lease buyers. The lease (like the e-book purchase) is a right to use for a period of time. It's not equivalent to ownership.

(That's not to say I don't think the practice by Amazon is bad)


Especially on Amazon, I don't think this holds muster when "buying" on Kindle is listed directly next to other options which are genuinely purchasing a book with nothing to differentiate that the Kindle one is not actually a purchase of a book.


> Yet strangely, the word “buy” is used in the Kindle store.

You can buy a license with specific terms, including termination conditions. This…long predates digital anything.


I wonder if somebody will file a class action... if it didn't happened yet, is maybe because some obscure corner of the law is on their side...

But seems strange that it is legal.


The issue in the US is harm has to be done first and the compensation is based on the harm done.

You are only harmed when amazon loses rights to media you purchased and that harm is easily measured in terms of the monetary value of the thing they took from you (which, they'll likely refund if you start talking to lawyers because it's not worth it to them.)

What we need is to get corporations out of politics.


"In the US." Not in California. Google B&P 17200.


Perhaps I'm missing something [1]

I don't read anywhere in here where an unaffected individual can raise a case and collect money. Rather, this sets up how the government can enforce the law at various levels. That's pretty standard stuff everywhere (that's why every state has a department of justice). The government can police, but me, and average citizen, can't raise a case against amazon.

Class action lawsuits are civil lawsuits. You can't raise a civil lawsuit if you aren't harmed.

[1] https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2010/bpc/17200-17210...


There absolutely should be a legal clarification of what "buy" means with respect to digital goods. And then fine everyone who uses "buy" instead of "license" for false advertising.


Or just "rent" because that seems pretty close to the reality of the situation. Just have the rental term be long, and have it 'renew' for free. I'd be ok with that.


> Or just "rent" because that seems pretty close to the reality of the situation.

Rent has a defined time period. Buying a license in this case has an indeterminate time period. Buying a license is still very different from renting or leasing it.


Some rental agreements include automatic renewal unless cancelled by either party.

So, a rental agreement for a defined period (very short, instantaneous even), with automatic renewal.


> A company called MobileReference, who did not own the copyrights to the books 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded both books to the Kindle store and started selling them. When the rights owner heard about this, they contacted Amazon and asked that the e-books be removed. And Amazon decided to erase them not just from the store, but from all the Kindles where they'd been downloaded. Amazon operators used the Kindle wireless network, called WhisperNet, to quietly delete the books from people's devices and refund them the money they'd paid.

I’m adding this detail because it’s not as sinister as you alluded.

You are correct with regard to renting, not buying. This is why I only buy paper books (with cash), and grab the corresponding digital version from the high seas.


Hogwash, the button on Amazon.com is clearly labelled "Buy". Amazon trying to take away something you have clearly bought is theft and fraud, and should be prosecuted as such.


> You don’t actually buy digital books...

From Amazon and the likes, no, not usually. But there are some sites that offer DRM-free copies to buy, rather than perpetually rent.

Even on Google Play, authors/publishers can choose to go DRM-free. You can download those copies without having to be tied to the Google app. Sadly, however, I don't recall Google making it clear which ones were DRM-free before making a purchase.


> You don’t actually buy digital books, you rent a restricted right to read for an unspecified duration.

Which is fine, as long as you know that going in and set your price expectations accordingly. If those terms are unacceptable, walk away. If you do decide it's worth it, keep a backup with the rest of your digital data.


It's not fine, it's precisely the kind of thing that needs to be regulated because the average consumer is not capable of understanding the non-obvious long term consequences.


It’s not just “not understanding,” it’s a massive revocation of rights that consumers enjoyed with physical goods. That needs to be changed. If you buy a digital good, it’s yours. You own it, are able to resell it, and no later revocation of rights by media conglomerates should be allowed to change that.


Exactly, it’s a play on a metaphor people know (“I bought a book”), yet one that’s doesn’t really apply (we “buy” nothing, it’s just revocable access).

So it’s ever so slightly fraudulent.


It's fine that the bar could occasionally serve you poisoned whiskey, as long as you know that going in. If those terms are unacceptable, walk away. If you do decide it's worth it, keep a friend with poison antidotes close at hand at all times.


I don't think that a reasonable person would assume that Amazon can and will (as evidenced by the OP) remove your entire library at their sole discretion.


So improve the documentation then so it's more clear what you're getting. Instant access to a digital version of a book, for a non-expiring rental, from an organization that could go defunct in the future. It does not have a perfect analogy in the physical world.


> from an organization that could go defunct in the future.

If only there was a way to preserve digital data even if the company you got it from no longer exists…


This isn't fine, because the language used in the purchase is "buy", not "rent". People buy these e-books thinking it's the same as buying a physical book, except they can read it on their e-reader. It's deliberately misleading on the part of the sellers.


There is no perfect analogy though, it is not the same as renting either. It is buying, with an asterisk. The company could go defunct. We can regulate the bit about their ability to revoke access to digital goods already purchased, but it's tough to do anything about the company itself going tits up.

I just treat it as a open end rental. The ability to revoke my access to the book lowers the value. The ability to instantly get the book in seconds adds to the value. I keep my expectations clear from the beginning.

Yes, we can argue that regular people are just too stupid to understand that. I don't really agree with that attitude.


Any company using the word "buy" for DRM-encumbered media should be required to put keys in escrow so that the DRM can be removed if the company fails to permanently maintain access.

We shouldn't let marketers tell outright lies just because regular people are smart enough to recognize them for lies.


I don't disagree. My Kindle books are DRM free already as delivered by Amazon. If they were encumbered, I'd add that to my list of 'things which would reduce the value to me.' So I just back up the data.


I don’t think it’s fine at all, but the reason it’s allowed to happen is that they aren’t “your” books - what you’ve bought (or been tricked into buying) is a license, and that license comes with terms and conditions, including the right to revoke the license, which usually means you must remain in good standing with your new ebook feudal lord.

Personally I think ebook vendors should be required to use language that makes it transparent that what you are buying is a kind of contract, which is different to a physical book in several important ways.


Personally, I think we need more protections for consumers. Either that license must be perpetual and unrevocable and grant far more rights than it does, or licenses should be abolished for proof of ownership for a digital copy. Real ownership, not some weird license that isn't even worth the paper it's printed on.

Corporations (at least in Europe) aren't allowed to make you sign away your rights. I don't see why it should be any different for ebooks.


Just imagine what it would be like if everything worked with the same design.

You would own nothing and be happy...


Found you, Mr Schwab


I still buy Kindle books on Amazon occasionally, but immediately try to remove DRM and turn them into regular epub files in Calibre. It works 95% of the time. When it doesn't work I return them, and get 100% refund. It's an acceptable compromise.


Can Calibre deal with the newer Amazon DRM? I was under the impression that it could not at some point. Admittedly I haven't looked at either in years though so maybe that changed?


It can if you are using an old-enough version of the Kindle reader app. Using an older version will allow you to download a copy of the file that lacks the latest protection scheme.

To try to prevent this, Amazon tries very hard to make sure you download and install the latest version of the Kindle app.


This is the way.


This reminds me of "The Books Will Stop Working" [0] (2019).

  "Reminded that the Microsoft ebook store closes next
   week. The DRM'd books will stop working. 

   I cannot believe that sentence.

   "The books will stop working."

   I keep saying it and it sounds worse each time."
~ Rob Donoghue

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20297331


You can also wipe your own library in the Amazon account permanently and without any refunds. Or the hacker can do it in a few minutes if your simple 1fa password is compromised. I still use Amazon for books, because really there is nothing like their selection + Kindle, but not because I like them.


I don't get this argument. You can burn your house, but it doesn't mean you should live in a hotel.

The difference is that while I can do it by mistake, Amazon can do it intentionally.


I consider this approach by Amazon insecure. I would much prefer that my purchases be purchased and not possible to delete using a single button in the interface. For example like Steam library. This forces me to treat my account as already lost and it is rather frustrating. I can't buy books proactively, I can't buy games or music there etc.

By the way, when I first stepped in this landmine and went to complain on Amazon forum, regular people also defended this practice. It was even more mindboggling than Amazon actions itself. Like, why would people voluntarily defend strictly negative to them feature, and for free?..


I'm not going to say it's "totally fine", but surely you can see why it's reasonable for them to detect the situation as suspicious. It's unclear whether OP was using a new or established account, but in either case they suddenly started adding multiple credit cards, each only for a single transaction. It's also unclear how many ebooks OP was trying to buy, but "so I started buying them one by one" certainly implies that OP added at least a half-dozen separate new cards in the span of a a few minutes.


This is how digital goods are “sold” (leased is more accurate), it isn’t an Amazon issue or an e-book issue. You’re leasing access to digital goods, not owning them. It’s much larger and broader than that. That’s why it’s always a good idea to download digital goods and keep them on your own device and not in the cloud on a retailer’s server.


This is no news, and not limited to kindle. All digital goods can be gone the moment a company decides to wipe your account. Books, videos, music, apps...they all can be lost at any given time for whatever reason. There is no law protecting you anywhere in the world, at the moment, AFAIK. IIRC there are laws made at EU-level at the moment, so European might have some protection in some years. Also, depending on your country, you might be able to sue a company for compensation, but this is not fast and cumbersome.

> Can’t wait for the apologist to appear and explain why this is just totally fine

Obviously this is beneficial for the economic, because you will replace the lost goods and buy the important ones again. This will drive the numbers to signal bestsellers, and let unimportant ones dwindle into oblivion, or so...


As Amazon announced Kindle services will be shutdown in China, they informed that all your books will not be downloadable after close. Books will be readable if you keep it in your original kindle devices. They won’t provide DRM-free books you purchased even before server shutdown.


Maybe because it doesn't really happen? I've been buying ebooks on Amazon from the beginning. Never had one disappear. I know it can, but in practice it's not a concern.

YMMV, if it doesn't work for you, don't shop there.

It's funny that techies, of all people, don't realize online digital content doesn't last forever. We helped build the system, and now we have to live with it.


> It's funny that techies, of all people, don't realize online digital content doesn't last forever.

We undoubtedly do realize this, but underestimated the degree to which companies would use this to siphon as much money out of the consumer as they theoretically could. It has made for many aggravating experiences, and ruined a lot of products that used to work perfectly.


I kinda think you're missing a point: the viability of your "books" is not under your control.


No, I see it very well.

Looking at the bigger picture, very few things in life are under my control, and on the long list of things out of my control, this is a relatively minor, hypothetical problem.


Then a further point being: it's not hypothetical. "Books" have "stopped working", see other comments. Whether you have or have not personally experienced this doesn't alter the reality.

If this is a "minor problem" for you, why comment?

If others here clearly feel it's more of a major issue, perhaps you'd benefit from seeking to understand why. Personally, I find it disturbing in several ways. The consolidation of editorial control in the hands of tech-oligarchs; the resultant de facto sterile homogeneity of expression; the ditching of customers en masse without recourse; the erosion of ownership and the expansion of eternal rental of anything and everything; on and on it goes.


> Can’t wait for the apologist to appear and explain why this is just totally fine

Could we avoid bait comments? They create unnecessary polarisation which is bad for everyone. We should strive for productive discussion which allows us to learn, not to shun the “other side” and start a flamewar before the conversation even begins.


Highlighting that HN is awash with corporate apologists _is_ a productive discussion. Far more productive than the apologists usually impose.


Is it awash in this case though? Very rarely have I read comments on HN in favor of DRM and restricting users' rights.

In fact, HN in this sense is a bubble where people seem to agree with me on this issue, often misleading me into the belief most people are aware about the war on users' rights...


Have the same feeling, which of course might not accurately reflect reality. But boy, this place can really make people force that "pristine me vs unethical you all" spirit.

Just think about it, GP preemptively felt the need to shame virtual users having a different opinion.


information and art should be free, and authors and artists should be entitled to decent living


Those two statements can't be reconciled in any viable society.


They can and should. Every time this discussion comes up in HN I describe how this could be viable. In the past it was done through something called patronage: a rich guy paid an artist for a painting or art piece.

Nowadays with crowdfunding a writer could be paid by wannabe readers before the book is published, and only publish when he has obtained a FAIR compensation for his time working writing said book.


That would fail spectacularly.

Kickstarters only work for known authors, so the newcomers would be excluded automatically from the beginning, but we consumers won't feel this for a few years.

Then it will stop being a novelty and hip thing to do (in about a week, given current attention economy), and the money streams will start to dry out, while the number of kickstarters will only increase while every existing author will switch to it.

Then Kickstarter itself and other portals will start promoting "better" authors, making it a sort of an unofficial ranked contest. Promoting will be based on different metrics, fairly as far as reviewers will think. Mostly it will be based on popularity and track record of previous products of those authors.

So the motivation to be seen on top (which equals - seen at all, due to the number or creators), will be releasing popular and catchy products, and as often as possible to generate a track record of good releases.

Over a few years this will shift people to create a common as possible popular and simple products, mandatory oriented on kids and ya because that's a gigantic market, so the lowest common denominator products will be the most successful and popular.

And so all kickstarter money, slowly drying out because more and more people will be tired of seeing this clown show and paying for inferior products, will be even further concentrated at the top kicktarting creators, while leaving "long tail" with zero money. Also audience will shift, while adults will stop participating in general, their kids will participate and will fund whatever is most flashy and predatory.

Thus this perpetual machine will go on in circles eventually producing only garbage.


There are undoubtedly creators who are operating on that model today. (Many Kickstarters for content, board games, etc would qualify I think.)

It seems like most are not using that model. Maybe it’s not lucrative enough; maybe they’re not aware of the possibility.


Of course they can. Step 1: institute a basic income for authors and artists. Step 2: abolish copyright laws.

(To simplify step 1, you could skip the thorny problem of defining who an "author" or an "artist" is by instituting a universal basic income.)


But then attempts at supplementing that basic income with additional income -- i.e., gainful (self-)employment -- won't include being an author or artist. People wanting to do those things would be incentivised to do other things instead. People interested in living on exclusively the basic income while watching most other people live on that plus optional income would be few, I think.


You don't think anyone would hire a band to play an event, or a muralist to paint a wall?


Yes, but I meant people primarily interested in making things that are readily copyable. We can just as easily say being interested in that is an obsolete mindset without also saying basic income goes hand-in-hand.


step 1 can encompass all people. lots of people with idle time choose to do art and not only for profit, this is very common and many of our valued cultural products have come from those kind of conditions (which no longer exist like they did in places such as england).


> Step 2: abolish copyright laws.

I thought we were talking about viable societies?

How can you expect any form of R&D investment if the investor can't expect to see an ROI? Sounds great if you want to stagnate but personally i dont.


Are you perhaps thinking about patents?

If not, could you explain where you see a connection between copyright and R&D?


you're repeating political rhetoric saying that advancement is exclusively achievable through capitalist investment. and no i'm not talking about communism either.


It should work with a universal basic income. Everyone has enough to eat and a place to live. Then you price your efforts based on not needing a subsistence. It would make it easier to dismiss the notion of intellectual property, since you no longer need to artificially limit copying so that creators could survive.

They'll probably want some kind of job to afford art supplies, but it's an option rather than a mandate.

This is oversimplified, of course, but it doesn't seem fundamentally impossible.


The limited monopoly isn't just for survival though, it's supposed to be an incentive.


Lots of creators like to create for fun. The type of work is different but it's not necessarily any less productive overall.


Basic guaranteed income model aside, centuries ago artists lived off mecenates - affluent people who chose to support works of specific people.

We see a renewed interest of that with Patreon and other services.


In the current system, the percentage of artists who become wealthier than average from their creations is vanishingly close to zero.

Almost all the money is skimmed by the huge range of industries that have arisen to capture the marginal proceeds created by copyright law.

Maybe you could argue that all artists are motivated by the folly of dreaming that they will be the next unicorn who actually gets rich, but I don't think most of them are that naïve. They find creating fulfilling. They would still do so with a UBI.


Historically you had patrons that provided for artists and the like. They weren't necessary paid for particular works.


Which was universally shitty way to live to all creators in world on average. Sure, top1% maybe lived acceptably, but majority just starved without proper business models. (it's not based on numbers, just a guess based on how humans lived centuries ago)


sounds like hardened political rhetoric to say simply that it's not viable. even ahistorical if you look at recent eg wengrow and graeber research. where's your intellectual curiosity for possible alternatives to status quo? but sure, enjoy your current "viable society"


For audiobooks it's even worse. Some are practically impossible to purchase outside of US. I guess it has to do with arcane distribution rights.

Authors should always have a donation page for people who are forced to pirate their work.


Could you use those learning budget funds to donate to said authors? Saying "I'll never buy e-books again" doesn't really help solve the situation you started out with (wanting to proffer thanks).


So I've had a kindle since 1st generation. Love it.

BUT I never ever have my kindle on wireless. Always buy books from amazon w desktop computer, download manually, then remove DRM, then manually transfer them via usb.

Never had a problem.


The act of removing the DRM is illegal in a lot of places, and most definitely against the TOS of the store you bought your book on.

the OPs point was that you could've just downloaded it as well. Both is illegal and downloading from one of the zlibrary mirrors is just easier and quicker at the end of the day.


Also easier just getting an ebook from an online library legally.

For example: https://www.overdrive.com/apps/libby


At least for the libraries I'm a member of, assuming the library even has it, the wait list for nearly all books is weeks or months. And then just hope that when it becomes available, one has the time to read it.


Should have added that it does depend. My library has everything I want available. Only remember having to wait a week for one book.


Not only books... movies and other content. It is a shame that you cannot pay and watch almost any movie online. And this is worst when you look to movie translated to other languages.


Stuff like this hurts to read. I don't have any DRM stuff for my ebooks so people can avoid any hassles, but at the same time it totally sucks when I come across is being pirated.


when i look for an ebook, i usually just do a google search for: "book name" intitle:"index of" "parent directory" pdf


Webtorrent have made it very easy to stream pirated movies aswell


Same with music, movies, and TV shows.

Valve realized, and monetized, this years ago: "pirates are underserved customers".


I wish we could just buy DRM-free physical copies of ebooks, music, and movies on SDCard-sized ROM cartridges.


It’s now time to grow up and stop being outraged at people wanting to be paid for their work.


What? Did you read the article?

I think it is you that is outraged. You came in a little hot.


Kindle Unlimited + real books for reference.

Also British Council and the ACM have excellent ebook facilities.


Music was this way for a while.

Then the industry did what we'd been pleading them to do since the late 90s: Embrace digital distribution. Pandora appeared, then Spotify, and it became easier to go legit than to maintain a big library of pirated content.

$15/mo was absolutely worth not having to worry about my ISP forwarding a DMCA notice someday, or to hassle with making sure my ID3 tags were right, or synchronizing the collection across my desktop and laptop and mobile. One Spotify worked everywhere, and I completely gave up piracy.

Then some chinks appeared in the armor. Spotify turns out to suck, tracks would just randomly vanish (gray-out) from my playlists because some artist pulled a distribution deal. The support forums are an absolute wasteland of "implied #WONTFIX by profound neglect". They got into podcasting and made some questionable choices with regard to misinformation, and even more artists left.

So now I'm on Deezer and it also sucks but in different and less-egregious ways. I'm back to maintaining a local stash of mp3's for certain stuff that I just can't find on streaming. (I'm paying for them now, because it turns out Bandcamp scratches that itch in the majority of cases, but the hassle factor is still there.)

TV and movies were this way for a while.

Then Netflix stepped up and basically made everything awesome. One payment, a world of content. Why pirate anymore?

Then a dozen-plus other streaming services proliferated and fragmented the landscape, and it turns out Netflix hates Linux viewers, and so on. (I completely gave up caring about TV and movies some time ago, so this is all based on hearsay. It was easier to _remove myself from an entire art form_ than deal with the industry that controls it. Admit that wash-basin.)

Are ebooks on a similar trajectory?


I always buy physical book.


It's expensive to turn physical books into something my text to speech program can read. Typically about $25-35 to ship off the book to a scanning/OCR company and get back an epub.


A lot of people in this post thread defending some that's illegal and immoral just because they realize that doing what is right is expensive and inconvenient.

That's a human being for you.


The irony when you supposedly pay for convenience.


Just Google "[Book name] filetype:pdf"


I know, right? It's the same with small appliances. It's such a hassle to take an item to a cashier and check out instead of just leaving with the merchandise.


eBooks on Apple Books is a pretty seamless experience.


Get a library card and check out libby.


Well luckily most people in society don’t decide what to do based on how easy or fast it is. Stealing a car is also easier than working to make $40,000.

I suggest a library.




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