> 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
"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.