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I choose the books I buy, from Anna's Archive. I choose the comics I buy from readComicsOnline. I choose the [european] graphic novels I buy from #WONTTELL. An

• Phelinofist 1y ago
  Can you recommend some of the obscure stuff?
  • lolive 1y ago
    Ok, there are not only obscure stuff. More blasts from the past, that really would deserve a better exposure. In term of non-Marvel/DC comics, things from Bernie Wrightson, P Craig Russel, George Besse, Alberto Breccia, Moebius, Druillet, Scuitten/Peeters, and others. In term of letters, once again the almight Lovecraft letters are really jaw-dropping ! For movies, I discovered Vincent Price, Sam Peckimpah, John Ford, Wim Wenders. So nothing really out of the "normality", but they are no longer marketed and are slowly fading to grey.
    • epiccoleman 1y ago
      Bernie Wrightson's is beyond awesome, fills me with nostalgia for a time I never lived through. The Roots of the Swamp Thing collection is really fun and serves as a fantastic hors d'oeuvre for reading the famed Alan Moore run.
• sersi 1y ago
  I'm exactly the same. I tend to get the first book of any series that interests me and read a third before I decide whether to buy it or not. I do buy about 3-4 books a month (mostly epub drm free preferred) plus about 10 european graphic novels (paper books only) a month so I'm a heavy consumer I think.
  • more_corn 1y ago
    I follow the newsletter from Borderlands Books in San Francisco. I usually buy one book off their best seller list a month (sometimes I’ll stop in and buy three or four) I’ve recently started using my local library’s mobile app and I love it. (I typically use this for re-reading or audiobooks for plane trips) I’m tempted to donate my entire bookshelf to the library and let them store and maintain it for me :-p
• Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  > Am I an exception? Yes, I think you're an exception, sorry. We will never have real data on this. But simply on its face, I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to. Maybe they will for a tiny handful of special books that they want hard copies of, or authors they really like, but not for most media they consume. This type of system also becomes a popularity contest for creators; you are supporting the people you like as opposed to whose work you want to read. If an author says something you disagree with, it's easy to just read their work without paying them. I'm not against consumer boycotts, but it should generally come with a sacrifice on both sides--for consumers, that means missing out on the product or service. You are free to feel however you want about this. I can certainly see the immense societal value of making things accessible to more people. But I flat out don't believe the "piracy doesn't lead to lost sales" shtick, of course it does.
  • ZunarJ5 1y ago
    https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-found-piracy-do-1818629537 https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-... From above: 'The Dutch firm Ecory was commissioned to research the impact of piracy for several months, eventually submitting a 304-page report to the EU in May 2015. The report concluded that: “In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect.” The report found that illegal downloads and streams can actually boost legal sales of games, according to the report. The only negative link the report found was with major blockbuster films: “The results show a displacement rate of 40 percent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.”'
    • Wowfunhappy 1y ago
      Unfortunately, absence of evidence ≠ evidence of absence. I obviously don't have time to read a 300 page report—I wish I did—but the conclusion says: > With regard to total effects of online copyright infringements on legal transactions, there are no robustly significant findings. The strongest finding applies to films/TV-series, where a displacement rate of 27 with an error margin of roughly 36 per cent (two times the standard error) only indicates that online copyright infringements are much more likely to have negative than positive effects. The conclusion goes on to discuss each type of media. Here's the section on games: > For games, the estimated effect of illegal online transactions on sales is positive because only free games are more likely displaced by online copyright infringements than not. The overall estimate is 24 extra legal transactions (including free games) for every 100 online copyright infringements, with an error margin of 45 per cent (two times the standard error). The positive effect of illegal downloads and streams on the sales of games may be explained by players getting hooked and then paying to play the game with extra bonuses or at extra levels. If this is what was meant by "illegal downloads and streams can actually boost legal sales of games" (and it's possible they're talking about something else which isn't in the conclusion), I don't find that convincing. It's within the margin of error and includes free transactions. Moreover, I firmly believe that we are never going to have good data on this! You're trying to measure two things that are virtually impossible to measure with any accuracy: (1) how much piracy is taking place, and (2) what would sales have been without the piracy. (I've edited my comment to actually quote the paper)
• dfxm12 1y ago
  I don't think I follow. There's no recommendation engine in AA, right? Do you download a bunch of books from AA, read them, then if you happened to like one enough, you will buy it from a local bookstore?
  • haltcatchfire 1y ago
    That’s exactly how I do it. I enjoy reading DRM-free epubs on my Kobo, and whenever I finished a book I enjoyed, I buy it from the local sci-fi bookshop. I buy about 90% of all books I read.
    • stronglikedan 1y ago
      I used to do that with games back when I played. I was always a staunch advocate of, if it's good, people will pay, and I didn't want to be a hypocrite despite refusing to buy most games because they could not be returned afterwards. Even newer services that offer refunds make it more difficult than I'm willing to put up with. If I played it most of the way through, I bought it.
    • Idesmi 1y ago
      You have a SciFi bookshop? Where is it?
  • lolive 1y ago
    Let me give you an example. Some Lovecraft letters were translated into french some weeks ago. Great reading! There, Lovecraft gives his opinion about the litterature and art of his time. And he mentions Nicolas Roerich. No idea who this guy was, but hey pretty interesting painter (thank god Google Images!). Ok, let's check on AA if there is a definitive book about his art. No luck, but that very same guy wrote many books about Hindouism and eastern asia. After a few downloads on AA, no big deal, I am not so fond of them. Except for one that I knew nothing about (the name is Altai Himalaya, and I have absolutely no clue why this one is picking my attention, but it does). That's definitely what I call serendipity. And that thing happens a lot when you have a full access to whatever content is available. [and you are curious by nature] In the end, retrospectively, such widespread access permits serendipity at a level that is absurdly miraculous !
• more_corn 1y ago
  Studies show that the biggest pirates of content are also the biggest buyers of content. The theory is that piracy functions as a way to deepen paid fandom not to erase it.
• xandrius 1y ago
  Same here. Also, I tend to look for obscure and old books (I love old travelogues) and once I find one that really gets me, you'll be sure to receive it as a gift, if I think you'd be someone (or in a place in life) who would enjoy it. So, I might not but it for myself but I make my decision on the pirated version and then buy more than my share when it's truly a gem. If I don't end up recommending it or buying it for someone that usually means it was something which I'd be ok not to have consumed.
  • gcanyon 1y ago
    If you haven't read it, The Long Ride by Lloyd Sumner is (as I remember it) an excellent read.
• wrp 1y ago
  Similar. Anna's Archive has become a more convenient alternative to the campus library. I can grab something while at home, get the info I need, and delete. If the title is worthwhile, I'll buy my own copy. I don't buy more books than I did before, but my satisfaction rate is higher, since I can check the contents before buying. On the other hand, I buy way more movies than I used to, because upload sites have exposed me to many good films that I would never have heard of otherwise.
  • NoGravitas 1y ago
    Where do you buy movies, and in what format? Blu-Ray?
• aidenn0 1y ago
  It's complicated. Many years ago, I was involved in a movie release group. Pretty much everybody in that group owned more VHSs/DVDs than the typical person. This is probably not surprising, since the time and effort one needs to put into that is rather large. Those who only downloaded were more of a mixed bag; some of them were not in the US and might not be able to see a domestic release of the movies any time soon. Some proudly claimed that they never bought any media because paying for it when you could pirate was for losers.
  • jacquesm 1y ago
    I spent a small fortune on a record collection. Then the record format was abandoned and it was all CDs. I spent a small fortune re-buying that same record collection, insofar as the records were even available as CDs. Then we went all digital (yes, I know CDs were already digital) and it became MP3s. So I ripped my CD collection and assigned them to a box in my attic. I will not be spending money on spotify or whatever other service to listen to stuff that I already have. Movies... I spent a small fortune on a movie collection. Then I moved countries and to my surprise found that my movies wouldn't play anymore. So I ripped the DVDs to digital media and played them using open source software. This saved a small fortune and was more convenient as well. I think I still have the DVDs. I spent a large fortune on books. Thousands of them. Typically read once, a much smaller number read multiple times. So I gave away my books, except for a few hundred that I still keep. I support the authors that I like by buying their books but I read on screens not on paper because my eyesight sucks and on screens I can set the font to whatever I want rather than to what the publisher thought was optimal. There is no way the media companies are going to guilt trip me over any of this, besides that I read both Janis Ian and Courtney Love's pieces on the recording industry. Copyright is great, it has enabled lots of people to earn a living creating content. But it has also become a weapon in an ever more absurd war between consumers and middle men, the producers caught in some uncomfortable position in the background. What's interesting is that the middlemen brought this all on themselves: they equated buying a physical copy of a production with licensing IP, but the general public didn't think that way at all: they bought a book, they bought a record, they bought a movie. And passing on what you've bought when you no longer need it was and still is such an ingrained part of our culture that it felt really weird to have restrictions placed on what you could do with stuff you bought and paid for. So when the format changed from physical to nothing (bits) plenty of people felt that this was not quite what we had agreed to, after all we were paying for the medium as much as we were paying for the content so how come we paid the same or even more as before? And now we paid and got something that we could no longer share with others. No way to easily pass that e-book to someone else (talk about malicious compliance), no way to send the song you just paid for through Spotify or iTunes to someone else to let them hear it after you are done with it. You don't own the medium any more so therefore you own nothing at all. And those publishers and movie producers are all laughing to the bank whilst doing nothing at all except for playing bank.
• Aurornis 1y ago
  > Am I an exception? Years ago I was following development of an indie game. The developers wanted to provide a DRM-free experience. The game had some online functionality (leaderboard or something). They were surprised when the number of accounts accessing the online functionality exceeded their sales by a dramatic number. The developer updates grew more and more sad as they switched from discussing new features to pleading with people to actually buy the game instead of copying it. Eventually they called it quits and gave up because the game, while very popular, was so widely pirated that few people actually paid. Whenever the piracy topic comes up I hear people do mental gymnastics to justify it, like claiming they spend more than average and therefore their piracy is a net win. Yet when we get small peeks into numbers and statistics like with video game piracy, it’s not hard to see that the majority of people who pirate things are just doing it because they get what they want and don’t have to pay for it.
  • kemayo 1y ago
    The difficult bit is working out what percentage of pirated copies are actually replacing a sale that would have happened if the content wasn't available to pirate. The more dramatic industry numbers like to claim it's 100%, which is ridiculous. It's certainly more than 0%, though. I'd assume that for your indie game, there were a lot of people who wound up thinking "I would play this if it's free, but I wouldn't spend $X" on it. Adding successful DRM wouldn't have done anything to them but drive them away, and reduce the amount of buzz the game received. But then, particularly in the indie game space, maybe trading away a lot of buzz for a couple hundred more full-price game sales would have been completely worth it... This is where the concept of services like Xbox Game Pass seem to be landing. Once someone has paid their fairly-small-amount each month, every game is now "free". Much like fairly-cheap streaming music basically stopped music piracy from being mainstream, cheap game-services might have the same impact on the game industry. Though, much like streaming music, whether it turns out to be economically viable for the average game studio is certainly a question. (For the sake of completeness: I don't pirate anything, so I have nothing to justify here.)
    • charcircuit 1y ago
      Sales or economics is not the only thing a developer may care about. Some people want control over their work and will be upset from people pirating their game even if it doesn't mean they lose a sale. Similarly many artists do not want you to repost their art or use their art as your profile picture.
• viccis 1y ago
  >readComicsOnline I'll never get over piracy sites blocking VPNs...
  • ranger_danger 1y ago
    maybe my tinfoil hat is on too tight, but to me that behavior sounds an awful lot like what a honeypot would do...
• msp26 1y ago
  The french comic pirate scene has an interesting rule where they keep a ~6 month time lag on what they release. The scene is small enough that the rule generally works. It's a really good trade-off. I would never have gotten into these comics without piracy but now if something catches my eye, I don't mind buying on release (and stripping the DRM for personal use). Most of my downloading is closer to collecting/hoarding/cataloguing behaviour but if I fully read something I enjoy, I'll support the author in some way.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • fransje26 1y ago
    Are there any links you could share for.. ..ehm.. ..research purposes?
    • nowahe 1y ago
      I've downloaded a few from yggtorrent, but there might be some more niche/less public sites I'm not aware of
      • lolive 1y ago
        You were not supposed to spoil the website behind my #WONTTELL hashtag ;)
  • _DeadFred_ 1y ago
    So copyright just with a shorter time limit?
    • lolive 1y ago
      The fact is that those comics are sometimes not available AT ALL anywhere apart from eBay (or equivalent). It is alreadu VERY tricky to learn that those items exist. And then, determining their value for you is simply not possible without those kind of "alternative" delivery solutions [aka piracy].
• plastic-enjoyer 1y ago
  No, I'm the same. A lot of stuff I read is hard-to-get philosophy or from obscure authors, so I first get them from Anna's Archive. Reading them on paper is much better so I try to find a physical copy later.
• NoGravitas 1y ago
  I'll often read books from Anna's Archive, and if I like them, buy physical copies from Bookshop.org for rereading and for shelf trophies.