33 ms·

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, th

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.

leephillips 6y ago
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.”
- kayodelycaon 6y ago
  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.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    "the author states they never had issues with other service" True, but then the author also says "So I bought it. For the first time in my life, I bought an ebook". So I can't tell what is going on.
    - salamanderman 6y ago
      I thought the other sites are giving away books that either had no DRM or the DRM has been broken, repositories of bootleg ebooks. I'm also confused.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Yeah, I have a problem that directly contradicts the article content - even if it's the authors original title.
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
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.
- kayodelycaon 6y ago
  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.
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    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.
    - input_sh 6y ago
      If you're looking for tech-related ebooks, check out ebooks.com. There's 49185 in their technology category that's DRM-free, including O'Reilly books.
- akho 6y ago
  I did not find the book they wanted on libgen. Libgen is not perfect.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  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.
jaybeeayyy 6y ago
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.
- jack1243star 6y ago
  If paying results in a worse experience than having to steal, then the business is indeed questionable.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Paying is always a worse experience than stealing, until you get caught. It's very hard to get caught and prosecuted for piracy though, which is why the "experience" is so much better.
    - znpy 6y ago
      > 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.
      - fastball 6y ago
        Nope. 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.
svrtknst 6y ago
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.
- svrtknst 6y ago
  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.
  - mercer 6y ago
    I sometimes find myself buying a book and then downloading a pirated version through Libgen. It's ridiculous.
    - Onanymous 6y ago
      Funny. I actually do the opposite.
      - mercer 6y ago
        Oh I do the opposite too. Possibly more regularly. I'm very comfortable with pirating, but if I actually end up benefitting/consuming the product I try to find a way to pay for it.
- michaelt 6y ago
  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)
black_puppydog 6y ago
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.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  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.
gwd 6y ago
> 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.
znpy 6y ago
> 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. Obligatory XKCD: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/steal_this_comic.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/steal_this_comic.png
- TomMarius 6y ago
  I am pretty sure that if you bought it beforehand, it would change the "ruling" on your piracy. At least in Europe, I am not sure about USA.
  - znpy 6y ago
    Not sure about the Europe, but at least in the US the DMCA makes illegal to bypass/circumvent drm technologies.
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    Nah, because the crime is usually sharing the copy, not downloading (i.e. the upload part of the torrent is the illegal part)
    - TomMarius 6y ago
      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.
learnstats2 6y ago
>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 I failed to do this after getting food poisoning once, thinking it was just bad luck/one bad restaurant in the chain, and I soon regretted it.
vernie 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Jack_in_the_Box_E._coli_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Jack_in_the_Box_E._coli_o...
crimsonalucard1 6y ago
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.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > There's a reason why companies put customers through all this garbage and the reason is because I can easily pirate these books. There's a reason why customers pirate and the reason is because companies put customers through all this garbage.
  - crimsonalucard1 6y ago
    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.
watwut 6y ago
Afaik, this is the norm and not the exception.
IAmNotAFix 6y ago
> despite positive experiences in the past 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.
schwartzworld 6y ago
FWIW, the author doesn't swear off USING ebooks, just buying them.

leephillips 6y ago

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.”

kayodelycaon 6y ago
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.
- tyingq 6y ago
  "the author states they never had issues with other service" True, but then the author also says "So I bought it. For the first time in my life, I bought an ebook". So I can't tell what is going on.
  - salamanderman 6y ago
    I thought the other sites are giving away books that either had no DRM or the DRM has been broken, repositories of bootleg ebooks. I'm also confused.
koheripbal 6y ago
Yeah, I have a problem that directly contradicts the article content - even if it's the authors original title.

read_if_gay_ 6y ago

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.

kayodelycaon 6y ago
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.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  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.
  - input_sh 6y ago
    If you're looking for tech-related ebooks, check out ebooks.com. There's 49185 in their technology category that's DRM-free, including O'Reilly books.
akho 6y ago
I did not find the book they wanted on libgen. Libgen is not perfect.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
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.

jaybeeayyy 6y ago

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.

jack1243star 6y ago
If paying results in a worse experience than having to steal, then the business is indeed questionable.
- fastball 6y ago
  Paying is always a worse experience than stealing, until you get caught. It's very hard to get caught and prosecuted for piracy though, which is why the "experience" is so much better.
  - znpy 6y ago
    > 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.
    - fastball 6y ago
      Nope. 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.

svrtknst 6y ago

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.

svrtknst 6y ago
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.
- mercer 6y ago
  I sometimes find myself buying a book and then downloading a pirated version through Libgen. It's ridiculous.
  - Onanymous 6y ago
    Funny. I actually do the opposite.
    - mercer 6y ago
      Oh I do the opposite too. Possibly more regularly. I'm very comfortable with pirating, but if I actually end up benefitting/consuming the product I try to find a way to pay for it.
michaelt 6y ago
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)

black_puppydog 6y ago

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.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
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.

gwd 6y ago

> 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.

znpy 6y ago

> 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. Obligatory XKCD: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/steal_this_comic.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/steal_this_comic.png

TomMarius 6y ago
I am pretty sure that if you bought it beforehand, it would change the "ruling" on your piracy. At least in Europe, I am not sure about USA.
- znpy 6y ago
  Not sure about the Europe, but at least in the US the DMCA makes illegal to bypass/circumvent drm technologies.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  Nah, because the crime is usually sharing the copy, not downloading (i.e. the upload part of the torrent is the illegal part)
  - TomMarius 6y ago
    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.

learnstats2 6y ago

>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 I failed to do this after getting food poisoning once, thinking it was just bad luck/one bad restaurant in the chain, and I soon regretted it.

vernie 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Jack_in_the_Box_E._coli_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Jack_in_the_Box_E._coli_o...

crimsonalucard1 6y ago

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.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> There's a reason why companies put customers through all this garbage and the reason is because I can easily pirate these books. There's a reason why customers pirate and the reason is because companies put customers through all this garbage.
- crimsonalucard1 6y ago
  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.

watwut 6y ago

Afaik, this is the norm and not the exception.

IAmNotAFix 6y ago

> despite positive experiences in the past 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.

schwartzworld 6y ago

FWIW, the author doesn't swear off USING ebooks, just buying them.