I pirate all my books now, except for the ones sold with no DRM as epub.
I would like to reward the authors, but I refuse to allow the publishing industry to get away with this bullshit. If the authors choose to publish their books DRM-free as epubs, I will (and do) happily buy them.
The same. I only buy DRM-free epubs (e.g. on Gumroad, Humble Bundle and directly), also pirate some which are not available this way. If I really were to buy something I would unDRM it. If I found out I can't unDRM it I wouldn't buy. Needless to say I only buy games at GOG.com.
Manning is another publisher without DRM. I used to buy Oreilly books without DRM, but they’re subscription only but some books do show up on humble bundle from time to time.
Manning does put a “licensed to my_email” on the pages of the digital copies but it’s not onerous.
- I'm sending a message to publishers that physical books are in demand (not the case)
- I have to deal with the physical book (giving it away to a charity shop is probably the solution, but it's still hassle)
- It doesn't solve the problem - publishers still think everything is good. Only by depriving the publishers of revenue until they start respecting their customers can we solve this.
And I think my attitude is a lot less entitled than the publisher's. If I pay for something, I should own it, not have it subject to the publisher's whims. The attitude that they can disrespect their customers and keep control of the book even after it has been purchased is more than entitled. It should be illegal.
If a store’s prices are too high, do you feel entitled to shoplift because it sends them a message?
The world operates on contracts, and we are all free to decline to do business with companies we dislike or who ask more than we think their product is worth.
Agree to terms or don’t, but I have a hard time seeing “I’m going to take what they’re offering but not pay what they’re asking” as some kind of noble stand.
> If a store’s prices are too high, do you feel entitled to shoplift because it sends them a message?
Digital assets cannot be compared to physical goods. A physical good that is shoplifted not only misses out on the sale, but must be restocked at the shop’s expense in order to capture the next sale. Digital piracy does not create any additional burden to a business’s expenses. This will never be a valid line of logic.
> If a store’s prices are too high, do you feel entitled to shoplift because it sends them a message?
That's not a great comparison. The problem in this instance isn't a high price, it's a lack of access. If they offered ebooks drm free with a X% unlock fee or something then you'd have a point.
> Why? I was told that using the product without paying for it was a righteous form of protest against outrageous terms.
That has nothing to do with it being a good or bad analogy.
> How would that not apply to shoplifting because the price is too high or the return policy too short or whatever?
What is "that" in this statement? I'm not saying the word "theft" isn't valid, I'm saying the circumstances are different enough that equating the two is a poor basis to reason from.
Shoplifting removes an item from the store's posession and is theft. Copying an ebook doesn't remove any copies the publisher has, which is why it's not theft.
Are you ok with me taking nude pictures of your family and than maybe also make them available for everyone else? It wouldn't be a theft, because you would still have originals.
The point isn't "it's ok", the point is "it's different", so drawing a line between the two is pointless. The nuances of copyright and IP in general don't apply to a bottle of Sprite on the shelf of a 7Eleven.
It's fine if you think what they are doing is wrong. The government shares your opinion.
Additionally, this argument here is even worse, because the laws you'd be violating in this instance have nothing to do with IP or theft, but rather privacy.
It's not theft, but I doubt people would be ok with that for other reasons. Depending on the laws there might be criminal charges for doing so, or a civil suit.
I am kinda doing both. There are books I want to own. Some I own in both formats.
There may be a reduction and I am kinda starting to warm up to my reader's ability to add multiple bookmarks to quotable quotes/interesting concepts/neat scripts, but I am not sure parent is right.
Maybe it depends on locale? If anyone has good data on that, it is likely to be Amazon.
Strictly speaking, there's nothing stopping anyone from making a website listing authors of books and how to pay them. And strictly speaking, there's nothing stopping pirate sites from taking said website and embedding the relevant author donation info next to a torrent/DL of the book they wrote.
Publishers wouldn't be able to take down the list website, as it's perfectly legal to send authors money. Publishers wouldn't be able to take down the pirate sites either, because they've already been trying for decades and can't win the whack-a-mole.
I like Peter Watts' approach with Blindsight. He directly provides a variety of DRM-free (including plain old HTML!) versions of it and has licensed it under Creative Commons, and he accepts donations to the "Niblet Memorial Kibble Fund": https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
I had thought he decided to distribute this way specifically as a response to how much publishers kept from commercial sales, but I can't seem to dredge up a source confirming that at the moment.
I mean it doesn't sound like you are doing anything to do what you say you would like to do though?
Generally if I say I would like to do something but I can't be bothered it's because I don't actually care about it at all and I'm just saying that as part of my complicated get away routine.
I believe what you probably really mean is you would be ok with rewarding the authors if it was convenient and met your requirements. Then you wouldn't pirate and the author would be paid as part of your purchasing in the way you wanted.
on edit: sorry, I see it wasn't you that made the original comment, and you were just pointing it out.
" I'm sending a message to publishers that physical books are in demand (not the case)"
Bullshit. While I agree with your point of view otherwise, this attitude is indefensible. To validate your "piracy," you have the simple option of paying for the physical book in order to provide the author at least a pittance. But your objection to that is that you might imply demand for physical books? Are you fucking kidding? Supporting physical books is A PUBLIC SERVICE. Because the fact is that many people DO prefer physical books, for the very reasons that you're railing against. They can't be taken away. If people don't demand them, they will disappear and we'll all be subject to yet another rental scam. That includes YOU.
WTF dude. You lost a lot of us right there, and need to re-think your value system.
Authors either need to sell something people want or get pirated.
It seems very obvious there is no moral or ethical justification for copyright/DRM or any other way of giving control over the replication of information. The author has at best only a legal right to money, and often bad law needs to be fought with civil disobedience (which is perfectly morally justifiable).
If an author/creator wants to get paid by people who disagree with DRM and the "licensing" of books/content they need to offer something for the money that those people want, or accept and attract donations.
Exactly. I hate it when people pretend the question is not on the table. The author+publisher chimaera has made a conscious decision to give me the finger. Well, fsck you too!
I haven't pirated lately because there's enough great content I can get on reasonable terms. But if I'm put in a situation where the publisher says "my way or the highway", I'm gonna go option C every single time, and feel no remorse whatsoever.
How is piracy not proof that people want the product?
You’re complaining about the terms they offer, not the product. If you’re not clear on that point, it’s no wonder the position is so garbled.
Maybe the author doesn’t want to get paid by people who dislike DRM. That doesn’t give anyone the right to take their content without paying. The principled answer is to refuse to read works from these authors.
The product is the totality of what you pay for, not just the content of the book unless the terms of the transaction give you full rights to the content of the book with no strings.
> Maybe the author doesn’t want to get paid by people who dislike DRM.
That’s fine and as I stated those people shouldn’t / won’t pay them.
> That doesn’t give anyone the right to take their content without paying.
This is exactly what my original comment addressed and you ignored:
I contend that there is absolutely no moral or ethical problem with copying information and no valid moral or ethical basis for giving creators exclusive rights or “ownership” of their creations, when they can be copied without depriving existing holders of the information, or giving anyone special/exclusive rights to profit from information.
I can see an argument for preventing corporate entities from profiting from any information or content they didn’t create, but not when it comes to people’s ability to freely copy and share.
The principled answer is to support and fund people and tools that enable piracy and free information sharing, to the detriment of “rights holders”.
Fair enough. It’s an extremist view but more principled than I gave you credit for.
But it’s also totally disconnected from DRM. Presumably you wouldn’t pay for non-DRM ebooks either, or at least see no “moral or ethical” issue with someone so declines to do so.
And I hope you’re also on the side of AI training as fair use that does not require permission or payment?
The only time I wanted physical books obsolete was in college, because I hated carrying 10lb of textbooks in my bag. I've had a full bookshelf for a decade since then and can't imagine a world where I have thumb through a stupid Kindle menu to see my collection.
I have the reverse. I used to have around 2000 physical books. Every time I moved (and I moved a lot) I'd pack them all up into boxes, move those stupidly heavy boxes, unpack them all. I'd almost never read them. They were just expensive wallpaper. Now I have thousands of ebooks on my hard drive and I carry them all with me when I wander the planet.
That's like saying bicycles are obsolete and we can move on.
Furthermore, it doesn't matter if they're "obsolete." In the case we're replying to, they provide a non-revokable mechanism to reward the author if you decide to "pirate" the E-book. Complaining that it sends a misleading signal that physical books are still in demand is a weak, ridiculous excuse for stealing.
When you "buy" a Kindle book, for instance, you click "Buy It Now" not "Rent It Now". The implication is that you are buying it to own, not renting it. Not a good comparison to renting a car.
Also when renting a car, I pay a fraction of its retail cost. Charging me the whole cost as a clearly marked "sale" and then renting the item to me is what's going on here, and it has to stop.
Entitled, eh? Some assumptions being made about people's ability to afford and access the physical books.
I've got cash, plenty of people around me don't and I don't begrudge their piracy. I pay, see below, when I was young and broke I pirated everything. I'm surrounded by people for whom a US minimum wage would be a stonking income, why shouldn't they pirate?
The big issue for me personally is shipping. I live outside the US and EU, and it's a real problem getting books out. I often pay more for shipping than I do for the books themselves, and I have to wait up to a month, and there's the ridiculousness of getting a book shipped across the US/EU, then to my third country.
My approach is that I pirate freely and happily, without a shred of guilt. Most of the books on my reader only get read up through the first few chapters, some I'll finish completely.
I do however like books, real books. If I'm getting into an author I've pirated, I'll then buy some of their other stuff, and I buy frequently.
This comes back to the old thing with music pirates being the biggest spenders on music. A classic case, I think.
So please, leave your moralizing out of this. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to pirate, much of it ending up with money in author and publishers pockets.
I think that this makes sense if you want a physical copy (possibly in addition to the ebook); if not, then I think that you do not need to buy it and waste paper etc.
When I want to read a book, I usually prefer a physical copy (and I am willing to pay for it, if I do not merely want to read it for a few hours at the library (if the library has a copy)); sometimes it is helpful to have it on the computer too, and in that case I would only accept non-DRM files, and possibly even piracy. However, some books might be difficult to find, or maybe I only want one page, etc.
Companies need to remember at their heart that their business model should rely on being at least a bit more convenient than piracy.
I believe authors deserve to be rewarded proportionally to the quality of their work, I also believe good publishers can add a lot of value to an author's work, and even more I believe that DRM-Free publishers have shown it's possible to base their core business model on being more convenient than piracy. I buy a book, it's mine to use on my devices, no strings ttached.
The hubris of some companies make them refuse to see the reality of the market, and instead stubbornly push for wider copyright laws, harsher punishment, DRM, and higher walls for their gardens.
or not pay for the ebook, not have the hassle of having to deal with whatever digital prison they put the contents in. AND not financially reward the ones doing it.
the idea that not paying for an author's book doesn't negatively affect the author is absurd.
there are valid reasons to pirate books sometimes but at the end of the day, someone has to pay something into the system to keep books getting published
same here, I actually love it when publishers publish epubs, it encourages me to purchase more stuff from them. Same with bandcamp stuff with music files. A lot of times publishers are very ambiguous about the nature of their ebooks and I have to email their sales team or customer service to get a square answer about what exactly I would be buying from them. If it's some complicated morass of third party obscure e-readers and other clunky interference I just end the conversation there and move on.
Just 5 cents, thats why I always trying to buy any games on GOG. No "install necessary launcher" bullshit and 100% confidence that backup of any purchased game will work in next decades, or even in next next decades without internet.
From the outside, the blockchain is just a giant bunch of transactions. No company like a Amazon or Visa has a clear picture of what those transactions are about.
Now in the times of lightning, there is not even a transaction for the payment of a book. Payments are bundled into channels. Individual lightning payments do not leave any trace on the blockchain.
> No company like a Amazon or Visa has a clear picture of what those transactions are about.
That's where you're probably wrong. If the NSA can listen to anyone on the planet through their phone, they surely have the data that exchanges are legally obligated to collect in terms of validating all users by their government documents, aka the place 99% of bitcoin users probably get their coin.
The rest is just mapping it all together and correlating the remaining blank accounts with the piles of other data they've got on each person, which I'm sure they're easily capable of. A bitcoin transaction and a book download coming from a the same IP at roughly the same time are surely mappable to a physical person.
There are plenty of anonymous (even decentralized) P2P market places for trading crypto for cash, bank transfers, or other agreed upon forms of payment.
I have over 2x my fiat savings in crypto and none of it could easily be traced to my real identity.
Just last week I walked into a random "crypto exchange service" in the city I was visiting and sold them USDT and walked out with $10k in cash. No kyc. They didn't even ask my name. They were buying and selling for only 0.5% commission.
It’s cool that you got cash for the USDT that you had but that had very little to do with my asking somebody that wants to only buy books with Bitcoin what payment processor they used to get the Bitcoin that they have.
This is interesting. Every mention of buying a specific good in a specific context with Bitcoin in particular is a valuable moment to learn about each other’s cash and USDT holdings.
I don't understand the reason for your sarcasm. In your original reply, were you not asking for an anonymous way to obtain Bitcoin, so that one could then use it to buy books?
My reply described how it's easily possible to convert USDT to fiat because I assumed it was obvious that the process is similar in both directions and can be done for any common form of crypto, including Bitcoin.
Your anecdote about your exchanging the USDT that you held for cash in your city is has virtually zero bearing in the average consumer. Not everyone has the access to piles of non-KYC no-questions-asked cash and asserting otherwise is an embarrassing pivot to distract from your strange brag about your net worth.
Also your story begins with you holding USDT. I am assuming that you were able to amass your entire crypto fortune without ever involving a bank account or debit card, because otherwise your answer to my question would likely be “Visa or Mastercard” when it comes to how you came to possess any crypto assets in the first place.
You bragged about money laundering in a thread about ebooks buddy. “I have access to a Hawala” is not constructive to the conversation in the slightest.
You're confusing me with someone else. Do you see the irony in complaining about unconstructive comments with a reply that is so obviously wrong and unrelated to the parent? Awful tone and childish argumentation to boot.
You're almost there: the parent didn't describe money laundering, they described a legal conversion. It's your prerogative to reflexively interpret privacy concerns as criminality, but it isn't useful for a constructive discussion.
I learnt that Cryto ATM withdrawal limits have grown significantly in the last few years.
It’s a bit of a shame that you’re primarily interested in my posting style, not payment processing, crypto or the publishing industry.
As a fun observation, when you see someone discussing something inane like buying ebooks, it’s actually pretty odd for a stranger to hop in and volunteer details about how much money they have and to brag about how they knowingly pay a premium to avoid KYC when handling cash.
For example, if a stranger walked up to you on the street and interrupted your conversation with “I totally know a guy that’ll take any amount of cash you’ve got and give you untraceable crypto or vice versa, no questions asked” without volunteering any other information, you’d be better off being suspicious of him rather than the person being skeptical of that guy.
If you think GP is talking about “Bitcoin ATMs”, can you point me to one that will dispense $10,000 cash from USDT, not Bitcoin without any KYC?
Maybe unpopular opinion, but I worked at "mega-coorporations" and nobody cares what you buy. You are just a number in a system that at most uses your buying history to suggest you books to buy.
> uses your buying history to suggest you books to buy
So they do care and intend to use the information to practice psychological tricks and deception to make me buy more things (probably not just books) and also sell it to others who want to do the same. No thanks!
> that at most uses your buying history to suggest you books to buy
There you have it. And beyond that, the corporation will sell the data to whoever if profitable. They will abuse them any time there is anything to gain.
I think getting recommendation of similar books to read is a feature rathen than a bug. If you ask your friend to recommend a book the first question they'll usually ask is 'what kinds of book do you like'. Either that or you get recommended whatever NYTimes says is the bestseller (which may not match your taste).
Right now we are seeing video games disappear after only a few decades. When the business model is for the copyright owner to issue restrictive licenses, most information will eventually disappear. DRM further exacerbates the situation.
Moreover this is inherent in the nature of a capitalist system itself - it's Schumpeter's creative destruction at work. It is normal, regular, and otherwise healthy for all businesses to eventually end.
But if that business was the only entity with the right and ability to copy, distribute etc. - then the creative work they produced is highly likely to disappear, lost to us forever.
It's tragic enough that the early history of video games may simply disappear. That future generations will have no idea how it all got started. With copying and distribution cheaper and easier than ever before, we're somehow still at risk of losing this era of history.
It's far, far, FAR scarier to think of this happening to the repository of human knowledge contained in BOOKS. The future which is now unfolding is a sort of permanent, rolling version of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, where the collective wisdom of the human race just sort of fades away over time. Where we lose the ability to learn from our past, because we've lost the ability to make an enduring recording of it.
Ironically, with technology, we have unlocked infinite, practically free distribution of copying and information. It can be done with a keystroke. The problem lies in our legal, political and economic systems - the iron boot has become so heavy it's crushing the larynx of the past and future alike, in a way never before seen in human history.
DRM is bad, most of us agree on this. Also, copyright laws were written for bygone era where things didn't move so fast. I think it's the case of the "lawful" not being aligned with "ethical".
But the tragedy of games disappearing? There's more than 30 games released on Steam _each day_, let that sink in. Writing and publishing books has never in history been so easy. A vast majority of these are archived and easily available to anyone, in many more magnitudes of scale than our capacity to consume them.
In fact, I'm seeing the opposite of your claims, with Meta and OpenAI publicly admitting of breaking copyright laws while training their LLMs, and also the widespread movement for self-proclaimed librarians hoarding books, ROMs and other software in terabyte scales. I'm not passing judgements about any of this, just saying that copyright law is not always strictly applied and the iron boot is more like a fluffy slipper when it comes to availability of historical content.
There was a recent article about 87% of "classic" games no longer being commercially available - well that's still above the Sturgeon's law ("ninety percent of everything is crap"). Why would anyone expect publishers to offer content that is only interesting for historical reasons? For games that are still relevant, there is an added effort to run them on modern systems and to offer customer support.
No one is saying publishers have to offer content which is not commercially interesting. My contention is that if we want to preserve knowledge we need to put it in the public domain after a while, maybe several decades, or at least be very generous with exceptions for archival. This is consistent with copyright law until it was subverted in the modern era. At this point it looks like Disney has successfully lobbied for permanent and perpetual copyright.
Yes, I agree. But I don't see any other way around it that works.
Publishers need to stop doing this, or we end up in a world where everything is rented. They will only pay attention to what affects their revenue.
I repeat: I'm happy to pay for books if they're DRM-free. It's not like I'm pirating everything because it's free; I'm happy to pay for it if I can actually own it.
I've taken a principled stand against Crunchyroll and Kindle - the result has been basically dropping reading nonfiction books and watching anime as a hobby for over a decade. Who does this benefit?
I pay to skip ads wherever that's an option. I do use an ad-blocker because ads are annoying. What I don't so is pretend my ad-blocking is a grand crusade for privacy.
I wouldn't even buy those. Who wants a bunch of shitty ebooks that they don't even bother to include cover art for? Sure, lately, the way they do contracts for the cover artists must include ebooks, but any title prior to about 2018 still has the shitty generic cover for whichever Random House imprint it is.
And as juvenile as it sounds, I'd actually like my copies of The Dark Tower to include the interior art too. Completely absent.
We finally got to a point in the future where theoretically they could siphon tens of thousands of dollars out of me (because I wouldn't first have to spend x20 that amount buying a home with a large enough library proper), and their authorized, authentic ebooks look no better than some half-assed scan downloaded from a #bookz DCC bot.
The arguments for pirating ebooks are very similar to the arguments in Uniquenameosaurus's "you should pirate anime" video (originally uploaded in, IIRC, 2018?). This:
This. I move country a lot, and Amazon/Kindle just wasn't happy with that. Books kept being unavailable despite the fact I'd bought them. Spotify does the same, but at least Spotify doesn't pretend that I've bought the music.
Yes. One account removed my purchases after changing countries. The other is stuck in the old country, but won't let me purchase most books unless they're available in both countries.
The only way to force this issue is to "pirate before you buy-it" and save your money. Hard to get screwed by fake purchase buttons if you dont buy, and hit libgen, torrents, and usenet.
I on the other hand am absolutely happy to buy ebooks via kindle. In fact most of the time I just borrow them via Kindle Unlimited, read them and effectively return them.
Don't need to own a book I'm going to read once and never read again.
Baen sells thier ebooks DRM free if you get them direct from baen.com. They used to distribute CDs full of DRM free ebooks, back when Jim Baen was still alive. Handed 'em out at cons with instructions to copy and share. You can still find ISOs of them online.
I was living in Germany, but don't speak/read German, so that was tricky. Moving country a lot doesn't help with this - a lot of the time you have to be a citizen or permanent resident to join the library and rent ebooks.
He pays them when they don't DRM their content. Pirates would get a much better experience, otherwise, by not having to put up with the DRM crap. I'm doing the same as OP in other domains. Whether the message is understood or not depends on how many of us do it. It's called activism.
Are you having an impact? Do you have publishers quaking in their boots? Do you even have a plan to extract your demands? Or are you just pirating shit you want to read and dressing it up as meaningful? Which achieves what?
Activism would mean you are out there convincing people who don’t already agree with you, and making hard choices about your own consumption, such as with a boycott.
You’re just enjoying the fruits of people’s labour without compensating them.
Right. To facilitate this we need a much easier payment system. I've advocated for ages we should be able to buy a card with value on it—say $10, $20 or so. The card would have a lottery-like scratchy which would reveal a number that could be used for such payments.
I'd be private, anonymous and dead easy to use. If you could buy these at shops, supermarkets—just about everywhere—I reckon people would use them.
Note: I've often not paid small amounts because of the complexities with credit cards, entering name etc. and being databased by some third-party company, etc. has made me hesitant.
I like your point that the person you’re responding to is lying. It’s cheaper and easier to pirate everything, including books published DRM-free, so in order for your point to be true they must not actually buy any books at all.
Why not just say “You are lying” rather than asking them to stop bringing up morals?
Honestly, this is a very privileged take based upon false assumptions. As someone who doesn't have disposable income ~90% of the books I pirate I would have never read otherwise. I'm not depriving the creators of income because I never had any to give them in the first place. Over 53% of Americans between the ages of 18-34 do not have any disposable income [1]. Additionally, Americans that do have disposable income should probably be saving it all in case of an unexpected medical emergency or layoff. These problems are only worse outside the United States. Before you lecture me about public libraries, go ahead and take a bus outside of San Francisco or whatever major city you live in and try to rent a book published in the last 5 years... I'll wait. For all of human history the poor simply didn't read. Digital piracy has changed the world for the better. As an (unsuccessful) author myself, I beg anyone who cannot afford to pay for my work to pirate it. Most authors I know feel the same way. If you're only into writing for the money your work probably sucks anyway!
>These problems are only worse outside the United States.
Huh? I agree with everything up to this point. Of the G20 nations, only the US has all the problems you complain about: no disposable income, enormous medical costs, no job protections, etc. Well-run developed nations don't have these problems.
As someone who left the US, the only real problem over here is that English-language books are hard to find in countries where English isn't widely spoken (which should be obvious of course), so of course e-books are very attractive for this reason. But then, as you can see in many comments here, the e-book sellers don't work much with people living outside the US, your "purchased" e-books stop working outside the US, etc.
There is a world of free reading material, recent and old. More than enough for anyone to educate and lift her/himself out of poverty. The Wikipedia alone, with all its errors, is a fountain of knowledge. You don't need piracy.
I hope your indigent pirate going to compensate the authors once he has lifted himself out of poverty.
This is not correct. In economic terms if person A values a book at a price below the selling price and pirates it, the seller has not lost income compared to the counterfactual world where piracy was impossible.
That's not true, person A could still send the author money by other means, but really in that situation a trade should not take place because it is against the seller's consent.
I was assuming that the other means have transaction costs higher than the value to person A because this is the case in the real world (how many authors even have a Patreon?).
Normally "have to" is used when the consequences of not doing so are very dire, possibly life threatening. A person shoplifting a copy of Harry Potter for their own use would not normally count.
Many would contend the consequences would be very dire if they didn't act. For example, those who depend on Sci-Hub for educational material. They'd contend they've no other option.
In Germany, Austria and Switzerland all local Book store chains got together to create Tolino, a competitor to kindle.
It got the same nice features like apps and sync. And the devices themselves are very good too.
But the one thing that sets them apart is that they give you the opportunity to download the EPUB files for e-books and MP3s for audiobooks.
Also you can just upload EPUB Files via the web interface.
Sure you sometimes pay more, but at least you own what you buy.
Google Play Books allows you to download an EPUB, but only if the book is from a DRM‐free publisher. Tor Books is one such (sci‐fi) publisher, so I buy their books through Google Play.
I don’t know a way to check in advance if a Google Play book is DRM‐shackled. Hopefully, if a purchase does turn out to have DRM, Google would let you return the book for a refund if you haven’t read it, but I haven’t tested that.
Kobo does too. Usually it says something like "At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied." and below in the download options it will tell you DRM-free.
I get encoding issues when sending books directly as epub, so I have to use a epub->mobi conversion service (sendepubtokindle). Is there any way to fix encoding issues directly on kindle? I would really like to skip a step of conversion.
In addition to that, many public libraries offer a service where one can lend ebooks. And this is integrated in the tolino.
This is based on some DRM system from Adobe, though.
But still, a nice thing as an additional source for ebooks.
I didn't know Tolino offered DRM-free ebooks, will definitely have to check them out. (According to the FAQ there are some Adobe protected ebooks, but that's rare)
I have to buy through one of the bookstores, right?
I got both my AWS and Amazon accounts banned a few months ago, because I was living in Eastern Ukraine and ordered some books there in 2014 (before the postal services stopped working). Apparently, that address was saved somewhere and now it is under sanctions, even though I left that place in 2014. My Kindle library is gone because Amazon's support can't do anything about it.
I was mostly ignoring the fact DRM exists, because what could go wrong? Well, it was a refreshing reminder that our "R" in "DRM" are much more fragile than we got used to think when nothing bad happens for years. At least until we forget about it once again. That's it folks, gotta go buy a few limited use licenses on Steam while they're on sale!
The author touches on revocation - to me this is a MAJOR problem with "licenced" media. Publishers have shown, again and again, that they will not continue to "sell" (distribute) their product.
Despite storage and transmission being very cheap, it is almost impossable to find many classic films, music, and books. Aparently it is legitimate can claim a "loss" if they cease to sell an item (presumably having destroyed the master copy).
It might make perfect commercial sense to drop low selling items and claim large tax losses, it may be legal, but how is this moral? For classic items, this is nothing less than destroying cultural artifacts.
(This is yet another case where modern copyright is out of step with modern morals and expectations. Personally, I'm for short copyright terms, perhaps requiring explicit registration, and requiring licence holders to maintain a copy for historical purposes - perhaps in some kind of escrow at the internet archive.)
I just had an old account closed by Amazon and lost 15 or so books a couple movies, some purchased music and a bunch of old mobile apps from the Amazon app store. The total value was probably $500. After an hour of going circles with contact center people, I was told there was no way to transfer my content to another account, and there was no recourse to restore access to the account and the supervisor couldn't help either.
This experience was a customer service horror show, and really soured me on buying any electronic content from Amazon, ever again. I really don't care about how piracy affects Amazon and mega-industries. I care a lot more about having $500 worth of content taken away on the whim of a call center agent. In fact, it might just be time to start working on getting legislation in place that forces companies to at a minimum, refund they buyer (with interest) if they cut off access to DRM protected content.
The HN crowd largely consists of people who make a living creating or working for businesses that create material which is protected as intellectual property rights.
Source code to computer programs is protected under copyright law (and in America often also patent law). Databases such as the core of social networks are protected under a version of copyright law. Algorithms and procedures are often protected through confidentiality agreements and laws requiring confidentiality from employees and business partners. Names of companies, websites, URLs, games, characters, URLs (google.com) etc. are protected under trademark law. I can't just register "google.con" and make a search engine and sell ads from that domain. Google will come after me. And those on HN that don't work yet, often study at expensive universities that awarding fancy degrees. Not everyone is free to say they graduated as a Ph.D. in engineering from Harvard.
Yes, many developers on HN open source part of or all of their work. But then the get paid creating some other intellectual property right. Very, very few people just give away all their work.
Yet, that's literally what most commenters here seem to ask that publishing houses and authors do. Publishing houses make little money compared to many other businesses and especially compared to big tech. Authors typically make next to nothing.
If publishing houses don't try to protect their digital works, they will not be paid enough to cover costs, yet alone turn a profit. Simple as that. An e-book can be copied and spread much easier than a print book. Without publishing houses, there will be less screening of published works, and less marketing of authors and new books.
At the end of the day, people have to eat. We're going to have to pay people somehow, either by buying a product, buying merchandise, paying taxes / donating to fund grants, or through patreon or github sponsors. The topic is fairly broad, and so it's less one system than a bunch of different industries with their own funding models, so this is going to be speaking fairly generally. A lot of our present funding models are a hybrid of these systems. Some combination of ads, small dollar donations, institutional sponsorship, and public grants broadly help pay for anything from a new software library to webcomics. Sometimes it's enough, and sometimes it's not, but there are alternative funding models to the present winner-take-all model of big publishing houses. It's good to recognize that a lot of open source can only exist because a lot of us work in high paying tech jobs, and that model will not work for traditional books, but that doesn't mean we should give up trying to find a better solution than the patchwork system we have today.
So, why don't we just subsidize authors?
Arguably, access to more information drives more technological growth, which benefits us all. How many discoveries have been delayed because journal articles are behind a paywall? How many wasted manhours were spent on that? Grad students make even less money and arguably spend even more time creating intellectual property. It's frankly ludicrous to gate scholarly articles behind a $20 paywall, because for one, the burden of payment in those cases tends to fall upon those least able to pay for it, who are students and researchers, while the publishers make all the money by extorting institutions who can pay, all while profiting off of publicly funded research. This is the least morally objectionable point, and probably why newer fields (especially in compsci) post all their articles for free on arXiv, or else host somewhere else, since the price of hosting is extremely cheap compared to the actual work.
Less arguably, art itself is the same kind of public good; We have PBS, for programs that one can broadly say is "enriching" because a bunch of people a hundred years ago said so; we surely recognize that Shakespeare ought to be publicly funded. Why not modern forms of entertainment?
Failing that, let's look at this purely from a cost perspective. We'll assume if we're paying 100% of a writer's salary, their work is in the public domain, and that counts as savings to consumers. Let's suppose we wanted to fund every single writer in America to do writing full time. Let's do some back of the envelope calculations here. Supposing I spent $40 on books per year, for the sake of argument. There are 330m people in the US, median income for writers is around $20k USD [1] (but those are poverty wages) to $50k USD [3] (I think those include industry), and there are anywhere from 50k to 200k active writers right now [2][3], depending on how you count. So, that's anywhere from $3.3 (probably add an extra few cents for admin costs) to $33 per person per year in additional taxes, if we literally subsidized every single writer in the US. I'm certain I spent more than $33 on books this year, though one could probably quibble on that. 'course, that's probably overkill, and it doesn't account for support staff, admin, editors, marketing etc, but evenly naively taken, it doesn't seem out of the realm of economic possibility.
Of course, we probably won't pursue such an extreme solution. So let's look at another one. Consider the question of the library. Surely every author would be against an institution distributing their work for free (even having paid the publisher for one copy). For sake of money, should Stephen King be removed from circulation of libraries? But that fails to recognize that physical libraries target a market segment that cannot afford to buy a book; when it is more convenient, people tend to want to buy books for themselves. Digital removes these inconvenient constraints and will require a renegotiation in this space as it shifts to much in the other direction; the internet archive's unilateral action is at best, controversial. Streaming services like spotify initially gave a lot of consumer surplus at the expense of the artists (and is now, like every platform, trying to claw that surplus to themselves). The library model may not work for digital. Consumers or publishers can capture all the surplus in this new shakeup, but some balance is probably the most acceptable/optimal solution to most people.
And like it or not, with AI, artists will be devalued, even if that work isn't done. Amazon is already killing traditional publishing houses with its own platform. While we're having a debate on copyright, the market is going to shift even more in favor of consumers and less in favor of authors. We're going to have to address these issues anyways, like it or not, because we're already on this path, so we might as well figure out a more robust solution now. Failing everything, why not have a national system of grants for writers to produce public domain works?
(And yes, I know this naive solution probably has many holes in it. I'd be delighted to be corrected, even more so with another solution. But at the very least, shouldn't we at least try something else than the endless morass of DRM and copyright?)
Well, it’s not that big of a mistery actually, even less a psychological manipulation to increase revenues. If I completely own an e-book, I can duplicate it, quadruplicate it, post it online for 10000 people to have it for free. And this would bring the company just the 3$ that I gave to them.
If you want to live in the olden days, buy the hard copy, share it with a friend, donate it to a library. Nothing has changed there.
Is the prevalence of DRM actually preventing ebooks from being pirated? I don't pirate books myself but I get the impression that the answer is very much 'no'.
Pretty much every single paper and research repeats the fact that DRM is completely ineffective and has practically no effect on piracy or revenue loss.
It loses revenue by itself by inconveniencing paying customers (lowering sales), restricting addressable market (by limiting purchases to compatible DRM leaden hardware) and demanding R&D costs.
Of course, facts rarely challenge belief when it comes to business owners - just see the RTO push.
It has prevented it to a certain degree. If don’t have the know-how, you can’t find the book you’re after. And I know very few people that actually know where to find for free the book they want to read.
Anyway, my poin was: if this solution isn’t working, or looks unfair, how are we going to solve it differently?
> If don’t have the know-how, you can’t find the book you’re after.
This isn't a function of how difficult it is for the pirates themselves to get their hands on a DRM-free electronic copy of a book. Instead, it's primarily a function of the fact that piracy is illegal, and—regardless of how easy it is for pirates to obtain DRM-free copies of the media they want to distribute—such distribution activities are limited to dark and relatively lawless corners of the internet where "normies" fear to tread.
That's the basis of my point in reply to you. It may be that DRM prevents to some degree the more casual form of "piracy" in which e.g. I give a friend a copy of an ebook file instead of lending a physical copy, but that didn't seem to be what you were getting at, and anyway since lending physical copies has been a possibility since books first came to exist I think the degree to which this sort of casual piracy threatens publishers' bottom lines is not a foregone conclusion until some independent party convincingly measures it.
> if this solution isn’t working, or looks unfair, how are we going to solve it differently?
OP's article makes some recommendations under "Conclusions".
It isn't. It's been a while that I've seen a (English at least) book I can't find a pirated version somewhere, unless it has a really small, niche audience or it just isn't published in a way that's much harder to use (vendor provided applications, etc). All it takes is one user with the know-how to remove the DRM and a willingness to share the file, which as the history of the internet shows, is almost an inevitability with even semi-popular books.
In terms of how DRM is cost-effective for platforms and publishers (i.e. why they bother with it at all), it seems much more likely to me that it's primarily meant to prevent fully legitimate post-first-sale transfers of books, e.g. library lending, second-hand sales, and so on. Publishers couldn't do anything to stop post-first-sale transfer of physical copies, but DRM-enabled ebook platforms give them a new lever.
These days companies have been able tie in DRM with convenience value add. Rather than fiddle around with epub files, just log in with your amazon account and have everything right there. It's crap from a freedom perspective, but I can see how it actually seems better to the average user.
It is not at all preventing this. There for instance 2 major sites with millions of books and wikipedia entries and all efforts to shut done is change the tld they are offered at which is linked on Wikipedia.
If DRM were banned maybe things wouldn't be different. So long as publishers have the option, I think they're more comfortable publishing e-books with DRM than without, and more comfortable publishing more obscure e-books from unknown authors than paper books from the same as the investment is lower. So there could be a catalog of books that wouldn't be available without DRM in the picture.
When I buy ebooks on Amazon I always download them and put them in Calibre. I have also sent copies to my brother. The article states that this is impossible, but Amazon literally has a "download" button. (Although they hide it well)
"In addition, the owners of older e-ink Kindles running firmware prior to 5.6.5 (August 2015) can access books in non-KFX formats directly from the device via USB."
some consumers will pay the premium of ownership over the licence and some won't. if either market has demand fall below a particular threshold, the market will collapse. this isn't a moral issue, this is simply an effect of a new market for a service substituting effectively for an old market for a good. it's clear that a lot of previous book-owners really just wanted to be able to access a text
if there is really a mass misunderstanding by ebook consumers that they don't have rights as part of their licence that they believe they have, the market demand will start shifting back towards ownership
A good solution to this is buying paper books.
Lots of cheap used books out there as well.
Then you can:
Keep it on your bookshelf.
Read it over and over again.
Make notes all over it.
Photocopy it.
Share it with a friend.
Donate it to a tiny community library.
Give it away
Sell it.
Burn it.
Toilet paper.
I really wish that real paper books would become the new
trendy thing (like with vinyl.[1])
You can even get together with some friends with similar tastes
then each person can different good books and let everyone
read them. Saves a lot of money.
[1] I read somewhere that a significant percentage of people
who buy and collect vinyl LPs do not own a turntable.
Quite odd
I think paper books are a trendy. Reading a paper book is a different experience much more so than vinyl is, and while bookshops and libraries went through a dip they seem to be coming up again
That's a long study. I look at ebooks like I look at movies, CDs, etc. Unless I can my own CDs or rip my own movies, I don't have a digital "file" copy of those items. Honestly, it has been difficult keeping up on that, improvements in displays (4K OLED TV, for instance), etc.
It sucks and there should be a way of proving ownership such that you get access to the online digital versions.
I have an extensive book collection and first several first editions in the areas I am interested in. I read the physical books from time to time, but for me the Kindle is a must have device that I use for hours every day - reading in bed, etc.
Do I like it being a closed system? No. Do I have the energy to pirate things and keep on top of managing those collections - books are somewhat easier, but media is much harder - no.
You do own the power you purchase. You just decide to give it away to our collective pool of entropy right away. You could store it in a battery instead if you wanted.
And taking credit for something you didn't do may or may not be some form of misrepresentation/fraud, but I doubt many jurisdictions would consider it literal theft.
I know you're joking, but at least in Germany you couldn't _steal_ electricity because electricity is not a _thing_ (according to German law)[0]. They fixed that well over a century ago by just making electricity theft itself a specific crime though.
This is a silly argument. "Owning" something doesn't mean you have unlimited rights to do what you want with it. Do you not "own" physical books because you can't (legally) photocopy them? Do you not own a gun because you can't (legally, at least where I live) lend it to a friend?
I'm not saying the way e-books work is good - it clearly isn't - but not because there's a fundamental law that owning an e-book should be identical to owning a physical book.
> "Owning" something doesn't mean you have unlimited rights to do what you want with it. Do you not "own" physical books because you can't (legally) photocopy them? Do you not own a gun because you can't (legally, at least where I live) lend it to a friend?
In your examples, you own the book and the gun because the publisher of the book and the manufacturer of the gun (or anyone else, excepting the state, I suppose) can’t unilaterally take them back from you or modify them without some sort of penalty. This can — and has [0] — happened with eBooks. The “unlimited rights to do what you want with [them]” are not guaranteed by ownership in my opinion.
Again, "owning" does not mean that something cannot be unilaterally taken from you. Eminent domain is a very obvious example of that. Ownership does not have a single neat list of requirements, which is why it makes no sense to say "this is bad because we don't own it".
> Again, "owning" does not mean that something cannot be unilaterally taken from you. Eminent domain is a very obvious example of that.
Eminent domain is the state taking from you. I already mentioned this in my comment. In fact, the state pays a penalty for doing so in the US as enshrined in the 5th amendment: “… nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.“
> Ownership does not have a single neat list of requirements
No, it does not have a comprehensive list for all use cases, but I would say that the one I mentioned in my first comment is a necessary one: fundamentally that it cannot be taken from you without penalty.
(Taking continental law as basis because lol common "law") Ownership means you have these three rights towards the object: usus, fructus and abusus. usus (use, i.e reading) and abusus (abuse, i.e deleting the file) are fine under DRM, but DRM introduces non-legally-required limitations for enjoying the fruits of the ebook you own (renting it, lending it, selling it). Any "ownership" with DRM is not ownership in the legal sense.
Copying falls under the ownership of the text within the book. It is something completely separate.
The definitions of rights that are guaranteed by constitution can be altered via laws. The government has quite a bit of leeway there that private firms do not.
One of the biggest downsides to eBooks and streaming in my opinion is the availability of out of print books/music. I have had a hard time getting hold of a number of books and CDs. Some music seems to have just been lost, where the only place to get them is ebay - but that I suspect that avenue is dying rapidly with the adoption of streaming.
stallman has been very very good at seeing what others would collectively do in the face of technological development. People shunned him, yet he was absolutely right
I stopped buying ebooks with DRM, which essentially means I stopped buying them altogether. It's a real shame, because ebooks are vastly more convenient than print books, but I got to a breaking point with the hassle of cracking modern DRM.
Anybody have success with DIY book scanning and conversion to epub?
I’ve been looking into it. Google published the design and software for the book scanners they used for Google books and it seems plausible to DIY them for a reasonable price. You can also buy book scanners for a couple of hundred dollars if you don’t mind turning pages manually.
The main thing that’s kept me for pursuing this is that I don’t really want to own all the physical books in the first place. I prefer physical copies of technical and math books, but for random fiction I am interested in ebooks to save space. Buying the books and scanning them gets me into the same position with books that I’m already in with movies, shows, and music: lots of physical media taking up space so that I could put a bunch of extra effort into getting a digital copy that I could have downloaded for free with far less effort if I were willing to pirate.
Calibre has allowed me to essentially own all of my ebooks. I try to buy from wherever the author will get the largest percentage (so, not Amazon, essentially) and then use Calibre to strip the DRM. It's an amazing software and will basically do everything for you automatically, I can't recommend it enough. The only reason I need to do this is because I use an off brand e-reader and DRM can prevent me from using it. I use these words quite deliberately: it's fucking ridiculous.
I don't distribute these purchases, I just store and back them up myself. Every so often I will "lend" one to my partner or a friend like any other paperback on my shelf. The difference being, I suppose they now "own" it, too.
In all of this, I am surprised that the authors managed to miss out (or did they leave it out?) the damaging role that Apple played in this ecosystem by colluding with publishers. It got away with a light tap on the wrist but we still feel its effects today.
I love getting ebooks from my library. I can even request new books within my system that aren't out yet, then when they're released and purchased by the library, they are automatically put on hold and added to my account.
I agree with everything in this article, but I also gave up. I accept that when I buy an ebook, it’s not mine, I’m just renting cloud storage for it until the company decides I can’t have it anymore.
This is mostly because the value I extract from it (the format) is the convenience and formatting. I want it now, everywhere, and well formatted for my device, and I want to do as little work as possible to make that happen. I have money and not much time.
Is this short sighted? Probably. But I have come to accept that media is ephemeral, like most things. I just don’t have the time or inclination to be an archivist, much as I wish I did.
Calibre trivializes removing DRM on import, collects your ebooks in a simple directory structure, sharing them on the web to yourself or others, moving books to your device plugged in or wirelessly on your iphone or android with an easy to use app.
It's been around for about 17 years and will probably hang around until the author dies.
Calibre is great! I’ve donated a few times. Alas, I simply don’t have the time or patience to maintain a library like this. It just isn’t worth it to me. I am grateful that the option exists.
Fine if "everywhere" you go is somewhere the DRM allows. For people who cross region borders, it can remove the right you thought you paid for, with no justification. If you want it 'now', read it 'now', then you're also somewhat the DRMed item being 'revised' against your will (happens) or removed by actions of or failure of the publisher (also happens).
How about the more general anti-ownership digital economy? When (legal) digital distribution of music was new, I remember how Apple's decision to distribute DRM-free MP3s in the iTunes store was hailed as a great success. Fast forward to today, where most music listeners are using (and paying for) platforms like Spotify, where they don't own the music they listen to. So it looks like the majority of people don't really care for owning the media they pay money for, or have gotten used to the "rent model" and will gladly trade convenience for ownership.
Every time I buy an e-book in Poland, I’m grateful that DRM here ended up being just a fad, and no publisher uses it anymore. The gold standard here is watermarking, but I can easily copy books from my Kindle to my wife’s.
That said, I’m still not very happy about the status quo. I wondered how the book economy would look like in my ideal world, and came up with this:
I hope that the subscription/Patreon/Substack model for publishing wins out in the end, because it seems obvious that piracy is not really a sustainable solution if you want new books to continue to be published.
For all of its downsides, the subscription model has two big benefits: more of the money goes to writers, not publishers, as in the current system; and it shifts publishing to an economic situation similar to open source, where writers are compensated for their opinions/services and not for an easily copyable (and DRM'able) product.
I use my e-reader a lot, as I only have limited shelf space at home, and like to be able to take my whole library with me in the train. For most books, I am fine with having them only available on my device. Bit once in a while, I wish there was some way to get the physical copy of the book for free or at a discount when one purchased the electronic version. Not being able to have the physical book to display on my bookshelf and lend to friends and family, although I essentially paid the same price, frustrates me again and again.
I would like to reward the authors, but I refuse to allow the publishing industry to get away with this bullshit. If the authors choose to publish their books DRM-free as epubs, I will (and do) happily buy them.