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Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

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Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#21

Post by sillysaurusx »

kick wrote: post #16
sillysaurusx wrote: post #6

Book piracy is a big reason I've been able to learn as much as I know about ML. I don't know how to feel about it. All I know is that I'm more effective than I would've been if I had to pay for the books, since I wouldn't have read anything. It's common on HN to pretend that everyone here is an affluent programmer working for FAANG with $500k/yr in stock vesting. In reality, I've spoken to many who are more along the…

An alternative to "Never buy a book" that I think is more fair is buying a couple of copies after I'm finished with a book and sending them to others if I find I enjoy them. A $50 Tensorflow book may not be initially affordable for some people, but assuming you got an understanding of Tensorflow out of it, you'll be able to convert the knowledge to at least $50 pretty easily.

Ah I see. What is the mechanism by which I can convert my knowledge of Tensorflow into $50 cash in pocket?

If you mean "go work for someone," then certainly. But that involves working for someone. Almost everybody on HN works for someone; many are less well-off than they seem. Students, for example.

One reason this is true is that GCE offers $300 credit for new accounts, and TFRC emphasizes that you should sign up for a new account before activating TFRC. $300 ain't much. If that didn't matter, they certainly wouldn't bother mentioning it. Yet $50 is 1/6th of $300.

Of course, buy them if you can afford to. I probably didn't emphasize that enough.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#22

Post by falcolas »

I'm torn on the topic myself. I buy books, because I'm fortunate enough to be in a financial position to buy the books I want to read.

But e-books are comparatively expensive. They were conceptually sold to us as a cheaper alternative to hardback and paperback books; but they cost as much as hardback editions quite often. For no reason other than "the market will bear it". The market may technically be bearing it, but it's caused a segmentation of that market with piracy on the other side of the line.

Technical books are even more ridiculous; $50 for a book is insane in this day and age. Especially when it's a distilling of topics and subjects easily found online for free. The act of distilling is not worth $50 to me. "Physically Based Rendering" is probably the only technical book I've purchased and felt good about purchasing; and that's because it feels like a full college course in the subject.

And then there's the college textbook scam. I feel morally incapable of supporting that racket in any way, shape or form. It's an egregious abuse of a captive audience that forces purchases at prices which are based on what can be gotten from a college loan, not in the value the textbook may provide.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#23

Post by gtycomb »

Similar to books, growing up in India I discovered “Western” music because of pirated music. The one and only reason I heard of bands like Yes, Jethro Tul, Roxy Music, Steely Dan, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, or St. Martin in the Fields, etc. are the pirated copes moving from hand to hand among our school buddies. There was no way we could have afforded the orginal copies from the publishers.

Well the clocks ticked, I came here for graduate school and but the time I got my first job, over a period of time I had instinctively purchased all the original CDs and Box Sets of these and many other artists, about 1000 of them on my shelf. When I exchange notes with with my old buddies, some in Canada and some in England, they have more extensive collections than me. For one weak immitation of a Gibson lookalike guitar we had, we own a small stable of the real things by now :-)

The pirated copies that hooked us to the artists in the first place. I hate to steal from the artists I so much adore, but then shouldn’t there be a way to spread the music around.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#25

Post by ggm »

The publisher who does three of a four part series but not part four (ipr dispute with right holder usually)

The author who is dead, has one seminal work online and four other not online. (Randolph Stow)

The author who is dead, has four minor works online but not the seminal work (c.m. kornbluth)

The author who is in dispute with epublishing as a protest against ipr contract terms (Ursula le guin, Philip Pullman) and has their work ripped anyway.

The bad OCR conversion.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#26

Post by bransonf »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #21
kick wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alternative to "Never buy a book" that I think is more fair is buying a couple of copies after I'm finished with a book and sending them to others if I find I enjoy them. A $50 Tensorflow book may not be initially affordable for some people, but assuming you got an understanding of Tensorflow out of it, you'll be able to convert the knowledge to at least $50 pretty easily.

Ah I see. What is the mechanism by which I can convert my knowledge of Tensorflow into $50 cash in pocket? If you mean "go work for someone," then certainly. But that involves working for someone. Almost everybody on HN works for someone; many are less well-off than they seem. Students, for example. One reason this is true is that GCE offers $300 credit for new accounts, and TFRC emphasizes that you should sign up fo…

That $300 on Google Cloud is exactly what enabled me to learn as much as I know now about cloud computing. And to Google’s advantage, it made me really like the platform.

Luckily, at this point someone else foots the cloud bill for me, but I’m still loyal to GCE just for giving me the opportunity to explore.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#27

Post by nataz »

supernova87a wrote: post #5

I can sympathize with the desire to see your favorite books put online for more people to read. I for example, am a big fan of the book "Waves & Beaches" by Willard Bascom, a long out-of-print book on the physics, dynamics of the ocean (and the spirit of longing to understand the nature of the sea), but which always only could be found for >$30 on Ebay or something like that. I finally bought a copy (out of nostalgia…

FYI - on your recommendation I just picked up a used paperback copy for under $7 bucks.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#28

Post by JustSomeNobody »

I will sometimes try to locate a pdf of a technical book I am interested in. If I find it, I’ll scan through it and if I think it’s something I would like to read I’ll buy a physical copy. If not, I delete the pdf and don’t read it. If I don’t want to buy it, it isn’t worth my time to read it free.

It’s my equivalent to walking into a book store and thumbing through books until I find one I want to buy.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#29

Post by iamiam »

vector_spaces wrote: post #17

Safari Books Online (I think recently rebranded as O'Reilly Online) is a pretty decent value -- about $49 USD a month for access to most O'Reilly, PragProg, Manning, and quite a few other non-programmer focused publishing houses like Academic Press. Between that subscription, my scribd subscription (which has plenty of unauthorized titles in addition to its authorized titles), and PDFs I'm able to find elsewhere, I'm…

Yes, Safari is a good deal...they also have a nice trial period which requires a simple signup/no payment.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#30

Post by Simon_says »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #11
Simon_says wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought one of the first Kindles and loaded it up with a hundred DRM-liberated ebooks and read it avidly. Since then, phones have gotten bigger screens with higher pixel density and longer battery life, and my Kindle now sits is a drawer unused. The best ebook reader is the one you have on you.

Higher battery life? The Kindle battery lasts much longer than a phone with the backlight off and in airplane mode. But again, even if a phone could be used as an ereader, my point is that for most people it is likely not. Even for bibliophiles, they might not get so much reading done on a phone due to the distractions that phones bring.

I meant battery life is now longer on phones than it used to be on phones, assuming you're using it as an ebook reader, which means no radios.
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