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It would be very interesting to find out how much data Amazon has on pirated books being uploaded onto the Kindle. The article ends with a discussion of Calibr

by sien 4y ago

It would be very interesting to find out how much data Amazon has on pirated books being uploaded onto the Kindle. The article ends with a discussion of Calibre. It would also be very interesting to know how much Calibre is used with pirated books. Amazon must be following an interesting dance with copyright, piracy and the Kindle. They know if it gets too out of hand that's the end. But if they were to entirely lock down the Kindle to anything without DRM they would also know that many people would shift devices.

lkois 4y ago
Calibre is good for library management, but for simply adding the odd book I've found it surprisingly easy to simply direct download a .mobi from any easily googled website and email the file to my kindle email address. This obviously feels very sketchy, not only because you might be including Amazon in some very transparent piracy, but because it works TOO well. By which I mean, these files aren't simply added to your device, but to your Amazon library; these are then readily available OTA to all devices you own and any you add later.
- lstamour 4y ago
  It's a little weird that we're impressed when a relatively tiny book can be stored in the cloud and synced to every device. I get the same feeling from Google Play Books or iBooks. Yet this is a standard feature of [insert name of every cloud storage service ever] and I don't think that much of it at all in those contexts, except maybe when iCloud or OneDrive or Dropbox seems to magically put files on my desktop. I wonder if the difference is that with the exception of comic books (sigh), most ebooks are small enough that they download quickly, yet have good metadata and often excellent cover art, so they replicate quickly. And they rarely get buried inside of unnecessary folders the way other files do. It'd be pretty awesome if say, you could visit Humble Bundle and after buying a DRM-free collection of ebooks, just hit a button to transfer the entire bundle to a Google Drive folder or iCloud Drive folder without having to download and upload things. That's still maybe a missing thing. But it's not terrible to have to send files manually. It's just extra work. (How lazy can I get, apparently?)
urthor 4y ago
It's a very intelligent dance on Amazon's part I find. The objective of antipiracy restrictions shouldn't be to restrict the top 5% of most technical power users. That takes far too much time and effort, and frankly power users provide word of mouth recommendations. The objective of antipiracy restrictions is to stop 95% of users going to the trouble of piracy.
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
They aren't helping by charging $15 for fiction ebooks with near zero distribution costs and marking up paperbacks even higher to make the ebook look like a "deal".
- fullstop 4y ago
  I asked the authors of The Expanse series which format put the most money in their pockets, per sale. They said that it was even between all formats, even though the cost to distribute the ebook version was significantly less. I don't mind paying $15 for a book if the author(s) are paid well.
TMWNN 4y ago
>It would be very interesting to find out how much data Amazon has on pirated books being uploaded onto the Kindle. I don't see how Amazon could know for sure. I have never uploaded a pirated book to my Kindles, but have uploaded dozens of books via Calibre, either public library books that aren't available in native Kindle format for some reason, or obtained elsewhere (notably Tor.com's regular offers of free ebooks).

by sien 4y ago

lkois 4y ago

Calibre is good for library management, but for simply adding the odd book I've found it surprisingly easy to simply direct download a .mobi from any easily googled website and email the file to my kindle email address. This obviously feels very sketchy, not only because you might be including Amazon in some very transparent piracy, but because it works TOO well. By which I mean, these files aren't simply added to your device, but to your Amazon library; these are then readily available OTA to all devices you own and any you add later.

lstamour 4y ago
It's a little weird that we're impressed when a relatively tiny book can be stored in the cloud and synced to every device. I get the same feeling from Google Play Books or iBooks. Yet this is a standard feature of [insert name of every cloud storage service ever] and I don't think that much of it at all in those contexts, except maybe when iCloud or OneDrive or Dropbox seems to magically put files on my desktop. I wonder if the difference is that with the exception of comic books (sigh), most ebooks are small enough that they download quickly, yet have good metadata and often excellent cover art, so they replicate quickly. And they rarely get buried inside of unnecessary folders the way other files do. It'd be pretty awesome if say, you could visit Humble Bundle and after buying a DRM-free collection of ebooks, just hit a button to transfer the entire bundle to a Google Drive folder or iCloud Drive folder without having to download and upload things. That's still maybe a missing thing. But it's not terrible to have to send files manually. It's just extra work. (How lazy can I get, apparently?)

urthor 4y ago

It's a very intelligent dance on Amazon's part I find. The objective of antipiracy restrictions shouldn't be to restrict the top 5% of most technical power users. That takes far too much time and effort, and frankly power users provide word of mouth recommendations. The objective of antipiracy restrictions is to stop 95% of users going to the trouble of piracy.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

They aren't helping by charging $15 for fiction ebooks with near zero distribution costs and marking up paperbacks even higher to make the ebook look like a "deal".

fullstop 4y ago
I asked the authors of The Expanse series which format put the most money in their pockets, per sale. They said that it was even between all formats, even though the cost to distribute the ebook version was significantly less. I don't mind paying $15 for a book if the author(s) are paid well.

TMWNN 4y ago

>It would be very interesting to find out how much data Amazon has on pirated books being uploaded onto the Kindle. I don't see how Amazon could know for sure. I have never uploaded a pirated book to my Kindles, but have uploaded dozens of books via Calibre, either public library books that aren't available in native Kindle format for some reason, or obtained elsewhere (notably Tor.com's regular offers of free ebooks).