I've written two novels, formally published in the UK, self-published in the US. Books available on Amazon, and DRM-free on my website https://gavinchait.com.
- Within the first week someone buys the book via Amazon using a stolen credit card;
- Book is uploaded to ZLib;
- I complained to Amazon, raising both the issue of the stolen work and the stolen credit card;
- No response from Amazon, although they were quick to reverse the charge (I'm assuming as soon as the card is reported stolen);
- I complained to ZLib using their DMCA reporting tool;
- ZLib care about as much as Amazon, and my novels are still up.
I made it as easy as possible to read my work on my website and pay me direct. I released it as a DRM-free epub for use on any device or platform. You can even buy anonymously. Still doesn't matter. Folks like the OP won't support writers.
And, while this won't stop me writing, it makes it impossible to afford to write as often as I'd like. Two years after my second, I'm still trying to save up enough to afford to write my third.
> Still doesn't matter. Folks like the OP won't support writers.
"Folks like the OP" mentioned they use GOG, No Starch Press, etc, so they presumably don't mind paying as long as the experience is reasonable, DRM- and bullshit-free.
That's the thing with piracy: it's often more convenient than buying the thing. If the pirate book/game/music is unencumbered and easier to use on more devices, but the legal book/game/music is DRM-laden and requires proprietary devices or apps to use, which one would you choose?
I can lend or give a real book to whoever I want. Forever or temporarily. I can buy used books I find at discount used book stores.
I don't buy it, the OP's first instinct was to see if they can pirate it. Only when they couldn't, did they pay for it.
And how could you even possibly compete with a book piracy site such as z-lib? You can get any book you want, for free, within seconds with virtually no fear of legal repercussions.
>I can lend or give a real book to whoever I want. Forever or temporarily.
Because the physical limitations on lending make it unfeasible to share it with absolutely everyone. The same goes for sales of used books. A 'used' digital book is just as good as a new one and would directly compete with the original seller.
> I don't buy it, the OP's first instinct was to see if they can pirate it. Only when they couldn't, did they pay for it.
I feel like this is intentionally ignoring the previous lifetime of experience which led to the OP's decision to attempt to pirate first.
After Google Play Music was announced to be shutting down a few years ago I've been trying to rebuild a (legal) lossless music collection. It's shocking how difficult it is to find some tracks and artists in a lossless format legally.
Some CDs I used to own years ago are now going for $250 used. Sites like HDTracks have apparently never heard of those bands, there's no Bandcamp site, the band site now redirects to facebook, all I can buy is 160kbps mp3.
Some CDs I used to own are available for $6.99, but it's the George Lucas style remastered content where they changed the lead-in and chorus and everything sounds wrong.
And that's not to mention the disks I still own that are copy protected. Sure I'll just pop this CD into my new car.... Oh wait it doesn't have a CD drive because it's 2020 and why would the manufacturer even consider including one? Is it okay to copy that CD? Why or why not?
So I still can't listen to some of my favorite bands, on whom I've spent $$$ on merchandise and concerts and their original CD releases, because I'm restricting myself to following the law. I cannot begrudge someone for choosing to pirate in the slightest.
I can understand pirating content you've bought and I'm sure there are a bunch of people who only pirate because of this reason, but the OP flat out admits that this is their first ebook they've bought. What possible lifetime of experience could they have had?
personally, i hardly consume movies/tv shows anymore. if i did, i'd likely pirate them nowadays. I did use netflix when it actually had content through vpn. They removed that (as well as almost all content) which made me terminate that sub. I dont really miss these shows that much, but if i did... i most certainly wouldn't subscribe to several portals jumping between just to figure out where is what and how much time i've got to watch it to the end before they're removing the content again.
i think you gotta realize that at least a lot of people dont really pirate to save money. they pirate because they cant be arsed to deal with the shitty other platform that are plain inferior and take way too much effort to figure out.
wrt books/ebooks: i actually do occasionally buy them on amazon, drm be darned. but i dont actually try to create an archive either. thats the big difference - if you actually wanna keep what you read/watch available forever... you just gotta pirate it. there is no other way. a lot of people enjoy building an archive. they're all forced to pirate almost everything.
> a lot of people enjoy building an archive. they're all forced to pirate almost everything.
Not just enjoy, many times you'd have to if you want to keep your citations and annotations. Otherwise it's the same type of fiascos over and over again
Well, the article does describe another way. I’ve been buying ebooks and stripping the DRM for years just so I can have an archive. It sucks, but I feel it’s worth it to support the authors (I recently switched from kindle to kobo, under the impression that this process would be a little improved - but it’s not).
However, for TV and movies, I find the pay site experience to be too poor (last I checked you couldn’t even stream from Amazon video if you run Linux). So I pirate everything.
I think Bandcamp is the perfect site for purchasing music. They’re transparent about what they pay artists and labels, and a purchase nets you unlimited streaming plus DRM-free downloads. This is the model the sellers of these other mediums should be following. I buy a lot of music, all because bandcamp is so great.
It was their first time ever buying an ebook so they didn't have a lifetime of experience in buying an ebook.
The first time they buy an ebook legally they become filled with moral outrage about how dreadful DRM and write a blog post about how they'll never buy one again. It's just utter self serving hypocrisy.
His experience was shit, total shit. Knowing his experience, I would avoid the site he chose like the plague. But now, let me ask you this, should I test each and every ebook retailer to try to find one that isn't shit, paying every time?
Should customers start maintaining their own index of which ebook providers are shit? Who pays to have someone go back and check them all once a week to see if they've changed their behavior since the last $7 purchase to check their DRM practices? Should customers pay a monthly subscription to some kind of digital mystery shopper service to find out who's webstores are just the fucking worst?
Your customers have _no_ reasonable path to control over shitty DRM practices. The only person in this entire conversation who has influence is Turukawa, because Turukawa is an author, and gets to choose who sells his books.
Bad news everyone: piracy exists, and provides a pretty great user flow. If authors want people to not pirate ebooks, they need to demand a not shit ebook option that /has a strong brand of being not shit/. Yeah, short term that might be really hard. Maybe authors need to form some kind of union and demand better from their publishers.
Because customers don't care. You can rant and rave about how they're immoral subhumans stealing from the mouths of authors children all you want, but piracy still exists and it's a much easier way of getting high quality ebooks that work on all platforms and devices. It's not the customers fault that zlib has a better reputation than your ebook retail partners, nor is it zlibs.
Some of the CDs I bought to rebuild came with `.mp3` downloads on Amazon. I thought "Oh sure, I'll download these since some of these disks are taking over a week anyway I can listen to these in the meantime."
I went to download an album and was immediately greeted by a popup saying I could only authorize three devices or something and asking which device I was downloading for. Well... I'm downloading from a laptop but I'm going to mostly be listening from a phone, how do I even authorize either device?
Fifteen minutes of reading later I closed the tab and waited for the disks to arrive in the mail, since I can do whatever I damn well please with my ripped .FLAC files.
My account isn't ready to transfer to yt music yet, but I'm already dreading it. Yt music streams at a lower bitrate, and you cannot download the highest quality (but you can stream it??)
Also, the thumbs up/thumbs down buttons are switched in the yt music ui vs GPM. Bad ux across different products... Par for Google, I guess.
> And how could you even possibly compete with a book piracy site such as z-lib? You can get any book you want, for free, within seconds with virtually no fear of legal repercussions.
People used to say the same about movie and music piracy. The problem was never piracy itself, but publishers offering an inferior product.
> I can lend or give a real book to whoever I want.
Yeah, this has been an issue for me as well. If I have a real book that I bought, I'm perfectly allowed to lend it to a friend for some period of time. Public libraries have done this on a mass scale for eons.
Amazon's DRM on the other hand only lets you lend a book for 14 days. WTF? A real book isn't going to care how long you lend it for. Even many libraries let you extend book loans for months as long as no other patron has placed a hold request for it. The solution? Strip books of their DRM.
I'm not out there to cheat authors of money. I'm not going to take my ebook files and post them everywhere on the internet for free. I'm support giving authors money when I buy an eBook. But I want the same freedom that a paper book gives me. The concept of borrowing books, and even photocopying a section or two from books for personal use, shouldn't disappear in the digital age just because we've gone digital.
> Amazon's DRM on the other hand only lets you lend a book for 14 days. WTF? A real book isn't going to care how long you lend it for. Even many libraries let you extend book loans for months as long as no other patron has placed a hold request for it. The solution? Strip books of their DRM.
When institutions use Adobe's platform to lend out books, they utilize a waiting list for borrowers to que into. You can, in fact, just re-borrow it after 14 days and if nobody else is in line, you get access back immediately. So in reality, the Adobe bloatware solution for a title nobody else wants to read works the same as a physical format in that sense.
> That's the thing with piracy: it's often more convenient than buying the thing.
While this certainly used to be true, I think this is an arguable point. You posit two choices in the next sentence:
- the pirate book/game/music is unencumbered and easier to use on more devices
- the legal book/game/music is DRM-laden and requires proprietary devices or apps to use
But: if I buy a Kindle book, DRM or not, it is very easy for me to buy and it is very easy for me to use on any device that runs the Kindle app. Buy it one device and it's in the library on all of them; at worst I have to just tap to download it.
This is the way most companies have effectively competed with piracy: make it more convenient to get something legally. I've gone the whole "set up automated scripts to scan piraate sites and wait for specific videos of a certain quality to show up, download them via torrent, tag them with proper metadata, convert them and put them in my iTunes library" route. It was clever and cheap and just super, super fragile and finicky. Pirate sites go up and down, metadata is wrong, something somewhere in the chain breaks mysteriously. You know what was more convenient? Clicking "Season Pass" in iTunes. Boom. Done. Convenience is also the proposition of streaming video and music, in a very real sense: it's all technically DRM-encumbered, but your Spotify music is available on every device that supports Spotify with almost no effort on your part beyond logging the device in. If you have a strong enough philosophical objection to DRM that you find Spotify, Netflix, et. al, unpalatable, that's great, but while it's pretty easy to move DRM-free music files around it's not as easy as just streaming -- and DRM-free video files are still kind of a pain in the butt compared to streaming, or even any centralized library system like Amazon or iTunes. The same is basically true for books: I appreciate Calibre, but "It's so easy to manage your ebooks and reading devices through Calibre compared to using the native Amazon Kindle or Apple Books apps" is not a sentence most people are ever going to utter with a straight face.
Sadly, Kindle only really provides English content. Finnish books only really get released on Finnish propietary platforms that, like Op's experience, are laden with DRM.
I don't really need to read Finnish literature (although it would be nice to be more well versed in my own culture) but I can't recommend ebook readers to my family and friends because there's no way for them to enjoy any content on them. Which is a shame as they're dope.
It's no longer the case only because some companies understood what piracy offered and adapted (note that the most reactionary parts of the industry fought back even against this -- they thought every one of these services encouraged piracy. The movie industry is noticeably backwards, which is hilarious when they themselves thrived thanks to breaking laws. But let's not digress). A lot of game devs I know (some semi-well known) cut their teeth with pirated games. I wonder how many will openly admit it.
DRM is still a step backwards. I like law-enforced laws ( :) ) because if they overstep I can ignore them. DRM/tech enforced laws often overstep, and it's harder to ignore them, and it's ultimately my business what I do with the stuff I bought. I can share paper books, and I can damn share digital books I bought if I so want. When did we let this nonsense of DRM happen?
They said that for the first time in their life they bought an ebook. Yet they have a library of ebooks and let people "borrow" from it. (How do you return a borrowed ebook I wonder?) Yet despite not having the physical copy of the book in question they somehow thought it possible that they might have it in their ebook library, lol. Just like the no starch press books they never bought either I'd say.
That is actually a feature built into some ebook formats & proprietary software packages. Adobe's bloatware supports this feature, and it is actively utilized in academia, libraries, and archive.org.
Basically how it works is the software sets a limit on how many people can use the file at once. When more people want to use the file than that limit, they go onto a waiting list. In the case of libraries & archive.org, your access times out after a predefined amount of time (say 2 weeks), after which the app no longer allows you to use the file and you must get back in line to use it again. However, if you finish with it earlier, you can "return it" by volunteering to loose access sooner.
With individually "owned" copies it works basically the same way, only with only "one copy" in circulation between you and your friend who is borrowing it (while they're using it, you can't access it yourself), and access for the owner does not time-out.
Hmm. Maybe you're right. I didn't read it that way because pirating GOG (or Humble Bundle) games is seriously going out of your way just to pirate stuff. They provide (mostly) unencumbered games, provide a platform popular for indie titles, support multiple platforms (when possible) and are relatively inexpensive. And run frequent discounts. And they give you permission to back up to whatever storage you want.
Some people will pirate no matter what, but I think piracy is mostly a matter of convenience. And it's pretty convenient to just buy GOG games...
There's also the issue of discovery. It's not easy nor obvious that an author is also selling a DRM-free version elsewhere, meanwhile all the big ebook stores sells DRM-protected copies.
If there were a big, well-known DRM-free ebook store I'd be all over it. I use GOG, Bandcamp and other similar businesses whenever possible
Sounds like you are employing a reactive, defensive and antagonistic approach to eBook “piracy”. Which puts you into the very position you described - at a loss, angry, and frustrated; instead of fuelling your sales and playing a direct hand in your success.
Unfortunately I don’t have the article on hand, but about a year ago I ran across a description of how an author _dramatically enhanced_ his sales by leveraging eBook “piracy” in order to drive people to official channels.
Yes, he actually released his eBooks for free onto the piracy sites - with a twist: he included the entire first portion (quarter or third, cannot remember) of the book, gave info on where to buy the full copies (with zero recriminations - just the facts!), and then repeated those same early chapters to plump out a fully-sized eBook. He then flooded all the file sharing networks with this copy so as to make it difficult to find legitimately complete copies.
The entire first quarter or third was used to get readers heavily enough invested into his novel to _want_ to run out and buy the official copy -- he _justified_ the effort and expenditure to his readers, and they responded (mostly) positively by actually doing so!
Granted, there was a lot more to it than that, but this was the basics, and it pushed a lot of people towards not just his eBooks but also his physical sales. And there are probably many other strategies out there as well that utilizes the “piracy” platforms to your benefit instead of leaving you tilting impotently at windmills.
If you are going to tell someone how they are doing their passion incorrectly please put in the additional effort to dig up the source you feel like justifies your opinion.
It’s frustrating to see people pushing the narrative that content creators should fully embrace piracy and that anything else is simply wrong. Here you have someone telling us the difficulties they faced as a content creator, and then you have responses from people who are not themselves writers, armchair-quarterbacking the parent poster on what they did wrong.
If you have an anecdote that goes against the narrative the fault is apparently still yours. The grand parent commenter made it as easily as possible to buy their book, which is what you’re “supposed” to do, yet that didn’t fix the problem. And somehow the recommended solution to poison the piracy well with basically content marketing for your book is somehow less “antagonistic” than what the gp commenter did.
Yes. It is literally just an anecdote about shareware, not a proven system for dealing with piracy. It could lead to more sales, or you could really piss off a troll who has nothing better to do than DDOS your site and try to hack every account you own.
> It could lead to more sales, or you could really piss off a troll who has nothing better to do than DDOS your site and try to hack every account you own.
This seems more like FUD for nagware than a proven system for not dealing with piracy.
I'm a mid-list author formally published by one of the world's largest publishing houses. Deliberately seeding pirate sites with my novel would place me in breach of contract. It's an interesting idea if I were entirely self-published, but not realistic for me.
What if you start a whole new story, which is similar to whatever you have published, and after a few pages just tell the reader, "actually, you're not reading "The Adventures of Foobar"...
The economics of mid-list writing don't really make this feasible ... very few writers get to do more than buy coffee off their work. Creating a whole dummy book just to mess with pirates isn't worth it. Not when I'm going to spend a year writing a new novel in the first place. Then, once that's done, I've somehow got to get back into industry so I can earn a living and recover the money lost while writing ... this isn't something you do because you expect to earn anything from it. Making a few dozen extra sales from pirates?
But the actual professional isn't 100% writing, just as being an independent software developer isn't 100% coding. Half of your time (or more!) may be spent on other aspects of the profession.
That's exactly what I thought. If you need to go through all this gimmick to sell books, when are you going to have time to write them? I much prefer to suffer the monetary loss in writing and make decent money with something else.
Jeez, mocking up a book to post on torrent sites is so much effort it eats a measurable chunk of time usually reserved for writing a novel? This is like an afternoon of work, compared with the months or years of writing a book.
Most fiction writers aren’t living from it. A lot of others books (educational material for instance) are written by people who have a job like researcher. So, writer is a professional job for some, but they largely don’t produce most of the work out there.
That's fine and dandy that author was able to go through those hoops to find success.
But there are still those of us who still (maybe naively at this point in history) believe that if you do things honestly, in good faith, and play by the rules, you should be able to make money too.
You can make decisions based on the way wish the world operates or you can make decisions based on the way the world actually operates. Both are valid options, but be honest about what you are doing.
This isn't a knock toward cynicism or dishonesty. Rather a knock toward the fact that sales, and self-promotion are necessary if you want to make money (why are people going to buy your stuff if they don't know about it and its benefits to them aren't communicated clearly). Also realize that some people are bad actors (pirates) and you need to emotionally and financially protect yourself.
It's not wishful thinking to want people to play fair. That's called being a decent human being, so apologies here, but yes that is a knock towards cynicism. Piracy is illegal. The law already protects me against illegal activities. Expecting people to behave legally, and setting your business to succeed in a legal environment is not unreasonable or wishful thinking.
It isnt unreasonable or wishful thinking to expect to never be robbed. I shouldn't have to lock the door to my apartment, I could probably get away with not locking the door to my apartment, but I lock it anyways.
Arguing that people shouldn't steal shit on a forum where lots of people frequently talk about how they refuse to pay for shit isn't just "dishonesty."
That discussion needs to happen, and bad actors who won't recognize that they're bad actors are a huge problem.
You misrepresent the position of many HNers. Most people here don't mind paying for things, the only mind paying for shit; for stuff that's broken, crippled by bad DRM.
But when an honest author games a system that tries to take advantage of them and manages to make that work, that's something I applaud.
Money doesn't get invested into projects that 'do things honestly', it gets invested into whatever is deemed to make the most profit. There's plenty of people who provide loads of value to those around them (emotional labor, child care, etc) and go largely unpaid. Unless you can generate massive profits, there's little incentive for capitalists to care, and it's capitalists who have all the money and political influence.
That's quite the broad brush you are painting all capitalists with. There are many ways to be successful many forms of capitalism, some degenerate yes, some not so degenerate. It is up to good honest people to set the example, because yes the greedy ones will always greed away. History has shown me that it doesn't matter what economic and political system is instituted, greed will find a way to exploit the good intentions of those systems.
>It is up to good honest people to set the example, because yes the greedy ones will always greed away.
A focus on 'greed' or 'honesty' is missing the mark on what I'm saying here. We currently have an economy built on a foundation of historical expropriation, enclosure, colonialism, subsidy, regulatory capture, rent-seeking, etc, and heavily biased towards the resultant monopolies/oligopolies. As a consequence, prices are set at this inflated level of profit, and those who perform labor outside of the interests of these corporations typically aren't able to afford the costs of living (especially without breaking the law). "Greed" isn't really the issue here; the issue is systemic privilege born through violence.
>History has shown me that it doesn't matter what economic and political system is instituted
It's pretty intuitive that a political system is generally going to be favorable towards those who instituted it, outside of happenstance benevolence from a political elite.
So he spammed all the piracy sites with a version of the book that turned out, after downloading and reading a third of it, to be incomplete.
As someone who has pirated things in the past and ended up being pissed that it didn’t finish/wasn’t complete/etc. I don’t think that would send me screaming to spend money on it.
Quite the opposite, what this is proving is that providing an intro to your work to prove to the customer that they actually like it (like Amazon’s “try a sample”) is hugely valuable.
> As someone who has pirated things in the past and ended up being pissed that it didn’t finish/wasn’t complete/etc. I don’t think that would send me screaming to spend money on it.
So what? You weren't going to buy it anyway, eh? What are you going to do, pirate harder?
maybe, but if that was what I was doing I would write "as someone who has pirated in the past because I want digital copies of books I buy in paper form.." so their not having written that makes me think the what, are you gonna pirate harder crack is reasonable.
The big criticism of the original author is that they got a better experience from a piracy site than from the legitimate product. The author referenced by GP turns that around: ensuring a better experience from the legitimate product than from pirate sites.
It's entirely fair. You've got no business being pissed about something you got for free on a piracy site. Especially not when it actively points you where you can get the legitimate version.
I don't understand how your last line proves the opposite: if it's hugely valuable, that shows that this is a good idea, doesn't it?
I remember the story somewhat, so I found it after searching for 'author writing series almost cancels because piracy uploads incomplete books instead'
There are more than a few books I have found this way...
The first part, or first book in the series, is published for free, then a reasonable (key being reasonable) price to buy the rest of the series or book
This man makes $13000/month (not a typo) putting free content out on royalroad, no need to buy anything: https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon
The patreons just get that free content a bit in advance. And in pdf form.
It took him around a year to reach that number.
He writes utter shit, sub-mediocre literature.
Check other top writers on royalroad, they also make lots of money.
The reason books don't sell isn't because of piracy, is because there's TON of free content (not only books) or almost free content (netflix, let's say).
I'm confused as to exactly who "This man" refers to in this instance - is it whoever is Shirtaloon at patreon? Or is it the person who made the parent comment? Are they the same person? Sorry, I just wanted a little more context for the this man part, everything else seems reasonable.
I'm someone who has read that story, at least the public parts of it, and I object slightly to your quality assessment... ;) I don't argue it's great literature or anything, more like the literary equivalent of popcorn - a fun and interesting story with not a lot of depth. So, entertainment, not life-changing prose...
And while I'm surprised he gets $13k a month, I'm not _very_ surprised. I'm one of his $1/month patrons, and I also give $1-$3 a month to a lot of other writers, YouTubers, and other creators. For another internet serial writer, see https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow
One of my criteria for supporting such creators is for them to make their creations public, even if some do it after a time delay. My rationale is that, this way, I both support the creators, and the creation of "culture", for a certain definition of that word, that other people would be able to enjoy for free. And while this might never replace traditional publishing and isn't suitable for everything, you've demonstrated that some people can certainly make a living this way.
there's a lot of these niche creators on patreon like this. I think the key here is that these people have small but really dedicated audiences.
A similar thing that surprised me is 'reaction channels' on youtube. It's often very small youtube channels with say, 10k subscribers, but they have a few hundred paying patreon followers and pull in 3-5k per month just doing tv show reactions.
I'm not a money laundering expert but I thought the point was to get a bunch of cash, from drug sales or whatever you don't want anybody asking questions about, turned into legitimate-looking income. Income from Patreon might look legit, but how would you funnel your cash into Patreon contributions without putting it in a bank account first (and setting off the very alarms you're trying to avoid)?
Imagine I am in a shady business and want to collect $13000 a month clean on my bank account, without attracting IRS etc. attention. I can have people (or myself) load prepaid MasterCard plastic with dirty cash and subscribe them to my Patreon.
Not implying anyone is doing that, just that it looks possible.
You can distribute it across multiple subscribers. $1k/month cash deposits for 1000 people will raise less questions than $1M/month for one person. That said, whole operation looks rather expensive, there should be much cheaper and easier ways than fake Patreon accounts.
I wonder what marketing/advertisement work was done to achieve this. It's not like you just need to open a Patreon account and start getting $10k+ immediately.
P.S.: BTW, all this money is "donations", aren't they? So under a lot of legislations you wouldn't even have to pay taxes on that.
Doubtful, I think for something to qualify as a tax-exempt donation the recipient has to qualify under 501(c) (aka charities/non-profits). These might be classified as "gifts" (which are exempt up to $15,000 per giver per year) but most likely it's considered a subscription (since the patrons get early access to content in return for their payments) and the author would have to pay income tax.
sole proprietorships and llc's, which would be the main mode of organizing a small company for donations, are for the most part pass-through to individual income for tax purposes and so would have roughly the same tax overhead (aka 0%) as a non-profit religious entity
also: one could just as easily create a 'x rights activism' group as a tax-free non-profit so why single out religion specifically?
Do you think this actually hurts sales though? I’ve always been of the impression that the vast majority of people pirating wouldn’t have bought it anyways. Yes they’re getting it for free, but at least they’re enjoying your work when they wouldn’t have otherwise.
> Do you think this actually hurts sales though? I’ve always been of the impression that the vast majority of people pirating wouldn’t have bought it anyways.
I'm not sure how applicable it is for books, because generally prices are more uniform for books than they are for software, but in the case of software I wonder if the ones who lose sales to piracy are the makers of more affordable software?
Imagine a world where piracy was effectively impossible for most people, and you want to do some occasional image editing. You look at Photoshop and it is way out of your budget. But you don't actually need most features of Photoshop. You find that Pixelmator Pro can do everything you want, and at $40 you can afford it and it is a good value. So you buy Pixelmator Pro.
In a world where piracy only takes a little time and effort you pirate Photoshop.
In both scenarios Adobe doesn't get any of your money so we can't say that pirating Photoshop in the second scenario cost Adobe a sale. But it did cost Pixelmator Team a sale.
In general, I suspect that the main effect of piracy is to change our allocation of spending within certain categories or groups of categories, without changing the total we spend in those categories.
That's been my theory as well, that the ultimate victim of Photoshop piracy in the 90s/00s was Paint Shop Pro. Adobe didn't seem to care, professionals still needed their properly licensed copy at Adobe's prices, and students who learn with pirated Photoshop might become actual professionals with paid licenses in the future.
But at $0 vs $0, Paint Shop Pro was a lot less appealing that it would have been at $99 vs $399 or whatever Photoshop used to cost.
“Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though,” [Bill] Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. “And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
Charles Piller, "How Piracy Opens Doors for Windows", *Los Angeles Times8, April 9, 2006
Absolutely. It's a common and very old belief that GIMP's worst enemy isn't just Photoshop, it's pirated Photoshop. The same was being said about desktop GNU/Linux and Pirated Windows XP.
That's essentially a price discrimination strategy (intentional or not). Adobe could just offer a free version with super restrictive license, and results would be the same without any piracy involved.
To be honest, these days outside of some categories like games (where the prices are relatively uniform) if you just need something to use casually, there's probably one or more open source options. Of course, the open source option may actually be the best one as well but, even if it isn't, it's probably good enough for the odd task now and then.
That totally makes sense! When I think about pirating, usually movies, tv, music, and books come to mind, but in the case of software, that absolutely makes sense.
I think it does hurt. Some wouldn't buy anyway. But the mindset has changed.
If you do the right thing, you're out say $30 for a book. If you do the wrong thing, you get the book and still have your $30. Some people don't care about others, and that mindset continues. (its kinda a Tragedy of the commons where the "common" is the market place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons).
DRM makes it worse, not only did you do the right thing and buy the book, now its not as useful as the copy someone "didn't pay for". So pushing people toward the free and better.
> I’ve always been of the impression that the vast majority of people pirating wouldn’t have bought it anyways.
I used to generally believe this as well, but then services like Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, etc. came along and put an end to the golden age of music piracy. Maybe these people wouldn't have bought the book at a full retail price, but there is very likely a price they would have paid to get the book in a convenient manner. Even the article basically admits as much. The author's complaint isn't the price, it is the convenience.
> services like Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, etc
Which are all subscription-based and not unit-based. There is no cost to explore and listen to random songs when you've already paid your subscription anyway. Switch to unit-based and suddenly way less exploration. So it's unit-less pricing + convenience.
Fundamentally exploration is much more important for music than it is for books due to the time it takes to consume a single unit. Either way, usually the most important part is showing that a customer is willing to make the jump from $0 to $0.01 and there are numerous music services that have shown that pirates are willing to make that leap in the right circumstances.
It solves part of the problem but quickly imposes a tragedy of the commons. These sub-10$ services pay peanuts to the creators. In order to make any meaningful money you have to have millions or hundreds of millions of views. To reach that scale you have to create something appetising to the masses which frequently entails clichés and sub-standard work. I do hear plenty of songs, movies, books rehashing the same old things following a cookie cutter approach.
I do remember reading a twitter thread of creator who sold books and earned a six figure income when a youtube creator chimed in and reported earning less than $300 for more than million views. Not an apples to apples comparison but you quickly see how youtube/spotify would actually create market pressures which discourage people from creating works of cultural and social significance.
In such a world, books like GEB and Piketty’s Capital would never see the light of the day.
It seems as though taste has not been improving with the Internet's adoption. I was just reflecting on this today and how SEOs rank according to "reputation", which is now just a network of mass media publishers which fill out the first 3-5 search pages. "Reputation" in the 90's was drastically different than today, where the average webmaster was likely a professor.
Also, what's noticeable with cultural works or "products" is the purchasing behavior is very much a crowd-effect. Very few people are inquisitive about such products; they will likely commit to a buy through word-of-mouth, and even then it may be after the 2nd or 3rd different person recommended a film or book. So the "psychology" of such purchases also favors the mass consumer who is looking for some temporary amusement, rather than a soul pathfinder looking for their chords to be plucked.
It might in some situations. With music for example, some bands have successfully encouraged people to buy their releases by including "rare" tracks that, if they were released previously, were done so on obscure titles that even collectors have a hard time finding. If everything an artist creates is easy to find online through piracy, there's no trove of "rare" material unless it's stuff that's never been released (like practice sessions or stuff that didn't make the cut for previous releases, much of this stuff is simply subpar and doesn't encourage purchases much).
Its hard though to carry that idea over to books though. What would be the extra material, unabridged versions? Not many books have abridged/unabridged versions to choose from.
I guess the closest parallel would be books people buy because they have to, not because they want to. By that I mean things like textbooks where, if they were available easily on pirated sites, everyone would just download. I kind of think publishers know this, and that's why so many now carry a one-time use only keycode to unlock online content. If you have to retake the class you can't access the online content again without repurchasing, even if the book itself has not changed.
I pirate most books unless they are available at my local library. I feel bad about it but I do it anyway.
If I'm being honest, if there were no piracy options I would be buying alot more books. Probably not as many as I pirate but still probably 500 dollars a year or so worth.
The catch is that it is true that if a book is unable to pirate I will probably not buy it. This is probably true for a lot of people. The reason is that there are other books available to pirate. That is the key distinction. If there were no piracy options I would be forced to buy some, but because there are piracy options I buy almost none and therefore you could say I wouldn't buy them anyway if they arent available to pirate.
So, Lament for the Fallen sounds fantastic. I've got a break from school coming up, and would like to read it. I cannot find a way to purchase it on your website.
The problem is that every retailer I can find that sells it sells a DRM'd version. Adobe Digital Editions isn't available for my operating system. There's no way for me to purchase a digital copy of your book that I can actually read.
If you sold a DRM-free epub on your website, I'd be reading Lament right now. I wouldn't have batted an eye at paying you $10 for a book Amazon sells for $5.
If I want to read your book on my Kindle, the only option is piracy. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pirate your book. I'll just end up purchasing an ebook from an author that has a DRM-free epub on their site.
Your books sound interesting and I hope you find commercial success as a writer. I just can't contribute to that success until your work's available in a format I can read.
How? My Kindle's quite old (4th gen, I think), it doesn't even support epub files. (I convert epubs to mobi to use on it.)
As far as I know, you can't use the ACSM files Amazon on it. I can't convert them to anything because Adobe hasn't released a version of Digital Editions for my operating system.
Technically, I could set up a Windows vm. But requiring a customer to use a particular OS to read a friggin' book is lunacy.
Your other comments are dead, but I'm still missing something. Why can't you buy it in the kindle store and send to your kindle over WiFi?
P.S. I am very aware that your operating system doesn't support Adobe Digital Editions; I just don't understand why your operating system needs to get involved at all.
This is what I run on my Kobo - it's quite nice! It has an RSS reader, Wallabag integration, cloud storage integration, a Lua plugin API... but it can't open DRM'd ebooks.
This is what's frustrating about DRM for me: it restricts the software you can use to only software from huge corporations. Want to make a small tweak to your reader? Nope, you're not allowed.
I only buy ebooks when I can find a DRM-free source for them, which pretty much means Tor/Baen/Humble/etc. I could buy DRM'd books and strip the DRM, but I'd rather not support the practice; I'm more likely to buy a physical book in that case.
My Kindle's old enough that it doesn't support the ACSM files you get from Amazon. I'd have to convert them to mobi from the DRM'd epub - which I cannot download from the ACSM because Adobe Digital Editions does not exist for my operating system.
Is that the most appropriate thing you can say to someone who bought a book and (somewhat expectedly) got screwed by DRM? Maybe there's a reason they won't support writers. Maybe they'll eventually write a blog post about that!
This someone only bought a book when they couldn't pirate it anywhere, unlike the rest of their "virtual library". They then "lent" the book to "everyone involved who really wanted to read it" and then wondered why DRM exists.
He doesn't claim to pirate all of his books (or any actually), and he only wished to lend it to one friend (whilst noting that lots of other people were interested in the book as well).
There is also no need to put 'lend' in quotes; it is perfectly legal to lend someone a book.
> How else would one build up a library of e-books without purchasing them?
books.google.com and archive.org have a lot of content. Depending on his interests, its possible if not probable that he has not pirated anything because most of his collection is too old to be under copyright.
Maybe his ebook collection consists primarily of product user manuals (pdfs straight from manufacturer websites), or pre1926 trade manuals (hey, I know a guy who collects antique light fixtures...), or he dabs in genealogy and has a few GB of pre1926 genealogies (not all surnames have had their genealogies re-done in print since then).
He literally starts out saying that '[he] crawled the internet [...] but alas, it was nowhere to befound'. At the very least he was intent on pirating this specific book.
>There is also no need to put 'lend' in quotes; it is perfectly legal to lend someone a book.
Yes, and making copies doesn't fall under any normal definition of lending.
> it makes it impossible to afford to write as often as I'd like
DRM is not the solution because the solution doesn't exist. The problem of the impoverished writer predates digital publishing, it's hard to make a decent living by writing anything interesting other than through indirect benefits. Sorry but writing something interesting is a luxury, writing something slutty is the only direct business prospect in writing.
Consider this: did Charles Darwin make a living through the royalties of "the origin of species"? No, he was bankrolled, the book was simply the fruits of his investment.
Not much comfort but it was still the better choice. DRM would have made it worse. Pirates would have still stripped it in 30 seconds while the honest paying readers would have been annoyed and put off. And readers are readers, if enough people like the books hopefully some will pay or recommend it to those who do. Hopefully.
Also, I tried to go and purchase a DRM-free version of your book "Our Memory Like Dust" to see how easy it was. I can't figure out to do so.
I clicked on the title for it, saw that you had some chapters laid out in HTML and figured, "Oh, I guess an HTML book is DRM-free". I clicked through and eventually had to login with Facebook to continue. That rankled, as I hate Facebook, so I checked out the rest of the site, thinking I missed the store page. I did not. I cannot pay you for a DRM-free version of your book on that site. This makes me feel like you're generating drama or something with your comment? I couldn't figure out an easy way to pay you real money for an ePub file.
I'm not going to go pirate your book, but the same result ended up happening: I'm not going to buy it either.
You're being unfair to the OP, and would know if you read their article in full. They purchased a book and hated the DRM wrapped around it for use in their libre software lifestyle.
Remember, piracy is a customer service issue. So perhaps buying your book isn't as easy as you thought, or your marketing is faulty, and you're not reaching the intended audience as well as you hoped.
I'm curious how you know the copy uploaded to ZLib was purchased with a stolen card? From metadata in the book? Or because purchase + upload date match? Years ago I remember seeing services on Alibaba that would get you any Kindle ebook you wanted – I assume they did something similar.
FWIW, I was quite surprised by your comment that "Folks like the OP won't support writers". The OP writes about _only_ being able to purchase a book in a way that involves submitting to very restrictive, platform-dependent DRM and not wanting to do it again. OP specifically contrasts this experience to buying from publishers who sell DRM-free ebooks as a counterpoint to the awful experience buying her/his book.
Both metadata in the uploaded book, and seeing the transaction reversed a few weeks later.
Publishers announce the books they'll be releasing a year in advance,and - seriously, this is a rabbit hole I knew nothing about when I started - people were offering bounties to pirate my book before it was available. I have a Google alert for my books so I can read reviews, so all this chatter was turning up. These are people who had no intention of paying for the work, no matter what, but also seemed to be going out of their way to make sure no-one would have to pay.
You can talk about DRM and clunky websites, but that comes across as post-hoc justification. The pirates seem simply to hate the idea that creators might earn anything, no matter how little.
>OP specifically contrasts this experience to buying from publishers who sell DRM-free ebooks as a counterpoint to the awful experience buying her/his book.
Or maybe he just likes them because they're easier to pirate from? In a prior paragraph he admits that it was the first time he bought an ebook.
I know I have pirated pdf/epubs of book in the past (as a broke college student) but I also support the authors as often as possible, a couple of series I can think of off the top of my head I got into when I pirated the whole series liked and them bought paperback and then the audio-books on audible and have pre-ordered hard covers of new releases in the series then got several fiends to buy read them. Not all piracy is lost sales some is unwanted marketing.
I don't think it should matter all that much if your stuff gets pirated. The reality is that if they're pirating your book, they probably wouldn't have paid for it anyway. I feel like most people I know pirate books to get a feel for the book before they go ahead and purchase it. Almost like an extended sample. All my friends who end up liking their pirated books typically spend the money (given they have money) buying actual copies afterwards.
The real number that would help you is finding out how many unique user downloads there were of your book and asking yourself if your marketing was strong enough to get that number of sales naturally? Or worse, is it that no one is downloading your book even with it being free?
I am biased since I write free content and believe in getting sponsored by supporters, but being the distributor of my free content and able to view download statistics, I can see that marketing is my biggest problem and no one wants to consume even my free content
Not op:
Can you add some unique tracker/signature per purchase so you can tell what copy was used to upload. Probably pointless with regard to the stolen cc comment/new accounts.
Sure :) The biggest barrier is micro-payments. If I could charge as a streaming service, but without having to go through a major platform (I don't want Spotify-for-books), then that would be perfect. I actually pitched this to GrantForTheWeb using their Web Monetization toolkit.
It is surprising that as a writer you engage in this misleading usage of the English language. People copying files without your consent may be financially inconvenient for you, in bad taste, even illegal in some jurisdictions, and definitely an ass move. But it is not stealing. You can firmly condemn this behavior without using metaphors.
"Stealing" as a verb for copying thoughts, ideas, or other intangibles has a long history. Longer than this defensive posture of people who want to feel better about ripping shit off.
Agreed, but this is not the case. It would be "stealing" if they copied the text of his novels and sold them signed by a different author. In that case, the correct verb is "sharing".
I have no idea what you think "stolen" means -- but whatever definition you are using, it is antique and not up to the task of describing the activity of theft as it exists today.
Nevertheless historical usage includes, "stealing someone's idea", etc. which is as least an applicable sense.
I think the OP has a point though. Back in the beginning of the DRM wars, many argued that "IP theft", "thieves", "stealing" were metaphors used by media companies to mislead customers. You know the clumsy anti-piracy advert, "you wouldn't steal a car...". It was clumsy then and it's clumsy now.
Illegal copying is not stealing. Sad to see this narrative won in the end, I thought we were past this. I though we -- the users -- had won.
"Stealing an idea" has been a phrase for far longer than that though. Stealing as a metaphor for intangible objects isn't a creation of the media companies.
> "Stealing an idea" has been a phrase for far longer than that though.
If it was only that, it may be somewhat justified. But in this case the "thief" is not making any profit from the stuff he has "stolen", he has just given away a copy to another person. The correct verb in this case is "sharing".
I refuse to partake in the orwellian newspeak of using the verb "stealing" for the act of sharing. This is a hill I'm happy to die on.
'Infringing copyright' is also a correct verb for this situation. I 100% agree that 'stealing' is not a valid word to use here. But I also don't expect most authors to be happy calling it 'sharing'.
Sure. Both are compatible. The generic act is "sharing", and this act happens to be "copyright infringement" in some cases. I don't see how anybody could say that the sentence "Sharing this file with other people infringes the copyright" uses a misleading language. Somebody may not like the socially positive aspect of the verb "to share", and they will prefer to use morally loaded terms, even if they are incorrect, but nobody can realistically say that using this verb for that act is wrong.
Agreed. But this precise usage, "stealing" digital products, is an invention of media companies. A stretching of a metaphor beyond all reasonable interpretation.
I’m not saying you’re one of them, but it seems the only time this pedantic definition of “stealing” is brought up is when that person is a pirate themselves, and they’re trying to justify what they’re doing as “not stealing.” As in: “I’m not stealing it; I’m just making a copy. The creator isn’t being deprived of anything.” Sure, you’re not literally taking anything from the creator, but you are robbing them of their right to do what they want with their creations.
Meanings change over time.
One can argue all they want about whether IP laws should exist, but as it stands right now (in re. to language and the law) it’s stealing.
I refused to buy Amazon ebooks when I learned that I didn't own them. I only owned a right to read them (dependent on many legal things).
The price of an ebook has so far been the same as the price of a physical book. Considering the resale value of a book is on average about 50% of the original price, the real price of an ebook for the user with this limitation should be ~50% less than the cost of the paper book. (Not taking into account shipping costs, etc...)
This became real to me when my aunt died. She had purchased thousands of dollars worth of ebooks. Had she purchased physical books, those books would have been donated or resold. At a loss to the publisher, but a gain to the original purchaser and secondary purchaser. (or estate in this case).
Unless I as the purchaser am at least partially compensated for this loss of value by a price decrease, I cannot buy ebooks with a resale limitation.
The resale value of most books is nowhere near 50% of the original price. The more popular the title and the bigger the print run the less it's worth - until you get to remainder mountain title like 50 Shades of Grey, which are literally worthless, except perhaps as fuel for a wood stove.
I had a library with thousands (and thousands) of books. When I moved I decided to get rid of many of them, because decluttering. Long story short - by the time you've allowed for post/carriage, listing time, packaging, and so on, you're more likely to be left with 5-10% of the nominal cover price - and that only after endless hours of work.
I donated most of mine, and I still got complaints from the local recycling facility that they were worthless because they were "too obscure" (i.e. pop science, math, stats, and such.)
The average paperback book weights between 1 and 2 pounds and would cost 2.75 -> 3.25 in shipping for media mail in the US. In addition amazon would take 0.99.
I see I can buy it new for about $11 although I wouldn't be surprised to pay $15 in a physical store. Selling it could get me about 10 but I would have to pay about a buck to amazon and around 3 to ship it for a net of 6.
This is 40% - 55% of original value.
Perhaps more importantly lending or giving them in person arguably gives them the same $10 worth of value. Shipping it to someone produces $10 worth of value for 3.
A book that is shared 3 times has produced $30 worth of value. A book that is shared 10 times has produced $100 worth.
An ebook that you might not be able to read in 10 years is SUBSTANTIALLY less valuable than the physical book.
Adding this value proposition back in and removing DRM that strip actual ownership both laudable goals in themselves are entirely at odds. Artificial scarcity is broken by design and unfixable.
Two local, both large, donation centers refuse any and all book donations. From paper backs to the obvious encyclopedia sets. One told me they have to throw every such donation out and since the trash container cost money they just put up a sign saying, no books. They do not accept records or music CDs either but DVDs are apparently okay.
I went through a phase where I was buying and selling job lots of books in the hope of striking gold (spoiler: you have to go through a LOT of books, and you'll make less than minimum wage). I ended up selling pallets of excess books for pulp - the paper of the books were worth more than the content.
The only books I would really consider saving are those that have survived long enough to be well out of print. It's like software in that sense - the longer it's lasted, the longer it is going to last.
I have a large library of technical books (accumulated over 50 years). Every 10 years or so I feel like I'm running out of space (5000 books or so) and I round up my oldest most out-of-date CS books, like books on pascal programming or LISP manuals from 1971. I fill up boxes of a couple hundred books and take them to a local Half-Price Books bookstore that sells used books. It is always so disappointing. I end up with pennies for each book. So I avoid going for another 10 years until I forget about my previous attempt to sell my out of date books. I've also made library donations of books I felt were still useful (I end up with duplicates sometimes because I forget that I've already purchased a book and shelved it somewhere that I don't see it until after I purchase a second copy.) Again, it's frustrating, most libraries really don't want very technical books.
I can't expect anyone to want an old manual for LISP programming so now I'm holding onto my old books because it's not worth dragging them to the used bookstore. And, every so often, I will go back and look at them. There was a discussion on HN involving assembly language and machine architecture, it caused me to pull out my old book on CDC 6600 assembler.
In another 10 years I'll forget this and try to sell my used books again.
For that reason, I mostly get books from not the most legal sources, and then buy a copy from a local bookstore. I either donate that book to a library or give it to a friend as a gift.
I get what I want while supporting a local bookstore and the author.
Personally I consider the convenience of ebooks to significantly outweigh the inability to resell or possible pricing discrepancies, so I always choose ebook (at least for text-only works).
A similar argument can be made against downloadable audiobooks, but in that case, they're far cheaper than buying CDs.
As an example, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: Primary Phase. The CD version is £20 from Amazon, whereas on Amazon Audible it's at most £8. (I'm not counting the £18 listed price on Audible, as one can simply 'subscribe' for £8, buy the audiobook with the token, then immediately unsubscribe. I put 'at most' because their per-book price is lower with a high-volume subscription.)
In this case, I'm ok with the DRM'ed non-physical version, as it's so much cheaper. It's true I can't easily gift the audiobooks or leave them in my will. It's also true that Amazon has the power to lock me out of my library, and if Audible disappears, I probably lose my library.
Absolutely, and also for 'buying' movies on Amazon, Apple, Google and (especially) smaller services.
The product you're buying is really: rental of unknown duration. And unless that's really substantially cheaper than actually buying it on disc, it's a terrible deal.
Well, maybe, though an external DVD drive probably costs no more than three or four movies, and then you can make yourself non-DRM digital copies too. (As long as you don't need BluRay and HD).
I place a big value on not owning things I don't want, like external DVD drives. I'd pay more for a virtual one-time-viewing copy than I would for a DVD even if it came with a DVD drive. I specifically want to not own one.
It's not a terrible deal if I prefer it in digital form (most fiction in particular) especially if I'm likely to only read it once. In normal circumstances, digital is much better for me as I can travel with all the books I want.
I bought an ebook from Amazon a few days ago. It asked me "which device do I want it delivered to", and I picked the "download please" (or something worded like that. I downloaded the epub. I could read it on Calibre, on the ReadEra app on my (Amazon-crapware-stripped) Amazon Fire HD, I emailed me to my partner's, "kindle email".
It displayed everywhere nicely. I never purchased books from other locations so I got no opinion on FNAC and the likes, but I never had an issue on Amazon books.
It's explicitly indicated on the info page for some applicable Amazon Kindle books that it has no DRM due to publisher/author request - e.g. [1]
I do not believe that is universally true.
(FWIW... I found a lot of SciFi authors request no DRM, as it supports their personal beliefs and values, but that's a personal observation rather than objective survey of the field)
You were lucky. Most e-books from Amazon come with DRM and restrictions preventing you from reading them on devices that do not have a kindle app. I once purchased a textbook (that wasn't on libgen) on Amazon and had to use the Kindle app on Windows to read it. It was not readable on Kindle Cloud Reader and Amazon does not have a Kindle app for Linux. I returned the book after using it (only needed it for a week) and got a refund.
While it's not DRM free... DeDRM [0] can be run stand alone or as a plug-in to Calibre. I have it auto run when I import a new book to my collection. From there you can do what you like with it.
You need to download the books from the "Manage Your Content and Devices" page using the "Download & transfer via USB" link. Those still use the old DRM.
Baen [1] is another to mind that imprint-wide believes that DRM is a waste of time. As another poster pointed out it is interesting that it is mostly sci-fi imprints leading the vanguard of DRM free, in terms of well known commercial publishers.
You can only do this on the minority of drm unencumbered books and even then the UI for simply getting at that drm unencumbered file is a complete mess especially if you are buying and trying to read the book on an actual computer.
It can be downloaded/accessed on all devices, but it gets explicitly pushed to the ones you select. These can be any registered device - kindle or fire but also phones or tablets.
If it's recreational reading, most hard copy books I only consume once. It's nice to pass on a hard copy book to a friend and have the opportunity to hear what they got out of it.
Ebooks don't work this way. I borrow them from a library. You're right, once an ebook is read it's just bits. They don't have the same value as hard copy books for resale, gifting, donation, or leaving out on the coffee table. Even obsolete textbooks have value, my monitor sits a few inches higher on top of a couple. Can't do that with ebooks.
I prefer physical as well but my problem is I'm hitting a shelf limit. My plan is to donate the books I don't care about to friends or the library to open up space.
Consider donating them to the Internet Archive OpenLibrary if they don't have them in their catalog. It's very inexpensive to mail if you use USPS' media mail class of mail. I just sent a 13x13x16 box weighing ~10lbs to them for ~$8.
This is exactly what I do with old books. I keep the ones I really like and give the rest to any place that accepts book donations. Might as well, I am clumsy and have busted two kindles, so I'm all aboard the physical book train now.
> The price of an ebook has so far been the same as the price of a physical book.
When I go to buy a book, the ebook price seems to be 10-25% lower than hardcover. It could just be my experience, but this has been the case for dozens of books. I look at this difference as the lack-of-salability discount.
Right, but hardcover is usually 100% more than paperback, at least more. So 25% less than hardcover is 50% more than hardcover. And a lot of modern hardcovers are so poorly made (especially as I've learned in the last couple of years, when it comes to RPG rulebooks), it's not as if the paperback is less durable.
I won't go so far as to say that's absurd, but you are neglecting value pricing. You aren't paying (say) 20% less than print cost and losing money over net value (which I would highly dispute your calculation). You are paying 20% less than print and gaining more value thanks the e-format.
I won't buy print books anymore, because they are too cumbersome vs digital. The 20% discount vs print, or 30% increase over net value of print, by your calculation, is worth the value I receive.
I exaggerate, because there are some print books I buy, specifically for the print format, because for those books so much of the value is in the packaging and physical form factor. The Apple hardware book, the Nasa Graphics Standards book, the recent Prince of Persia book, etc. For a couple, I buy both print and ebook because both formats have their own value; for the same book sometimes it's good to be able to page flip and sometimes it's good to be able to search. Brendan Gregg's BPF book is a recent one that comes to mind.
But for the most part (95%+), I buy only digital, and I am happy to pay "more" than the net print value.
Books are my life and my Kindle library has reached 1,200+ in 7 years of reading ebooks.
I'm a bit morbid, given that I statistically have decades of reading ahead of me, but I always dreamed of transferring the collection to my bookworm niece. I only learned of this Amazon policy recently and it was crushing!
I think within 5-10 years digital media like ebooks, games, movies etc will transition to being represented by ERC-721 tokens which brings with it the benefits of physical media (permanent ownership, sharability, etc) while also being easy to store, transport, read digital items. The main benefit is that you can buy your ebook/game/movie in one store/ecosystem and even if that system goes out of business your purchase will still be valid at other stores and platforms. Like physical books, these items can be re-sold and given to anyone you like (granted you won't have access to the book anymore.)
1. How do you stop a person who can legally read a book, and thus has the key needed to decrypt it in memory, from obtaining that key and using it to create an unencumbered copy on their hard drive without totally depriving them of ownership of their computer to provide a controlled environment where such copying is impossible?
2. I remember a substantial issue with Etherium wherein someone was able to steal a large amount of currency from other users in 2016. What are the risks of an attacker say stealing a large number of tokens intended to be sold to users from distributor or even the ability to create them? In a decentralized world how do you invalidate them? If you can invalidate them doesn't that mean any seller can take back anything?
This can happen now of course they can steal a copy of your pre production movie but potential to monetize is garbage and effect on your legitimate value proposition may be largely unchanged. In this brave new world their stolen tokens may actually have a legitimate market. Steal 1 million tokens sell all 5 days after release as already read for 10% less than going rate before owner bans tokens from legitimate market.
3. What about the case in which someone breaks into your computer or infects it with malware and effectively loots all your books and music and sells it on craigslist/amazon/facebook. How do you invalidate those purchases without a secondary authority. If you can haven't you recreated central distribution with more steps?
1. ERC-721 tokens don't replace DRM. Effectively you would buy the book and use any DRM scheme you want as the DRM would verify that you owned the ERC-721 before allowing the media to be used.
2. True, there is always smart contract risk. The DAO hack happened right after Ethereum was founded as nobody really knew what they were doing and tooling was extremely basic. Things are still in the early dial up days for crypto but even now tooling is vastly better, there are dedicated firms for contract/code auditing and the systems being created today are much more robustly designed. With that said, nothing can be certified 100% safe and the only concrete proof of security we have is the passing of time itself. These systems will be new for a while and adoption of this tech will happen slowly over time in the same way the internet grew over two decades into what we know today. There will likely be a system that withstands the test of time and becomes old enough to be trusted by even conservative developers, but until then there will likely be mechanisms built-in where the content creator can destroy and re-create tokens in case of failure. Not every token will be this way and the decision is up to the content creator themselves.
3. This is a problem for wallets in general and lots of people are working on it. The leading solution seems to be social recovery which is where you designate trusted addresses (family members, hardware wallets, friends etc) and configure it to allow your wallet to be recovered if say 3 of the 5 agree that you legitimately lost it. If you ever lose your wallet because you forgot the password or your computer/phone died then you can recover it easily and safely, no complicated and technically hard key backup systems needed which is key for normal non-HN people. You can also set outgoing filters so your ERC-721 tokens couldn't be sent unless it's to a whitelisted address or you verify it with another of your trusted addresses, so even if a hacker got into your wallet they couldn't transfer the tokens and you would just recover your wallet using the system above. It's still early days but Argent is the best example of this.
Are you saying the original owner can destroy the token they already gave you? Regarding social recovery. I wasn't talking about recovery in case of data loss although that is a legitimate concern I was talking about loss through theft.
If everyone suddenly had at least hundreds of dollars of value on their desktop that could be stolen and easily monetized by any software also running on said computer then the entire planet becomes a target rich environment full of badly secured computers. Buy or break into an addon used by 10k people. Steal an average of $200 in digital goods per user and walk away with 2 million dollars.
>Are you saying the original owner can destroy the token they already gave you?
With most tokens, no. They are yours forever. If the token creator did want to set this up then they can do it though. An example is RealT which tokenizes rental housing. They can revoke a token and re-issue it if they need to (if you lose your token or it gets stolen) and they are up front about this. It is very obvious when a token has a backdoor and most of them do not as it's kind of a scandal when someone does backdoor a token and people don't adopt it.
>Regarding social recovery
I did cover theft in my comment but I'll elaborate. Smart contract wallets are more sophisticated than simply money being stored on a computer. They operate a lot like banks do today with daily spending limits, trusted owners, and the like. With Argent for example you can limit outgoing transfers to non-whitelisted addresses to $100 a day similar to how ATMs are limited in the amount you can withdraw daily. This cuts down on loss due to theft. As soon as you notice $100 missing you would recover your wallet (like replacing your debit card) and the thief wouldn't be able to steal anymore. Also, in case you don't know the technicals, wallets are generally very secure and even if an extension can see your wallet they won't be able to access the funds as they are cryptographically protected and also secured by a password/biometrics. So it's not likely that your funds will be stolen by a run-of-the-mill thief and even if they are successful the loss is limited.
With all that said, a lot of people will likely still use banks to store and use their crypto as those existing trusted intermediaries still work just fine. People just have the option of storing their digital money themselves now.
What is the point of a token if its actually centrally controlled like rental properties? You can't actually use the token to revoke a rental agreement you use a court and the court looks at supporting docs like the rental agreement. At best it acts as official motorization of what the exact agreement is which isn't normally the point of dispute.
Presumably those spending limits and indeed ANY limits are user configurable with a token that could itself be stolen or just used by software instead of a person on the machine in question. If the person can do it the software can after all. For example by faking keyboard and mouse input and keystroke logging the user to steal their password.
We can't secure simple things now I cannot imagine how you can believe we can secure complex things with even higher stakes.
Credit card transactions are tolerable because the financial sector takes in a huge chunk of the value of the economy and writes off losses out of that huge pile of money.
In a decentralized situation where the only money in the kitty is users actual money how does this actually work?
>What is the point of a token if its actually centrally controlled like rental properties?
This goes down the rabbit hole of crypto a bit and I don't want to drone on too much if it gets annoying, sorry in advance.
Most tokens will not be centrally controlled in the future (I can elaborate if you're interested). During the transition period there will be centralized tokens like RealT which have similar properties to the paper forms we use today but even in that state they do offer improvements such as integration with DeFi products (RealT tokens can traded on Uniswap and will likely be integrated into Maker allowing for using your property shares in a collatorized loan), easier accountability/auditability, and other use cases (Let's go a bit sci-fi and say your car lock will open for you as long as you prove you own the car's ERC-721).
>Presumably those spending limits and indeed ANY limits are user configurable with a token that could itself be stolen or just used by software instead of a person on the machine in question.
This stuff does exist and there's some really good documentation out there that's not just me rambling :) Changing or turning off the spending limits or whitelists comes with a user-defined waiting period, so even if a virus somehow accomplishes this feat you would still be notified and have a day or so to cancel the changes and recover your wallet. Your original example was a browser extension which cannot fake keyboard or mouse input to your wallet. It would need to be a real virus of some kind which is rare on desktops in today's world and basically impossible on mobile platforms. I'm not saying the risk is 0% but it's not like mass numbers of people are going to just get their crypto stolen willy nilly, especially if they use their phones like the majority of the people in the world do.
>Credit card transactions are tolerable because the financial sector takes in a huge chunk of the value of the economy and writes off losses out of that huge pile of money.
Credit cards will still exist in a crypto world. Banks will still exist too. You will be able to reverse those payments just like you can today even if the credit card company backs their operations with ETH/DAI/BTC instead of USD. On top of that, it's actually really easy to develop a payment system on top of Ethereum that contains the ability to reverse transactions for a period of time with complex logic such as different amounts of time for different merchants based on a calculated risk score. For end users this isn't much different at all in the short to medium term.
The point about changes requiring time to implement is well taken and I can even imagine people relying on notifications to catch bad behavior because I see some people doing that now.
Malware isn't impossible on mobile. Android install security is in a fashion crap and androids are 90% of the market worldwide.
OEMs base their installs on old kernel versions that support their custom never to be upstreamed modules needed to boot their board then after 0 through a few updates stop providing updates for their phones. This is so because their is no stable interface for kernel modules.
My own phone is running 3.18 while my laptop is running 5.6.
Ultimately a lot of people are running around with devices that are actually vulnerable to things we already know are broken in addition to the known vulnerabilities upcoming that will be known to attackers long before its known to OEMS.
You can posit a better more secure future but the honest truth is that our present work is crap and we have no particular reason to believe the future isn't also largely composed of crap. It's trivial to imagine that in a situation where you can derive an increasing payout for breaking security that the attackers wont keep pace with those trying to secure the future.
This pessimism has been the correct answer from the moment computers were networked to one another through today. Given that we have been bad at securing networked computers for 5 decades it behooves the optimistic to prove it.
Maybe in 5 years we will all be running devices running Sel4 with only substantially audited code but I would bet on more steaming piles of insecurity instead.
http://erc721.org/ (Edit: https://cointelegraph.com/explained/non-fungible-tokens-expl... is probably better) has a nice friendly writeup. It's basically a token on Ethereum representing a unique object such as artwork, media (like above), a cool sword in a game, cards in a trading card game (Magic like games such as God's Unchained), or even physical items such as cars, houses etc. These tokens represent an individual thing that needs to be usable in the digital world (sending to others, selling/trading, using for identity management etc).
Let me get this straight, the author has a bad experience with one website selling ebooks, so they decide they’ll never buy ebooks ever again?
In real life, this would be the equivalent of getting one bad meal at a restaurant chain in a city you’ve never been to before, so you stop eating at that chain anywhere else, despite positive experiences in the past.
I think it would be more like deciding never to eat in any restaurant anywhere.
The headline says that he won’t ever buy ebooks, then lists good places to buy ebooks. I guess he is exaggerating for effect?
But it’s true, nobody should accept DRM. Here is the statement of the publisher who sells my gnuplot book:
“We believe that when you buy a book, it belongs to you. That’s why we use no ‘digital rights management’ or anything else that interferes with your rights. You can make as many personal backups as you want, and use the book on any number of your own devices. If you lose your files, you can just download them again, forever.”
Unless I missed something, the author states they never had issues with other services but they don’t say they intend to keep buying ebooks despite one bad experience.
One would hope the author is exaggerating but I have seen a number of people in my life be this irrational. I’m inclined to take the title as is given any lack of evidence to the contrary.
> Let me get this straight, the author has a bad experience with one website selling ebooks, so they decide they’ll never buy ebooks ever again?
It may be hyperbolic, but I basically feel the same way, because I had more or less the same thing happen: I saw a book I wanted to buy, it said EPUB; there was absolutely no indication that there was DRM, that I'd be required to install Adobe software, or anything. I bought the book, and after paying for it, was told about all this.
I was so furious I emailed them immediately and demanded my money back (which they complied with). But it certainly put me off buying e-books from random websites -- I haven't even thought about doing it since.
Seems to me that all (major) ebook retailers try to lock down the files in one way or another. So yeah, if the chances of having a bad experience buying ebooks are high, I can see why "just download it and be done with it" is a compelling offer.
I'm all for finding ways of letting authors survive, or better yet thrive. But the current market seems to cater to the publishers, not the authors (cf: movie industry, music industry) so I don't even feel all that bad about that.
To stay in the allegory: if it was common practice and somehow widely acceptable for restaurants to use boatloads of laxatives during food preparation, but they only told you so after you asked to see the manager, would you judge the people who just outright refused to eat out any longer? The stress of finding a laxative free restaurant would simply outweigh the benefit from eating out.
It's not that the retailers are trying to lock them down, they'll happily sell DRM free books. However, publishers in particular tend to be sticklers for DRM, and won't sell on your platform if you don't implement it as an option.
There are books I'd buy today if they weren't published by publishers which only distribute with DRM. If it isn't desirable enough in that case to justify buying a dead tree version, I just pass entirely.
There's a hepaing of hyperbole on there, but my experience with buying ebooks is very similar - Aside from buying from e.g. pragprog, who don't do DRM.
When pirating books, I download it, put it on my ereader, and read it.
When actually purchasing books, I need to install Adobes proprietary DRM-program, open the book in there, unlock it with my account, then use the Adobe program to transfer it to my tablet.
Not a huge hassle, but pirating just works, and offers an experience that's infinitely more pleasant.
Which is a shame, I should add, because I want to pay for the culture I consume, but vendors, copyright, and publishers try their best to make that process as wonky as possible.
If you're willing to buy from Amazon and use a Kindle it works pretty easily. One-click purchasing, automatic downloading to your reader, and suchlike.
(That's if you're willing to hold your nose about having DRM at all, the remote deleting of books, Amazon's near-monopoly and so on - personally I don't buy any ebooks I'm not willing to lose)
I prefer not to use Amazon, and currently use a reader other than a Kindle.
I do believe my reader has the same ease-of-use if I purchase books from the company selling it. Might be only if buying things using the reader itself, not sure.
You raise a valid point, but I have had a similar experience and I think ebooks indeed are in their golden age of piracy right now, like movies before Netflix came along or video games before Steam.
Libgen has everything and it's so much easier than dealing with online retailers and Adobe's bullshit. If you know stores that sell DRM-free ebooks I'd be very interested.
It is worth pointing out that Libgen doesn’t have everything, just a portion of books that have been digitized by publishers. For older and now out-of-print books, or for genres like poetry where only a few authors are ever given the ebook treatment, you won’t find that content on Libgen unless someone does the work of scanning it. And even if someone does scan it, you’re going to just get a PDF or DJVU file, not a beautifully formatted EPUB for your e-reader.
I have been a Libgen user and contributor for many years now, but I find myself simply buying more and more physical books, since so much of what I want to read is not available on Libgen or anywhere else digitally.
I’ll leave finding DRM-free ebooks as an exercise for the reader. There are a number of small publishers offering their books without DRM. Some genres are easier than others.
Tor went DRM-free many years ago. I know their catalog is on Amazon.
Sorry, I just realized that question was poorly stated. It misses an important point: there has to be a decently sized catalog. It doesn't need to rival Libgen, but it should be something that covers most of your bases. Sorry for kinda moving the goalposts here, but right now, most of the time, looking for a particular book you can't get your hands on it DRM free without going to Libgen. That's the thing which has to change.
More like he already has a political stance on ebooks and he just used this one example to further his political agenda.
There's a reason why companies put customers through all this garbage and the reason is because I can easily pirate these books. So the story isn't as one sided as this guy makes it out to be. It's a contentious issue between customer rights of ownership and piracy.
Well it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, who started it? Customers pirating or companies adding DRM to their products?
I would wager that there's a good number of people who pirate things for the simple reason of them not wanting to pay for anything. This is the catalyst.
I think the author typically pirates e-books and the one time he tries to purchase one, he has this experience and decides he will continue to pirate them.
So really it's like if someone usually takes food off the hot plate at a restaurant to steal it, and the one time they sit down and pay it's a shitty experience so they decide they're going to keep stealing lol.
When you are treated like a thief (and get additional harm like being forced to install spyware) because you did the legal thing and purchased a book you know that you are in the wrong side of the lane.
Same happened with music (Sony had rootkit bundled in their CDs), DVDs (the FBI warning screen), games and so on. You get punished if you try to be a good behaving customer.
> Paying is always a worse experience than stealing, until you get caught.
Nah.
Take netflix for example: you pay your subscription and you get to watch movies. ez pz.
Now take the pirating route: you have to find torrents, such torrents have to have seeds, you need disk space, you need a torrenting app, you might have to leave your computer turned on for a long time etc etc.
Netflix is sucessful because they managed to make paying better than pirating.
I don't think the writer of this blog post would accept "Netflix for ebooks." Netflix still has DRM, and you definitely don't own any of the content you watch on Netflix. For someone whose whole point is that they won't buy anything but a DRM-free epub to load into Calibre, I doubt that a such an alternative (which already exists, by the way, in the form of Kindle Unlimited, Scribd, or any number of library apps) would be an acceptable solution.
Popcorn Time exists, and it's just as easy as Netflix. Much better catalogue too. It also downloads while streaming, so if you have to stop in the middle, you can more easily pick back up where you left off because it's already downloaded. Also you can then share this downloaded file with whomever you want because it's DRM free, but you can't send a Netflix movie to someone else, which was the author's main quibble anyway.
Much better UX for movies with piracy, even with Netflix, which is a great service.
That's only because sharing movies isn't as easy (files are quite large) and law enforcement goes after pirates.
If piracy sites could flourish without being disturbed, it would be absolutely impossible to compete with them. And this is the exact situation you have with book piracy.
If that were true, Netflix would not have been the success we know. When the user experience of buying anything is easier than the illegal counterpart, that's how you win over piracy.
Please see my reply to the other respondent about Popcorn Time.
Regardless, my broader point is a complete rejection of the idea that "businesses should just make getting X easier than piracy" is a reasonable point to make at all. The onus is not on the business.
Do you know what else is an easier experience when you steal? Clothes shopping. The UX is much better when you just walk in to a clothing store, pick out what you want, and then walk out. No waiting in a queue to checkout, no receipts, etc. etc. Clearly the onus is on clothing stores to make the experience of paying for the good easier than just walking out with them, right?
What about restaurants? Wouldn't it be so much nicer if you could just go in, sit, eat your meal, and then not have to pay? No having to deal with tipping, splitting the bill, arguing over charges, etc. Just walk in, eat, and leave. Clearly then the onus is on restaurants to make the "paying for your meal" experience easier than dining-and-dashing, right?
Who else would the onus be on then? Ultimately if you don't like something that's happening to you, then it's on you to address it. The cops most likely aren't going to give a shit about someone seeding a torrent of your pdf, and while publishers haven't completely recouped sales since the advent of internet piracy, services like Spotify have definitely slowed the bleeding.
That is, until there's a piece of content he wants that's not available from one of those vendors.
The problem with those vendors really comes down to selection, and they have a smaller selection. Like it or not, if there's something highly desirable and current, and he _must_ have it, he's going to have to deal with the inevitable pains of DRM, or resort to piracy.
I'm sure the bean counters at content producers have done the calculus of losing a certain percentage of prospective paying customers vs. convenience, and have decided that certain inconveniences are worthwhile.
I find the "it's 2020" statement strange in more than one way.
Yeah, ebooks are higher tech than paper, but I find the experience to be worse than paper.
I have no problem reading long-form content on a screen, but I'd rather be reading a long scrolling HTML page than a "paged" ePub or PDF.
I just set up an Obooquity server on my network so I can access my eBooks from any device, and I dislike the experience. FWIW, I dislike physical eBook readers and mobile eBook reading apps too.
DRM aside, I feel like "it's 2020", and the fact you have to flip pages to read eBooks to be somewhat ridiculous.
Just an assumption on my part, but the 2020 statement might be referring to the current state of the world, i.e., thanks to ongoing quarantines in many places, it’s easier to buy e-books than physical ones.
I think the author mentions it is the first time he buys an ebook.
Also if you think the problem is systemic ("it seems that all the restaurants in this chain behaves this specific way I dislike") then you might as well move on and don't try your chance a second time.
> In real life, this would be the equivalent of getting one bad meal at a restaurant chain in a city you’ve never been to before, so you stop eating at that chain anywhere else
well, supposedly a chain will sell the same dishes everywhere.
If you don't like the menu of a certain chain, what's the point in trying at another location?
It's gonna be the same menu.
------
Coming back to the article: my advice would be to download that illegally. If in order to use your legally purchased content you have to go through illegal means (and become a pirate anyway) you might as well save those seven euros.
Torrent is probably illegal, yeah. Regular downlpad might be legal-ish (protected by court) based on the intent - to simply read a book like a book, without unrealistic expectations.
FWIW, I'm not "buying" ebooks or audiobooks anymore because I found out about the magic of digital access via a library card. This is certainly not a new thing, but since it'd been years since I engaged with the public library it was new to me!
I've been tearing through material lately, all through the library app (Libby, which I think is a rebrand of Overdrive), and it's still magic to me that I'm getting all of it for free. Sure, it comes with the normal library restrictions (popular stuff has long hold waits, sometimes tough to find a specific book vs. any book, etc.) but the sheer amount of books available that spark my interest is really cool.
I fell out of the habit of reading actual books for awhile, and diving back in has been like reconnecting with a long lost friend.
My impression is it's similar to physical books. Libraries buy/rent them per copy and loan them out at an equal rate. So authors should get paid similarly to if a citizen bought it from the store. Except if the library already acquired the book, then them leasing it to you does not give the author any money.
it's not free. You've funded the library (who has to volume license the book) with your taxes.
There's a wide gap between "free" and "you've already paid for it, may as well consume it". I have to mention this because people in non-USA countries always talk about "free" healthcare, which isn't.
I have/had some 20 books on the market, all of them also as ebooks (PDF) and not a single one of them is DRM'ed. I refuse to sell ebooks on Amazon, because their ebook format is not open. This year I will publish my first EPUB book. Also without DRM.
However, most authors just don't know and/or don't care. Either because they do not know anything about DRM or because they only care about sales, and with some publishers DRM is not an opt-in. Unfortunately!
So, yes, I understand the frustration expressed in the article! Look closely before you buy any ebooks!
Yes, pirating media is often easier than buying media that compensates the author and distributor. Didn't we all know that?
DRM and other protection instruments are widespread in digital media and I don't think a good answer to this problem has been found yet, which addresses ease of access & use and also adequate compensation to creators.
We still want an equivalent to physical ownership of media but that's applying old thinking to a modern technology, so frustration is understandable. Truly owning digital media is increasingly rare concept. Being able to sharing individual media items more so. Typically we merely rent temporary access through a defined ecosystem. I don't know what the answer is, beyond acknowledging the limitations of both physical and digital media and not expecting the best of both worlds to be possible.
Take a look at digital distribution stores for games that give people a fuss-free experience. Access a well organized catalog & help pages, discussion forums, wikis, etc. Keep track of your library, always get latest version, download anytime anywhere in the world from fast servers any number of times. That really made a huge impact on game piracy.
What a typical "illegal download site" that tries to bombard you with ads, puts a bunch of silly restrictions on you and then starts to nag for money to lift those restrictions.. what a pain.
Books aren't games. Books have a way smaller file size, so fast downloads aren't as attractive. They aren't software, so there is a severely reduced security risk. Something like offering the 'newest version' just doesn't apply, most books have a few errata at most. If you think there is some equivalent service you could provide for books, I think you have to give some examples specific to books. In regards to organized catalog: why wouldn't people use the catalog and then just pirate it anyway?
And are you really arguing that 5 books a day or 1 MB per second (when most books are less than 10 MB) are a limiting restriction and that people would actually buy more than 5 books a day? Hell, there are even other sites without these restrictions. Genesis library as far as I know only shows ads. If you think this is even remotely a pain, I think you're pretty out of touch with the average consumer.
Books are different, therefore you can't offer people an easy, simple, convenient ebook store that doesn't screw you over with excess prices and proprietary windows-only software and DRM? Yeah, with that kind of attitude it's kinda hard to compete with Z-lib or whatever. Just like with games. Torrenting used to be too damn convenient compared to all the legal offering, because the legal offers were just crap.
The problem isn't that illegal channels are too easy, the problem is that the legal channels are (seemingly deliberately) terrible. That's exactly what prompted the blog post we're commenting on, and that's what also keeps me from buying e-books.
What? It was you who was explicitly mentioning additional services (e.g. always getting latest version) which just don't apply to books.
If your argument is convenience tops everything: again, the best possible, most convenient book store would be just like genesis library, except that you'd have to pay (and maybe see a single ad banner less).
> most convenient book store would be just like genesis library
Great! So let's start there. That's already 100% better than what the current bookstores are doing (a few small publishers aside). That alone would solve my and the OP's problem, and I'd be open to buying ebooks, but I guarantee people will also enjoy the additional features once you get them to use the platform. I would certainly like to browse a curated catalog with tags, user reviews, a discussion section, thematic sales, etc. Just as with games. As with digital storefronts for games, you could always go find similar resources outside the platform, but having it all in one place is incredibly convenient and engaging.
It is essentially a proverbial greed trap the same as the music industry encountered already. They can in fact get more but they need to let go of the impossible first. DRM asks for the product to be viewable to the end user while not being copyable when fundamentally being viewable is being copyable. It is a hint of a fundamentally insane world view.
>Truly owning digital media is increasingly rare concept. Being able to sharing individual media items more so. Typically we merely rent temporary access through a defined ecosystem. I don't know what the answer is, beyond acknowledging the limitations of both physical and digital media and not expecting the best of both worlds to be possible.
I think within 5-10 years digital media like ebooks, games, movies etc will transition to being represented by ERC-721 tokens which brings with it the benefits of physical media (permanent ownership, sharability, etc) while also being easy to store, transport, read digital items. The main benefit is that you can buy your ebook/game/movie in one store/ecosystem and even if that system goes out of business your purchase will still be valid at other stores and platforms. You own the item itself and are not renting it from a certain store.
This idea has been around for a while, it was trialled during the early days of digital media services when they were trying to preserve the level of DVD and Blu-Ray sales. But it didn't take off widely. It seems to have hung around as Walmart's Disc to Digital, but stopped at the end of last year.
The key difference is that ERC-721/NFTs are a neutral platform not owned or controlled by anymore. Those systems were run by a corporation that could pull the rug out from under you at any time which means no company in their right mind would risk their success building on a system that could be turned off or used to coerce them at any time in the future. You can build on top of ERC-721 since you know it will be around in the future and it's stable, like HTTP before it. Neutral systems are a prerequisite for large groups of stakeholders to cooperate.
Stores sell commodity items all the time. There are a large range of products that are identical in price amongst all of the stores today.
This even exists to an extent today with video games with Steam allowing you to purchase gift copies and sell them to others as a later time. Humble Bundle also allows games to be bought and sold to an extent. If you search there are lots of sites out there that sell Steam keys too. Steam doesn't just compete on price, they offer unique features such as their community features, existing userbase, and easy to use item markets as well. There are ways existing merchants entice you to buy commodity products today even if they have to sell them at the same price as other stores.
This model will likely be more fair to the content creator as they will likely get a larger portion of the profits, thought this is completely up in the air.
An interesting use case for selling modern digital commodities are things like $SOCKS (https://unisocks.exchange/) and Saint Fame (https://www.saintfame.com/). The price is dictated by the market itself instead of individual sellers.
>Stores sell commodity items all the time. There are a large range of products that are identical in price amongst all of the stores today.
A second hand store does not compare to a store selling new goods. Physical used goods are at least in some ways inferior and it's quite costly to resell them.
>This even exists to an extent today with video games with Steam allowing you to purchase gift copies and sell them to others as a later time
But you can't resell used games, that's the important point. It doesn't matter who buys the key, if you play the game, the author has been paid for your specific copy. If resale is allowed, a single purchase of the original good could be played by potentially 100s of consumers (sequentially) without a single additional cent for the author.
>An interesting use case for selling modern digital commodities are things like $SOCKS
I don't understand how books/games are comparable. These seem to have some actual commodity, which can't be easily shared, backing them.
>But you can't resell used games, that's the important point
Well, yeah, I said to an extent not exactly the same. That's also why I made my post. It is possible now.
>If resale is allowed, a single purchase of the original good could be played by potentially 100s of consumers (sequentially) without a single additional cent for the author
This argument applies equally to physical console games (Used copies sold at Gamestop and ebay) and physical books (Libraries and second hand bookstores). Those mediums didn't get destroyed by the reselling of the item after it was used.
Digital goods are always in perfect condition and can be trivially resold, while reselling physical goods takes way more effort, is mostly semi-locally restricted and the good gets damaged after usage.
e.g. if some guy from the other side of the world wants to sell their physical book to you, it's very likely cheaper, faster and more convenient to just buy a new copy.
It's like the difference between e-mail and mail. It's conceptually the same, but the lack of barrier causes it to behave completely differently.
I used to really worry about this sort of thing, and would only buy ebooks from vendors like O'Reilly or Baen because they were DRM-free, and I could read them forever.
These days, I can't be arsed to worry about any of that. I just buy what I want from where-ever (Google, Amazon, etc.). Why? Convenience of course.
Really, how many of these books am I ever going to read again? Tech books in the old days (1990's) would last you a few years at least (my copy of TCP/IP networking from O'Reilly was well-used) but these days? Everything is changing so fast.
So I just buy them, enjoy them, and don't worry about having access to them in the future. A few true classics I have purchased multiple hard copies of over the years anyway. If I end up purchasing electronic something for a 2nd time, I might make more effort to ensure continued access.
I bought a book with Adobe DRM once. It was a relatively obscure book, and I wanted to support the author. Downloaded the file. Installed Adobe ebook software. Then something went wrong. I had to uninstall and reinstall Adobe software, and after that I couldn't open my new book anymore. Had to break the DRM. I never bought any other e-book with Adobe DRM again. It was obvious that the user experience was the last thing Adobe cared about.
I also avoid Google Play Books. E-books are just one of too many things Google does. IMO Google won't think twice before switching off the service.
I do buy some Kindle titles though. At least it works, books are linked to my Amazon account, and Kindle is core business for Amazon. I bet it will stay around longer.
I bought a ebook from Kobo, having never heard of them before and thinking they'd be the small competitor to Kindle that offers a better experience. (Oops, they're owned by a big conglomerate.) I stupidly bought the ebook using my google account to sign-on. Then to read the book, I had to enter my google account username and password into their app! Their desktop app is clearly an electron-type web-based thing but they don't have an in-browser reader so there's no secure way of letting them do single-sign on. Here's hoping this app I know nothing about didn't steal my password - the only solace being that a desktop app can screw you over regardless if it wants to.
If you buy from the kobo store, you can just go to your "library" on the website and download the DRM free files and then use whatever app you want to read the books.
So that's round-about but going to "My Books" (which seems to be their new "library") downloading it gave me a .acsm file which can be opened with Adobe Digital Editions software which will then download the epub. So it works, but surely there's a saner way!! Also note that you can't download the book from the book's page (which only points you toward their app), but only by clicking the dropdown menu on the My Books page.
It may have changed, but last time I looked, only some Kobo books are actually DRM free. For the others, if you have a Kobo device, you can download them onto your device and then use a Calibre plugin to extract them as a regular epub. I presume there's a way to do the same with the desktop client, but haven't used it myself.
On the whole I've been far more satisfied with Kobo than Amazon, though if the DRM situation ever becomes more onerous I'll stop buying from them. The devices themselves are excellent and pretty easy to tinker with.
It depends on the book. Some Kobo eBooks are protected by Adobe DRM... it's mentioned on the main book page in small print about halfway down beside the format if DRM is included.
I've done every step the author has done, in multiple flavors. I have the Kindle for PC app running under Wine on my Linux laptop, so that I can get ebooks I buy off Amazon decrypted and converted to EPUBs. I have the requisite suite of DeDRM tools and Calibre plugins so that I can strip the DRM off books I buy on my Kobo. At one time I had an Android VM so that I could pull the decryption key out of my Nook app and decrypt those books as well. It's a massive pain in the ass on every front, and I despise having to do it.
There is hope on this front, however. People need to understand this. The e-book manufacturers implement DRM at the behest of the publishers. Publishers can also request that the books they sell not be DRM-encumbered. You'll see that listed on the product page. See below:
> At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
It's not easy to find books that are DRM-free, but this does show that pressuring the publisher works. I think this is the route to go if we want to make DRM-free books the norm. Pressure the publisher, not the platform.
As far as I know, there's no crack for Amazon's KFX format.
There is a workaround to download the book in an older format that can be cracked, but when you do so you don't get the newer features that are present only in KFX files.
If cracking DRM sounds like a fun project, check out the thread here:
That's correct. My version running in WINE is locked at Kindle for PC v1.24, I think.
I can't really think of any "newer features" I would need in the books I'm converting, anyway. 95% of the books I buy are works of narrative fiction or nonfiction, and I buy them on Amazon for the purposes of converting to an EPUB and reading them on my Kobo eReader.
The big one for me is the option to set ragged-right. I'm not a fan of full justification.
The other changes only in KFX include hyphenation, ligatures, kerning, and pop-up footnotes. Amazon's Bookerly font is also exclusive to KFX and it's quite a nice font IMHO.
We have downloadable music existing without DRM. Music industry tried before and failed. I pay an extra price for FLAC-quality downloadable content without DRM on it. And I hope that the movie industrie will take this road some day, too.
BTT, there are a lot of books where you aren't forced into DRM. DRM creates real world issues for customers, as the shut down of DRM servers in the past showed.
If you put DRM on your book, I won't buy it. It's as simple as that. Which doesn't mean I illegally download it from "somewhere on the interwebz". I simply won't read it at all.
I buy ebooks largely out of convenience. I’ll be laying in bed and want to continue the The Witcher. There are plenty of pirated copies of this but I’m not going to trouble myself so I just buy this thing I’ll spend weeks falling asleep in front of.
Occasionally I’ll try to get something from the library but it has a seven week waiting time on it. Forget it. I buy that then also.
Sometimes I want to remove the DRM from something, I buy a fair amount of ebooks I should be allowed to make this call.
In the past I’ve used caliber to do this.
Unfortunately the DeDRM plugin is broken on Catalina. As far as I can tell you have to boot macOS into safe mode and disable SIP to get it working.
The eBook market kinda sucks. Not every book is available, for example a friend and I wanted to read Inca Gold as sort of a joke together. He bought the book used in hardcover, this particular novel is not available in the Kindle Store. I clicked the notify publisher they should publish this as an ebook link then I found a copy floating around on the web.
The other thing is pricing. eBooks cost much more than regular books and I can not understand why except because it is convenient. Frankly the device is convenient. Not a lot about the systems that support ebooks feels convenient.
Even supporting services like Goodreads feel clunky and stale at this point.
I largely blame Amazon for half hearted support of kindle. Their flagship device has a micro usb on it.
This was a rabbit hole they needn't traveled into. Buy the DRM version (if that's all they could find), then download a deDRM'd version from the internet. There are plenty of places to do this, Google being one (intitle:index.of blah blah and such).
A poor experience with what sounds like a poor distributor, and, perhaps by extension, a poor and limiting DRM, should not be considered representative for an otherwise neat format (.epub).
If sales are done right, the experience is seamless, as the author himself finds to be the case with other distributors.
Doesn't sound like the author is gonna stop reading ebooks, just that he's gonna pirate them (he mentions how easy it is to get a DRM-free book on Z Library).
Considering the author already strips the DRM from the purchased e-books and also apparently knows about Z library, a simple solution seems to be the buy the e-book, ignore it and then download the same e-book from Z library.
I also feel the frustration though. I won't buy e-books unless it either has no DRM or if I know I can strip it easily afterwards.
Most of the "eBooks" from Z-lib and archive.org I've downloaded are nothing more than poor-quality scans of paper books converted to ePub via PDF+OCR. They're not even worth getting. The eBooks I rent via Overdrive or Kindle, though, were actually prepared specifically for that format.
The author usually gets <5% share from the book price. I guess it's much better (although not legal) to just skip buying the book and send a donation directly to the author.
I subscribed to O'Reilly Safari and Packt. They provide web pages and mobile apps. Because I don't own the books so it seems I cannot download them, but the apps are not very nice. I would avoid them when I can, so I just use those books as manuals to refer to when I have to read them.
On the contrary, I spend quite some money on Manning Publications and Pragprog to buy some PDFs and read through my PDF viewer and I'm pretty happy about it.
I know it's not a fair comparison at all, since I didn't buy books from O'Reilly and Packt. But the point is just to illustrate DRM + apps really destroy the experience.
I wish ebooks would follow the movie industry with Movies Everywhere and start offering an ebook copy of the physical books you buy. I love the convenience of having things electronic, but having the physical medium is a great backup if/when these services decide to shut down.
OReilly had DRM free books to buy. I bought a bunch.
But Piracy killed it, so now its subscription service, or available on kindle (I don't use). Some authors seem to have deals to give away their books and sell them at the same time: e.g.: https://www.tidyverse.org/learn/
I buy some DRM free books from Manning. They put a footer on each page, saying, licensed to: xxxxxxx@yyyyy.com to discourage me from sharing. It doesn't bother me.
Manning also seems to be going a sort of subscription route too. They have "live book" where you buy access to parts of books you want with tokens. Its kinda interesting how they're trying to do micropayments.
For the record: HumbleBundle frequently does eBook bundles. Obviously that's niche - generally comics, programming books, stuff like that, and you're just buying a bundle and not getting to peruse a library. However, all their ebooks are DRM-free.
I've bought into a few ebook kickstarters, and the books came in open files visibly watermarked with my KS email address. That seems a reasonable approach.
For KS, from the author's perspective this is ultra-high-risk. Their book isn't even on store shelves yet, and yet they're selling DRM-unencumbered copies. Meanwhile if I want to buy a 60-year-old book that's obviously available on every pirate site, the seller will still foist DRM onto me.
So I think we're getting there. There are new businesses working with DRM-free ebooks, since the encumbered ones are basically pirated instantly anyways.
I don't buy physical books anymore. It's just stuff to get dusty and clutter up the place. Reading on a tablet is great- carry it anywhere, also has search, highlighting, bookmarks etc.
I prefer no DRM but I don't complain about the hassle of removing it- I'm too busy reading.
I stay on the "happy path." I have a Kindle e-paper reader. I buy a book, I can read it. It's probably DRMd. But it doesn't get in my way. I agreed to the price and I know I may or may not be able to read the book 5 or 10 years from now. I accept that.
I realize this may not be the experience or purchase model for everyone, but for a large segment of the reading public, it "just works."
Yes, I have been a Linux zealot once. I have been a "no DRM here" zealot once.
I am now running Windows 10 + WSL and I begrudgingly accept if I want to support the authors while reading on an eReader I need to accept the DRM'd ebooks. I am getting too old to struggle with being a zealot. There are better things to spend my time on.
DRM-using publishers tend to pay authors less than non-DRM ones do, and certainly less than you can donate to them (I assume the full price of the book). So if your intention is to support authors, pirating and finding a way to pay the author in a different way is more efficient.
I have yet to find a way to pay authors directly. One way I can support the authors is pirating the book, reading it once, deleting it and then purchasing a physical copy and donating it to the library. The end result is the exact same as if I had read the physical copy and donated it: I read the book, I paid for one copy and it doesn't take space which I do not have.
I am surprised by this comment; the article seemed clear that the author didn't mind paying for the book. Their issue was that the book was advertised as an EPUB file but then came wrapped in proprietary DRM.
Their title is literally "I won't buy ebooks anymore". They've stated their intent to only pirate books. And they bought it with the intent of giving copies to their friends in the role as a "library". If they had stated a preference to only buy DRM-free books that would have been different but they literally link to a book pirating website in the article.
There's definitely a demographic of that culture that comes across as having a very angsty, "hack the planet damn the man" attitude. A surefire way to stoke that anger is to involve them in any kind of process that results in profits being generated.
Zealotry is great when you've got ample time on your hands, but some folks have work to get done and bills to pay, i.e. the authors who's books OP is stealing...
> Is this communication style a function of being involved in FSF, or does FSF just naturally attract very angry people?
I agree that the article was poorly written. But you seem to be implying here that people involved with the FSF, as a whole, tend to be angry. I’m not at all sure that that’s true.
> It's not unreasonable that people should be compensated for work that they've spent months or years of their life working on.
Sure, agreed. And downloading unauthorized copies of ebooks from shady web sites, like the one mentioned in the article, isn’t a fair solution. But, for example, buying only ebooks withoutDRM from legitimate sources, and otherwise buying paper books, is one possible fair solution without DRM where writers and publishers do get paid.
Are you me? I could have written the exact same blog article! I have the same experience this month, I ended spending hours to be able to use an e-book I bought, and I also finally needed to convert it multiple times, install shady software, etc.
I didn't find an online shop meeting these criteria:
* really big catalogue (of the size of Fnac.com, etc.)
* EPUB with no DRM
I also sent an email to the (French) publisher/editor of the book to narrate the awful user-experience. Maybe you can do the same ;) If enough readers contact the publishers to say they won't buy ebook anymore with such a poor user experience, it might help.
I only buy ebooks that I know I can break the drm on. The first thing I do when I buy a book from amazon is to run it through calibre with dedrm plugin so I know I will always have a drm-free copy.
> Having DRM on books is a fucking dystopia nightmare that shouldn't even be a thing and I hope that the EU will pass laws to nuke them from orbit
Learn polish ;)) there is no DRM on polish ebook sites. You just pay and get links to PDF/EPUB/MOBI formats of ebook. There is only watermark protection, example site: https://virtualo.pl/ebook/heban-i150038/ but it is similar in all publishing houses.
This article resonates with me so much. I recently purchased an e-Book on Wiley too. Atleast, the author got an EPUB with DRM in it, which is pretty easy to remove using de-DRM tools (open source). However, what I got from my purchase from Wiley was some stupid proprietary format that requires me to install some crapware called Vitalsource. There is nothing out there that will de-DRM for you and you are forced to install this crapware wherever you intend to read this - be it on your mobile or desktop. I thought ok, no biggie, let me seek a refund ASAP, but Wiley explicitly disallows refunds, probably this is the reason.
In their entire website, they refer to these things as "E-Books", but it is anything but. It's a proprietary viewer. There is a small "i" icon next to them in the listings, which I presume they must have added recently that now states these things aren't actually E-Books (in fine print). Clever huh?
Either way, I don't understand the point of DRM. People can still make copies if they're determined to, and studies have shown that giving away ebooks actually increases sales. If these sort of publishers go bankrupt, no one will shed a tear. Because, you know, don't fuck your customer maybe?
I had a script to de-DRM books from VitalSource. It “printed” each page one at a time to a PDF and then concatenated the individual PDFs into a single file.
Everyone writing about what they think and what they did about it.
I think authors should get paid, and I should have free use over the artifact.
So I wired together some machinery to take a downloaded Kindle file, turn it into a PDF (using the underlying Calibre tooling), and send that to my Remarkable tablet.
I should make it available, think it would be useful to others (under terms that the PDFs are for personal use only- authors need to get paid).
I don't mind buying ebooks, movies, music but it has to be simple. With DRM is less good, but even DRM, as long as it's simple. I had the same experience as the author with a book I bought in Spain; they had ebooks so I bought this one. The process was so convoluted and annoying (and only worked on Windows which I don't have here) (also; I am a technical person/programmer; how is a 'normal' person supposed to do this?) that I definitely won't buy again from them.
I think unlike the author though, I was not attempting to remove the DRM; the process of getting to read the book with DRM was many steps (downloading adobe crap, etc) and the endresult was something with DRM that could be opened in another Adobe program but no-where else.
The most annoying part is books 'disappearing' or becoming unreadable like what happens on Amazon; like there are books that I bought which are limited to n devices (all mine and my account!) or they just suddenly cannot be read anymore (and cannot be downloaded again). What else can I do then just download illegally?
Instead, buy a printer. It's cheap and you can print anything you want, including books. It's much easier to read on paper and with a highlighter, you will annotate and remember much more.
This works -- especially -- in a country where you have to wait ages for a book to arrive by post, not to mention silly countries like mine, where you have to pay tax on books.
Yeah. DRM sucks if you want to lend your bought content, or if you're hoping to have it around for long periods of time (e.g. 10 years+). When I buy electronic copies of Xbox games, I'm under no illusion that I will be able to play them in 10-20 years. I see them as long-term rentals. I've made my peace with that because I have an entire library of games, movies and music on media like floppy disks, VHS, cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs, that I never felt the need to use again and are cluttering up my basement. If I get nostalgic about some content, there's always an electronic copy around somewhere on the internet, usually legal and available for a few bucks.
Having said that, I do agree with the shitty ergonomics and usability of DRMed content. If someone went out of their way to pay for a book or a movie, they aren't the kind of people to go and pirate that - so don't punish them.
I buy ebooks because I have intermittent low vision. Large print books worked ok, but the lighting is never right. The ereader has freed me up to read when and where I want to instead of under very specific conditions.
I am also think I am sensitive to the "renters economy" issue. I think I preferred owning them, but I'm not sure why. I've had to dispose of books in various ways in the past for running out of space etc. And I have had books lost or stolen, or borrowed and never returned, so many time. Now I can actually read the books I buy regardless of the quality of my vision. I don't have to worry about running out of space or carrying huge heavy boxes. So I don't know if I really don't like the new way or if I'm just resistant to change.
The place where e-books leave me lacking when they have DRM is the ability to loan them or transfer them. It is a lot easier to get a friend to read an important book than to get them to buy it. But I can’t lend the kindle copy, which is the format I can read best.
That functionality is enabled for about 1 in 20 titles in my collection, and sufficiently well hidden that I can't imagine most people know it exists.
E-book publishers don't see the value in lending. Look at how they are clamping down on the number of copies available to libraries. To them, every loaned book is a lost sale.
I agree it's not widely used and not known about. What surprised me is that I know older family members, who are otherwise fairly technically illiterate, who actively share ebooks using their Kindles. Another older family member, where their local library is very hands on with helping them. They both know way more than I know about what's possible and how to do it.
Another, I believe separate program, is family sharing (it's not a loan you can both read it simultaneously). I'm not sure if that's a separate privilege the publishers must opt-into, but I have used it the one time I tried.
Sometime last year, I was researching the OPDS spec and the upcoming release. I found that it’s all linked to DRM ultimately. Check the Readium specs if you’re interested.
I was so disheartened to see DRM being pushed with an open standard. It’s the whole EME thing again.
When you pet a snake and get bitten, you don't pet snakes anymore. But since you already were afraid of snakes (who isn't), you don't have to test petting it to find out it bites.
So the author doesn't have the eBook instinct. e-book. In other words: "electrified book", "less of a book", "not a real book".
Then, he's not using standard tested consumer channels like Amazon Kindle etc, so then he's on his own. He doesn't need to brag about having to set up a VM and going to darknet to hire a Korean hacker gang and buying a DM cracking botnet to crack DRM. He was just being cheap.
Or just buy ebooks without DRM. Last time when i bought ebooks, the eshop just offered epub/mobi/pdf for download, directly from browser, with only 'social DRM' (info about buyer on separate page in ebook).
This is very shortsighted. People are motivated by wealth. Paper books cannot be copied for free but ebooks can, same thing with music. The creators must be compensated or the content that you enjoy would cease to exist.
Very few content-creators get a fair royalty. DRM is mostly about publisher wealth, not creator wealth.
I think selling books for 25 cents etc. can result in massive sales. There is a middle-ground between selling overpriced editions with small changes in between, and outright piracy. Digital formats allow large-scale distribution, so pricing copies for under a dollar makes piracy not that attractive, when following the law and your conscience comes so cheap.
But somehow publishers want it all - the large scale distribution possibility of the digital medium, and the margins of the print medium.
You need to consider perceived value, most of the books I buy are $9.99-14.99 and if I saw a new book come out for $0.25 my first reaction would be Wtf, then probably: did a child write this?
Maybe a middle ground, like what Louis C.K did. He was selling his videos for $5 at one point, if I remember correctly - directly from his website, cutting out the middlemen. Yes, one can buy it and send it to all their friends, but the price is low enough that many people would just buy it..
I've had similar thoughts, and my conclusion is that most copy-able assets should be copy-able. The real value is in discovery and curation, which may be sold as a subscription. Many companies already realize this, and DRM requirements are set by 1 stockholder who pushes for it and nobody can give a good reason why it would hurt paying customers.
The subscription model seems generally good for the consumer but terrible for the creators. As a customer, I really like the Bandcamp model. I can't directly speak for the creator side of things but I feel like that would get them a far better cut.
How is it terrible for creators exactly? I don't quite know what you mean. Streamers often complain about the "always on" nature but that seems more related to having to handle building engagement as well. Patreon is a popular enough that there are several clones for whatever content they exclude to help their image ranging from taboo porn to extremists.
The payment stream seems peripheral to the deal they get. Creators get screwed in publication models as well. The best deal I can see in a "Netflix" style package is a bit tracky in having a maintainer cut and a time weighted service by the consumers under the logic that if 1 work is why you are there it deserves the share more than anything you don't consume while among N works each matters a bit less. More content grows the pie but it is fixdd share. Heavy users pay the same as light but that is because metering and surprise bills are too stressing and loses customers combined with a marginal real cost.
I ment subscription to service like Spotify or Netflix. Direct subscription to streamers is something I do often, but that doesn't work for music and movies.
Currently, I hardly ever buy ebooks (maybe like 1-2 per year), mostly because I hate DRM and the hassle that comes with stripping it off. A monthly 4$ subscription to a store where all books of the world are available would make the industry see a lot more of my money. Surely that would be good for the creators.
How on earth would any author make money from you paying $4 a month? Why don't we pay all computer programmers $10 an hour, that's pretty much the price equivalent of paying what you ask.
Never thought of it from the creators perspective. Thanks for giving me a new problem to solve during quarantine! I'm 100% certain there is an ideal system to manage every human problem, it's just a matter of investigation.
Music was being made LONG before there was a music industry.
Creating value and collecting a portion of the value created are completely different skill sets. You can't put them together by just saying it MUST BE SO. That's the "central committee" approach and history has shown that while it appears attractive, it will more likely destroy it all.
honestly, having given it much thought, i don't think this is actually the case.
all i can say in a short comment on my reasoning is:
1. works of art done for love or the need to share are peices of content probably worth spending very valuable time on
2. works of art created for money are inevitably optimising for wasting your life - films and books are dragged out to series that largely go no where, vacuous music and media is created in the hope of getting you to spend money, not expanding your mind and adding to the value of society
3. historically this doesn't really seem to have been an issue. if you are good you can make money out of commissions and guest appearances or signed copies etc. this is not perfect, but it certainly makes it more likely money will go to the creator rather than a distributor. - note also the current system is far from perfect and many creators suffer from its failures today
4. nothing is done in isolation: inevitably you created your thing based on what you learned from others and opportunities society gave you.. but most importantly the value comes from other people need, NOT your creation - ability to write code is not valuable, removing someones problem is.
5. controlling and restricting the ability for other to create as they are not creating how some right holder wants seems drastically counter productive and greatly slows progress and de-motivates people who could be adding to society.
6. if we got better about respecting what others had contributed to our ideas (as we felt less need to hoard them) then overall i think people would be worried less when its someone else take on their idea that "makes it big". if thre was less ot be gained financially, it would remove incentives for deceit.
i suppose in summary, i think that you should create out of love and because you think that thing needs creating. if all "for profit" inventions and art were to vanish from existence, i don't actually think we would be missing much. there is no race we are trying to win with progress and there is no final state to get to.
My opinion on ebooks is entirely driven by weight. I move often, and am usually stuck with the heavier lifting tasks in my household. Books in dead tree format are heavy, and I'd prefer not to move them.
I understand the sentiment. When I buy a book now I first decide if I will ever want to loan it to someone, and if yes, then I buy a physical book.
For the books I write I now only sell eBooks but under a Creative Commons Share and Share Alike license and I encourage people to share with friends. Writing books is a lot of work and I want them to be widely available. Then, you may ask, why not just put PDFs in the public domain? The answer is that I do enjoy getting some revenue from writing, so it is a compromise.
I've had my "no more DRM" experience when my ebook reader crashed on a vacation, required a reset and wouldn't let me read the DRM protected books afterwards.
I'm still buying eBooks without DRM. At least in Germany, it's common to only have a watermark instead.
DRM on eboos is utter trash, it just makes everyone's life harder but can easily be removed by anyone who puts some effort into installing the required tools.
Click on my kindle icon for "store", find book, click buy, have it seconds later. Alternatively, go to amazon.com and find book, click buy, shows up on my kindle seconds later.
Kindle has definitely made it as friction free as possible. The lock-in used to be moderately annoying, but I have a phone that can natively handle other formats (not to mention the kindle app), so I just don’t care anymore.
Yeah, Amazon's ebook buying experience is about as seamless as one could ask for. I do not think the ebook buying experience has anything to do with why paper books are still around.
I used to collect physical books, but there are so many new and novel stories out there that I don’t reread most of them. So it’s a waste of space to keep 98% of them around anymore. Purging them was cathartic.
I only "buy" (1) ebooks to read on the plane. You can't practically (2) loan ebooks and I like to share them with my friends.
(1) You don't actually buy them, you lease them.
(2) For example; Kindle books can only be loaned for 14 days. I guess if you vacationing on the beach, you could probably read it that quickly. Most people only have some weekend or evening time.
Not OP, but my children seem to have a "Kindle Activity Detector" and suddenly want to play whenever I sit down to read. They're only children once, the books can wait.
But, hey, I finished Worm and that's about a million words!
It's 2020 and we're for some reason discussing DRM.
It was repeatedly shown for the last 20+ years that DRM can not work, is detrimental for sales, author popularity and income.
Late Jim Baen of baen.com realized that in 1999 and since then sold DRM-free multiformat books with usually first 1/3 to 1/2 of the text available free. And it works just fine since then.
> The advertised format was epub, an open standard, useable on a large number of supports. But surprise-surprise, to get the file, I needed either a specific kind of tablet ... or to use Adobe [] spyware.
How is this not bait-and-switch fraud? OP should file a complaint with their local business regulator.
I have a heap of ebooks i got from amazon and find I need to break the drm and convert them to pdf just to read them on my kindle. Really hate the situation on one hand I want to support the author but I don't want to support amazon for the bs that doesn't work.
Also one of the reasons I’m gonna take back my old kindle from a family member. You need an old one to break the latest generation of DRM they deployed.
The new ones - paper white etc pull the new format off the cloud which is currently unbroken.
I had this exact same discovery/dilemma 3/4 months ago. My windows partition stopped working now so don't think I'm going down that road to buy a book again. The Adobe digital editions hassle just really isn't worth it.
I've run into the situation where I want to buy an e-reader. I like the Amazon paperwhite product but my public library doesn't support it (they support Kobo). So if I want to get books from the library I need to buy a Kobo.
Mine situation is arguably worse, it varies depending on the book. Some are Kindle compatible, others require Adobe's software, and I believe yet others only support Libby.
What's nice is that I'm able to get access to libraries that are a pretty far drive. I can borrow those books without having to drive to one of their libraries.
I am building an app that enables book exchange based on geographical proximity, think tinder for books. Do you think there is place in the world for such an app ?
Sorry, but content protections including DRM are the "death and taxes" of the online world. You will have to deal with them one way or another, because without them, authors and creators -- especially small-time ones -- will not be able to make a living doing what they love and so they will stop producing output.
Learn to accept DRM, or go without. Anything else is snatching food from the mouths of the children of authors, artists, and musicians.
I reject that the only way forward is to simply accept rent-seeking behavior and move on. It's unreasonable to expect people to pay for a freely reproducible good, and "doing something" about that implies state surveillance and ultimately violence, which leaves me uncomfortable. Based on my understanding of history, I actually believe it's the perpetuation of this violence that created an underclass who can't afford anything in the first place.
Ebooks are a gimmick. I only buy them if they are deeply discounted (symbolic value). The only books that I pay full price are real paper books that I can read without a computer and keep in my library.
TL;DR: He doesn't like DRM. Neither do I. Don't support it by buying anything with DRM. There's lot's of ebooks without drm though[1].. so.. you know.. buy those.
[1] Especially within technical fields. Also Norwegian ebooks :D
I have a lot of Google/Nook/Amazon ebooks that I still need to get around to removing the DRM from. Over the past year I've honestly just started pirating books. I'll try to buy merch off the author's website or support their projects (podcasts, patreon, etc.) so I can contribute something to them if they have such avenues.
Kobe has some DRM free books, but not a lot of authors publish there.
I'd really like to buy DRM free books. I'd even pay twice as much for them. I started going down the eBook route when I was moving and travelling very minimally, and now I rarely read paper books. I prefer the ebook format, but wish there was a Bandcamp for eBooks.
Ever since Amazon deleted its first books remotely from people's Kindles, I haven't bought any ebooks, digital music downloads, movies aside from on physical media, or software which is downloaded and delivered digitally.
I do have numerous shelves in my home devoted to Laserdiscs, vinyl, CD's, tapes, and of course many many books. But I don't have any room for media which I don't physically own, nor media which can be taken away as easily as I can download it.
I agree your experience has been shit, but work that an author spend months or years of their life on has to have some sort of protection. People need to get used to actually paying for digital services, but they won't when the experience is as bad as this. Companies can not make dealing with their drm more difficult than working around it.
Was the author reluctant to buying the book? He bought it. He just doesn't want to have to use Windows and a whole suite of awful software because of the DRM.
Really? The 1st paragraph is just about his friend trying to borrow the book, and noboby having it, and the author eventually buying it. Is the problem that people are trying to borrow books from their friends? This has been going on for centuries.
My preferred way is to pirate everything, and support after the fact, usually by buying copies to give to friends (though more than once it was just "buy the DRM version and never touch it because nothing else was easily available").
I like this because I make sure to support things I enjoy, rather than buying something and finding out it was not as good as the reviews made it out to be. It is a product of my entitlement, sure, but with the wealth of free content available, I can't justify spending money up front anymore.
I realized when I bought "The Catcher In The Rye" in digital form that I can only buy it once.
But I want to buy more copies of "The Catcher In The Rye",
Every time I visit Amazon.com I try to buy "The Catcher In The Rye" but it won't let me because I already own "The Catcher In The Rye" and that's a real shame because I really like "The Catcher In The Rye" and want to buy more copies of "The Catcher In The Rye" whenever I see a copy of "The Catcher In The Rye" which I cannot do in digital form.
Both novels were stolen and uploaded to ZLib within the first week of release: https://b-ok.cc/s/gavin%20chait
Here's how I - as author - experienced it:
- Within the first week someone buys the book via Amazon using a stolen credit card;
- Book is uploaded to ZLib;
- I complained to Amazon, raising both the issue of the stolen work and the stolen credit card;
- No response from Amazon, although they were quick to reverse the charge (I'm assuming as soon as the card is reported stolen);
- I complained to ZLib using their DMCA reporting tool;
- ZLib care about as much as Amazon, and my novels are still up.
I made it as easy as possible to read my work on my website and pay me direct. I released it as a DRM-free epub for use on any device or platform. You can even buy anonymously. Still doesn't matter. Folks like the OP won't support writers.
And, while this won't stop me writing, it makes it impossible to afford to write as often as I'd like. Two years after my second, I'm still trying to save up enough to afford to write my third.
Thanks OP.