Comment by babblingfish
3 months ago
Books have got to be the least expensive form of entertainment out there. The value to cost ratio is incredible. Consider buying books to support authors and publishers. If you can't afford it, then libraries are nice too.
I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people!
I recently bought the complete Storm Archives series by Brandon Sanderson on ebook for $10. That's over 100 hours of entertainment. It's literally a ratio of 10 CENTS per hour of entertainment.
I have more than 100 books that I bought with actual money on Apple's iBooks (or whatever it was called back in 2010-2012). I no longer use an iPad and would like to be able to read them on my Kindle. Because of DRM, I can't. I'm all for supporting authors and the various editors, etc., but I feel like I've already done that in this case.
I don't see much of an ethical problem with downloading a pirated version of an ebook that you already paid for but can no longer access. If I did that, I'd have no problem sleeping at night.
Afaik, format shifting for convince is legal so long as you're Anthropic.
It was mostly a passing mention in the lawsuit against them where the damages are just for pirating books they didn't also buy. The fact that they bought used books and scanned them since its cheaper than ebooks was allowed by the court.
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I agree with that
Yes, there should have been a law that required interoperable DRM.
At least you can transfer movies around different services. It’s a shame you can’t with books.
Ironically I worked on the project to enable that cross-provider interop for movies...
If there was an actual market demand for this then Kindle could license the technology.
It should be put into law, that when you buy something, you have the right to do with it what you want for personal use.
In the present case, Amazon clearly states that the customer is buying a book, so it should work the same way as buying a physical book.
One solution would be to buy a DRM free digital version.
The stormlight archive isn't a representative example because:
- Brandon Sanderson's books are actually relatively inexpensive, despite their popularity
- Brandon sanderson ebooks are available without DRM. Interestingly, this is actually more common for fantasy and SF than other genres.
Other books are more expensive and more likely to be locked behind DRM for digital books.
> Interestingly, this is actually more common for fantasy and SF than other genres.
Because it's a Tor policy? Brandon Sanderson's ebooks are DRM-free because his publisher is Tor.
Yeah, it's a Tor policy, and Tor is one of the biggest publishers in fantasy/scifi, which does have a big impact on why DRM-free is more common in those genres than any other.
But it's also useful to point out that it isn't just Tor. Baen, best known for military scifi, has had a DRM-free policy for slightly longer than Tor. (Not just that, but the Baen Free Library is a really cool approach to ebooks as well, with DRM free copies of some of their most out-of-print/hard-to-print books and also the first book or two in nearly every series that they publish for a "try before you buy". Some of their hardcovers have even included CDs of sections of the Baen Free Library over the years.)
Baen did it first but Tor did it louder in that Tor's parent Macmillan went to bat for Tor and few other brands in a big lawsuit with Amazon that Amazon was applying their DRM whether the publisher wanted that or not because it was a lock-in moat for Amazon, which led to why there is now a required "This book is DRM free at the request of the publisher" acknowledgment on kindle copies of most Tor books (and a few other publishers).
> I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people!
What is your definition of “cheap” and how many books do you consume compared to movies and TV shows on streaming services? You also haven’t stated which categories of books are cheap and are better value for you. Others may not have an interest in Storm Archives or something that’s interesting to you. There may be people interested in reading a lot of nonfiction alongside some fiction. Individual interests vary a lot.
Someone using only one streaming service may probably be getting thousands of hours of entertainment over one year.
Such comparisons also don’t account for regional price variations and availability.
The post you are replying to implies that they buy books with the exception of books that are only available on Kindle.
I, too, do not buy ebooks that I cannot strip the DRM from. I would face a dilemma were I to have need of a book that I cannot get as either a physical copy or a DRM-free electronic copy, but I have not faced that situation yet.
I have spent over $2000 this year on books.
If you read GP's post closely, they're saying that the value to cost ratio is 0 due to Amazon's new DRM. Did you mean to reply to some other thread?
I'm more than happy to pay for DRM free epubs. I won't pay for a crippled rental of a book that only works on amazon or adobe blessed devices and can be confiscated on the whim of a corporation who won't be answerable for it.
>I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people!
I've been downloading every book whose title I see mentioned anywhere. I've got the last 20 years or so of the NYT Book Review Notable Books (100 per calendar year), the Book of the Month Club list, etc. Why go to the library, when I can have one of my own?
The issue wasn't with the price so no amount of talking about how the price is great will make a dent in the issue.
The library ebook lending solutions tend not to avoid the DRM problem either.
> Books have got to be the least expensive form of entertainment out there. The value to cost ratio is incredible.
Hard disagree, lot of video game will give you a better hours of entertainment per dollars ratio.
Lot of sport will do the same, as will board games and roleplaying games. Lot of hobbies are cheaper than books.
The issue is that you usually aren't buying the ebook. You are buying a license to access that ebook and they can revoke that license at any time. Maybe you're okay with that, but many people want to permanently have access to the things they purchased.
Buying a license if you’re pirating, supports the authors while potentially offering you legal protection on the cheap.
If at all possible, find a local independent book store and buy from there. If they don't have it in stock, often they'll order it for you.
I have one that's been around since I was a kid, and I love taking the family there. Everybody picks a book, and it might cost anywhere from $80-120 (I've got a good sized family), but these days that's about what it would cost to go to a movie. And since you have a physical book, you can swap when you're done.
We also started celebrating Jolabokaflod a few years back, which is an Icelandic post-war tradition of giving books as gifts on Christmas Eve and reading them. This is a lot of fun, and it's a great excuse to hit the book store.
Also consider buying through Bookshop.org. You designate your local book store as the one that will receive the profit from the purchase, but you get to shop through Bookshop.org's full catalog. If you don't designate a book store, the profit is distributed among participating book stores.
How much of a cut does a place like Amazon take from the purchase while providing negative value to the product? Everyone (except Amazon) would be better off if you pirated the book and mailed a check to the author for half the cost or whatever
Videogames could give them a run for their money, I guess, but only certain genres.
Most genres really.
Even a 60 euros for a 6 hour experience comes at 10 euro per hour, cheaper than music and on par with movies.
Add replayability, multiplayer, longer games, cheaper games, ... and many many games are under 1 euro per hour, sometimes far under. Even someone playing fifa or call of duty has a price to hour ratio thats absurdly good.
And the range available is insane, used to be if you liked some genre you had maybe a game once every two years, now there are so many that not only you can't play all your games, even a seasonned gigantic fan of gaming cannot know all good games released anymore.
Cheaper than music?! Not while Spotify is around. Assuming my listening stats are accurate I hover around 2¢/hr annually.
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I agree in general, it is just that books also score very well in this metric.
Vampire Survivors ^^^
Well that’s just not fair; cheap and endlessly replayable. And multiplayer now, which is giving it a second wind for me.
> Consider buying books to support authors and publishers.
Consider that maybe buying Amazon Kindle books is giving more support to DRM schemes like the one described in the article than it is to authors and publishers.
I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people!
Games that sell a battlepass or have ongoing MTX are an minority of the video games available.
There are plenty of games available that are priced similarly to books and there really isn't a question as far as which will provide more entertainment.
For instance, I recently purchased the Mass Effect series for $6. I should be able to easily get 100+ hours out of that set of games.
I often buy a hard copy and then find an ebook online or check it out from the library on Libby. I’m all for supporting authors, but I don’t want to funnel money into books that I don’t really own.
> I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind.
I personally know people that pirate everything and PAY FOR PIRATING SERVICES. This blows my mind even more! I know that globally it's probably still cheaper to pay for those services rather than paying for 4 different streaming services each month, but god, if I go pirate than I would go for 0$/month expenses.
It isn't about the price. The level of service and the quality of the product you get by pirating is simply better. Streaming services break up shows and have s1-3 on one platform, 4-5 on another, and the rest on another still. You'll "buy" a movie on amazon prime video only for them to remove it so you can't watch it anymore. Prime video, a service you have to pay for now has ad breaks while watching shows. Even just FINDING stuff to watch is a nightmare, Netflix is the same stuff over and over again in different random made up categories.
Plus, streaming services limit what devices you are allowed to watch on and what software you can use, especially if you want to watch the highest resolution version. It's completely absurd how some people accept that and continue paying those streaming services.
I know and - cough cough - I might be embracing that as well. But still paying someone that basically leeches on someone else (and I don't mean Hollywood/Netflix etc, I mean the ripper themselves) unethical.
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They pay _for service_ of just press play and view
I buy a lot of books from used book stores. Fundamentally I'm only paying for the paper it's printed on as none of those fat proceeds($3.99 paperback) ever reach the publisher. Totally cool and legal.
When I'm following a new book that's coming out, I'll drop the $30 on the unnecessarily large hardcover with the thick paper that fluffs it up.
I have only ever purchased one eBook though, and it was an awful experience. I had to crack the DRM so I could read it on the same app I read all my other books on.
When I buy a physical book, I can put it on my shelf and share it with anyone I want. I can't do that with an ebook. And if I can't comfortably read the oversized print copy, I'm going to just go find a copy online.
I basically refuse to buy physical modern fiction due to the publishing industry making every physical copy as large as possible. I have old mass-market paperbacks that have twice the density per page, thinner pages, and overall more portable than the massive soft-covers with giant print that they sell today. They're just uncomfortable to read. I took a copy of "Death's End" and a copy of "Thinking in Jazz" by Paul F Berliner. From the outside, the two books have nearly the same dimensions. The latter weighs almost twice as much, has nearly 300 more pages, and the page density is nearly a third tighter. Why should both these books take up the same amount of space on my shelf? Why do publishers think they're so important as to take up two seats on the plane? Bring back smaller mass market formfactors ffs and I'll pay full price for their bullshit.
Publishing companies are making their products worse and worse to consume. As Gabe Newel says, it's a distribution problem.
If you're going to just borrow it from a library, then why not just pirate it? The author/publisher isn't getting paid in either case, and libraries are 1000x less convenient than pirating.
The authors and publishers are getting paid by the library for the physical book borrowed, which endures wear and tear and must ultimately be replaced. Not sure how licensing for digital books work with libraries - all the library systems I've used have a cap on the number of digital books that can be lent out.
i'm gonna argue that video games can be better cost to value ratio.