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> Well, from now on the workflow will be: > - Find the book I want on Amazon. > - Buy it. > - Find the same book on a torrent site. > - Download it. > - Ph
by __MatrixMan__ 3mo ago
> Well, from now on the workflow will be:
> - Find the book I want on Amazon.
> - Buy it.
> - Find the same book on a torrent site.
> - Download it.
> - Physically copy it onto the Kindle via a USB cable.
Wait a second... you're rewarding Amazon and the publisher for their bad behavior by continuing to buy from Amazon? Nothing about this plan is discouraging the problem.
Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.
- stavros 3mo agoThe next sentence says: > And it can hardly escape anyone’s notice that I would achieve exactly the same end-state — the book on my Kindle — if I just skipped the first two stages.
- __MatrixMan__ 3mo agoSure but why pussyfoot around the issue? We should be actively encouraging each other to punish misbehaving companies. It's the right thing to do. They're deaf to anything besides pain. If you want to help your fellow humans, you need to inflict that pain. Otherwise the company won't change.
- stavros 3mo agoI agree, but I think that the author is saying the same thing.
- munk-a 3mo agoI think by spelling out the process in this manner and then highlighting the absurdity of the first two steps your argument is defusing a lot of the bad faith responses that are likely to arise. It does feel cumbersome to execute the argument in this manner but it feels rationally defensive.
- breuleux 3mo agoI just see it as a way to highlight the absurdity. They're heavily implying they won't buy books on Amazon anymore in the next paragraph: > So it looks as though this move — both mean-spirited and commercially incompetent — will result in the loss of about 50 book sales per year.
- jldugger 3mo ago> Sure but why pussyfoot around the issue? We should be actively encouraging each other to punish misbehaving companies. It's the right thing to do. Probably because doing what you suggest would not look great in court: "Dear Jeff Bezos, Here is my signed confession letter of intellectual property theft. Yours Truly, Mike Taylor"
- randallsquared 3mo agoThe poster isn't pussyfooting around the issue, he's feigning discovery to emphasize the point as a rhetorical move.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 3mo agoRight? I never understood why people think it's morally right to buy books/movies/music from predatory service providers
- Aarostotle 3mo agoIt’s very simple. They purchased the right to distribute the books on their terms. You don’t like the terms, so you call them predatory. You want the product, so you just take it on your own terms. Morally, that’s no different than your employer just deciding to pay you less than your contract states, because he decides he doesn’t like the terms of the agreement anymore. You don’t gain a right to take things just because you want them or need them.
- ElevenLathe 3mo agoYour morality is pretty strange if it equates ignoring some of the more odious terms in a hundred-page click-through EULA to knowingly engaging in wage theft. I would honestly like to hear you explain that further.
- saaaaaam 3mo agoAuthors’ wages are paid by people buying their books.
- Aarostotle 3mo agoThe moral principle here is just property rights. One case is more complex than the other, but that does not change the fundamental. Two cases: 1) Two parties agree to a trade under certain terms, one party decides he does not like the terms, and decides he wants to take the benefit without complying with the agreement. 2) One party decides he does not like the offered terms, does not accept the agreement, but takes the benefit anyway. With that said, I think you have a point that the current way EULAs work are questionable under contract law. They're specifically designed to be unreadable and to encourage people not to read them, not to keep up with updates, and generally to be unaware of terms they've agreed to. I'd be interested in some smart legislative reform here and I'm hoping you can point me to some people doing good work in this area. There's a live issue here, but the fact that contract law has flaws does not give anyone the right to defraud or steal.
- bspammer 3mo agoDid you read to the end of that list and then close the article?
- joe_mamba 3mo ago>Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money. If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations? On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%? Maybe because those middlemen platforms provide a combination of discoverability, user review rating system, network effect, convenience, and trusted return policy at scale that's valuable to both consumers and developers/authors enough for both parties to tolerate it as the status quo even if it's not perfect, it's just good enough to be the default.
- CuriouslyC 3mo agoBecause Amazon gets millions of views per day, and their personal website gets a dozen or so. Literally the only reason.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- zbentley 3mo ago> why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations? Some do! https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
- shimman 3mo agoRead the Rifter's trilogy because of this, quite good IMO. Made buying Blindsight in hardcopy way easier once money wasn't a strain.
- paul7986 3mo agoor use Cloudflare's "Pay Per Use," tech so real humans and or more so AI sucking up your content for free is forced to pay you something to gain access.
- Georgelemental 3mo agoIf you read what follows, he makes it very clear he intends to do more or less what you suggest
- badgersnake 3mo agoOr just buy an actual book from and independent bookshop.
- Cider9986 3mo agoThat doesn't cut out the publisher.
- shimman 3mo agoPublishers aren't as evil compared to big tech. Maybe a random lieutenant of hell versus Lucifer's advisor here. You can also buy DRM free self-published books quite easily nowadays. Amazon doesn't have a monopoly on e-commerce, not yet at least.
- lstodd 3mo ago> Publishers aren't as evil compared to big tech. Haha yes, they are even more evil en masse.
- badgersnake 3mo agoI don’t think that’s even possible.
- themadturk 3mo agoMost publishers demand their ebooks be sold with DRM. This can be seen as an aspect of "evil."
- saaaaaam 3mo agoThat’s fine if you have one near to you, don’t have mobility issues that make it hard to visit or accessibility issues that make book print hard to read. And it stocks the kinds of books you want to read. Without being all woke about it, indie book stores can be great if you like reading the sorts of books your particular local flavour of indie book stores stocks.
- InsideOutSanta 3mo agoAs somebody who wrote a book in the past, yes, this. Give Amazon no money. If you want to spend money because pirating makes you feel bad, send a few bucks to the author, buy something on the publisher's store, or go to your local book store and spend some money there. But never feel bad about not sending money to Amazon.
- pointlessone 3mo agoHow much money? I mean, the natural answer is full price but that’s not the amount the author gets from a regular sale. There’s a whole range where it’s cheaper to freebooters and still more profitable to the author. I’ve seen an argument that buying an album from a musician (or a physical media or merch) and pirating the rest of their library in most cases more profitable to the musician than streaming. I suppose there’s a similar dynamic in publishing where the overhead created by all the intermediaries is significant compared to the actual work done by the author, editor, designers, and so on.
- InsideOutSanta 3mo agoIf you send the author half of what the book costs, there's an almost 100% chance this is more than they would have made if you had bought the book. If you send the author 20%, that's roughly what most authors earn per book sale. It can be substantially higher or lower depending on a bunch of factors, but I think it's a reasonable rule of thumb. > I’ve seen an argument that buying an album from a musician (or a physical media or merch) and pirating the rest of their library in most cases more profitable to the musician than streaming. Streaming is a particularly brutal example for musicians. Book authors make quite a bit more per book sale than musicians make per stream.
- __MatrixMan__ 3mo agoWouldn't it be cool if we could get to the point where authors (and artists generally) are making more from voluntary direct payments than they are from the platforms? It would be a great way to demonstrate how broken the funding model is, and all of that money would be money that didn't contribute to the surveillance/censorship tech that copyright is used to justify.
- shinycode 3mo agoActually if authors could sell directly I’ll gladly buy from them each and every time and cut off the middle man.
- rzzzt 3mo agoWhat is making it complex for authors to sell directly? Edit: hah, only 15 minutes late with my attempt at Socratic spiel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810056
- saaaaaam 3mo agoA lot of authors are not technical people and/or are busy writing. There isn’t a simple system with a large audience of potential book purchasers that makes it easy for authors to sell their books because Amazon became that place but now wants to irritate its users by mangling the kindle.
- shinycode 3mo agoAlso unfortunately the problem lies when the platform has too much power and makes this relationship with the author disproportionate. At first such a platform seems like a good deal for everyone, except when it stops being one
- tzs 3mo ago> What is making it complex for authors to sell directly? If an author living at place X sells directly to a reader living at place Y and it is not true that for all governments G PlaceInJurisdictionOf(X,G) == PlaceInJurisdictionOf(Y,G), then the author is making a cross border sale which can have annoying tax considerations. The internet made it very easy for someone to physically run a small business that conducts transactions across dozens or even hundreds of borders, especially if they are selling intangible goods, but as far as I know the legal environment has not been updated for that. Hence it is a lot easier to use a middleman who handles the legal stuff with cross border transactions and you only have to deal with the middleman.
- 3mo ago
- jtbayly 3mo agoOr buy it literally from anybody other than Amazon.
- tsujamin 3mo agoI ended up migrating to ebooks.com and importing them into Calibre (after some work to get Adobe Digital Editions to import nicely) and using that to manage my Kindle. Did the same with my old Amazon library too when they were talking about stopping you exporting the azw3's
- francisofascii 3mo agoAssuming the author and publisher are not evil, you want to at least give them their legitamate cut.
- __MatrixMan__ 3mo agoSure, but they've claimed to "sell" you something, and now they're making your continued "ownership" of that thing contingent upon some future purchase. "Evil" is maybe a strong word, but I see no reason to continue playing by their rules after shenanigans of that sort.
- trencedamp 3mo agoI went to kobo when my Kindle told me if would no longer work. Now I don't buy anything from Amazon
- SoftTalker 3mo agoI have a kobo. I use it to check out books from the library via Libby/Overdrive. I have never purchased an e-book.
- Marsymars 3mo agoI find that integration near-useless. Even obscure books (if available) tend to have a multi-month wait at my library. Since the wait times seem to be semi-random, it's basically impossible to queue up books in a way that syncs up to my pace of reading. (I guess if I really wanted to, at my rough reading pace of one book per week, I could place a hold on two books per week, and on average every week I'd get two books available, pick one to read, and just cycle the other back into the hold queue.)
- SoftTalker 3mo agoHmm, I've had pretty good success with it. The current bestsellers are hard to get, but haven't really had a problem with anything else. I wonder if it depends on the library?
- Marsymars 3mo agoYeah, I'm sure it does - libraries buy licenses to a specific number of books that can be lent out. I've got no insight into how the licenses my library has stack up against other libraries though.
- asveikau 3mo agoCame here to complain about this workflow too. If you don't want to resort to piracy, there are many vendors that sell epubs with weak DRM and presumably give money to publishers. Ebooks.com is one. If you have not already, I would recommend looking into calibre for managing such titles. (I did this even when I used to buy from Kindle, first thing I would do is break the DRM and put it into calibre even if I was only reading on Amazon devices, because I never trusted Amazon in the first place. But supposedly the DRM breaking flow is broken with new kindle releases.)