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I would rather see my books get pirated than this

janefriedman.com

191–200 of 517 posts

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#191
post #139

Let me tell you how to buy a kindle book for my kid’s Kindle that is connected via a child account in “Amazon Household” to my Amazon account. (This opening sentence already signals how the rest of this will go). A child’s account can’t buy books - you have to do it for them. 1. I open Amazon app on my iphone and find the book - “This app does not support purchasing of this content”. 2. I open Kindle app on my iphone…

I agree that this is ridiculous, but blame Apple and Google for wanting their 30% cut of digital goods; I think Amazon is actually right to refuse to play ball on this. Regardless, though, once you know how to do it, you only have to do two of those steps, which seems... fine?

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Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#192
post #179

Having never heard of this person, I clicked through to their author page which has apparently only the books she actually wrote. They're all books about writing books: "The Business of Being a Writer", "Publishing 101", "Beginning Writers Answer Book". Oddly, also on that page is "Author In Progress: A No-Holds-Barred Guide to What It Really Takes to Get Published", but the page for that book (and image of its cover…

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Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet I can buy entire contents of the amazon using the Amazon shopping app. Or Walmart app. Or Target app. Or Best Buy app. Opening amazon.com via Safari on an iphone is a throwback and a very odd experience - I haven’t needed to use a mobile version of amazon.com in ages - i use the app for all my Amazon shopping. And one other thing - I can’t stand Musk, but given my experience with Amazon in a world where WeCha…

The reason is that Apple specifically requires all digital only purchases to only use in-app payment and must give Apple 30%. You are not allowed to process digital purchases through an app with your own payment system. You also can’t tell people that or link them to the website. This does not apply to physical goods. Which is why all the apps you mentioned are fine. This is the same issue that has been talked about…

Heh, ok. But re-read the above adventure in digital commerce that I have described. Can none of this be made easier if a company gave even a fractional amount of care? Like, for instance - allow searching and requesting a purchase from a child’s Kindle pending an approval action by a parent? That’s just one example I thought of instantaneously - because I used the damn thing. Can none of the, probably thousands, product- and user-experience experts adept in Amazon Principles and commanding six-digit compensations solve this so that I don’t need to post about it on HN?

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#194
post #44

I think this is the future of computers for people. they will open their phone and say "hey siri get this book or computer or car" and the browser will show them a bunch of made up products generated by an AI and they'll get the product drop shipped from china and it'll be a shitty counterfeit just like the $5 256GB USB drives. But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be ge…

Your first paragraph is just Amazon today. They don't need AI for people to make up products and send you garbage. They probably will use AI for reviews, but they already have fake reviews that reliably fool people, so this isn't much different. If it gets so bad that Amazon's bottom line is threatened, they'll actually crack down; they're assholes, not business-suicidal.

"The entire internet will just be a computer that guesses what you want and shows you its best guess as the truth" - you just described Google Search, like, 5 years ago.

"the next 100 years is going to be unimaginable.." - not really. What we're capable of is not what happens. We only reach the minimum viable capability that meets a societal expectation. Once the expectation is reached, progress stagnates, until something exceptional changes the expectation. As a more specific example, regardless of how advanced hardware gets, software remains a gas that fills any container, so what we can actually do with the hardware is always limited by our horrible software.

People keep talking about AI like it's going to transform everything. It's actually more like colorized talking movies vs the black-and-white silent ones. Reshapes industries and changes expectations and experiences? For sure. But the films, plots, characters, actors, industry, viewers, their effect on society, etc remain the same. 3D didn't take hold, neither did smell-o-vision, drive-ins, and countless other "innovations", even though they were feasible. This is just one example, there are tens of thousands of other examples I could give. It's like a law of nature. We don't accomplish what we aren't motivated to.

Also, mcdonalds drive thrus work all the time, not just most of the time. The drive thru is the engine that generates most of the revenue; it's a conveyor belt for cash. A franchise would go out of business if the drive thru broke.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#195
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that this is ridiculous, but blame Apple and Google for wanting their 30% cut of digital goods; I think Amazon is actually right to refuse to play ball on this. Regardless, though, once you know how to do it, you only have to do two of those steps, which seems... fine?

Amazon is not innocent here. They are incredibly predatory as a middleman

I buy a $10 book on Google Books, $3 goes to Google, $7 goes to the publisher. I buy the same on the Kindle Android app, $3 goes to Google, ?? goes to Amazon, Since Amazon had been selling books on the Kindle app for a while, I assume they made more than 30% to be worth it, or pushed the cost to the publishers? Or probably worked out some deal with Google, which seems a bit unlikely.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#196
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flippant? I thought you said iPhone not a Samsung folding phone. That's Android.

They didn't mention a Samsung phone. "Flippant" is a normal English word that means "dismissive or disrespectful".

You are very kind to explain this, and I now feel slightly guilty for making the joke (which is a bad pun).

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#197
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cough mobilism.org/libgen.is/irc channels/z-library cough

Do the ends justify the means, matey? Have you considered accessing freely-licensed content instead, and supporting authors who believe in the freedom movement, such as Creative Commons? How would you feel, if you were an author, and people openly advocated piracy, such that you were deprived of sales, and earning an honest living?

> deprived of sales

but the post above explain an arduous process for a purchase, and i would expect that there's not an insignificant number of people who would've given up in the middle.

So do you also feel that you need to make the same complaint of a lost sale to amazon? Why target pirates specifically? Whether they _consumed_ content or not, is irrelevant - in both scenarios, you would've "lost" a sale.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1: go to amazon on a real computer and find book Step 2: click buy Step 3: in the post purchase confirmation it says "Want to start reading right away?" and a dropdown of your devices with a deliver button. It's a kids device they (and you) don't want your kid to be sent 50 shades of gray accidentally. The other flow is buy book. Go to kindle, "sync and check for new items". But again, it's a kids book, don't wa…

The only activities I do on the phone are browsing internet, chatting, and taking/viewing pictures. Anything that requires active involvement waits until I am in front of a PC. Mobile UIs are just insufficient for most activities.

You drive Tesla to go grocery shopping? I strongly prefer a manual transmission diesel F350 because it can pull a loaded trailer full of construction materials over dirt road like nobody’s business.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#199
post #129
post #44

I think this is the future of computers for people. they will open their phone and say "hey siri get this book or computer or car" and the browser will show them a bunch of made up products generated by an AI and they'll get the product drop shipped from china and it'll be a shitty counterfeit just like the $5 256GB USB drives. But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be ge…

This is why I have conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theories about digital IDs. I don't see any escape from a hellscape of AI-generated-sludge unless we have a real way to say "somebody has signed their real government-confirmed reputation on this". The paranoid disinfo peddlers are the ones who benefit most from the untraceability of the horsecrap they put online. Otherwise it's all downhill until the singul…

Free speech should only apply to verified humans. We could use the blockchain to assign keys to babies as they are born.

Only half kidding, about both statements. Corporations also have rights. How terrible it will be when we have "companies" that are just AI programs. All human weakness, eliminated.

South Korea requires you to register with your national id if you want to access the internet there, which sounds like the wrong direction but might be necessary if we want to maintain some semblance of sanity on the internet or whatever it is going to become in the future.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#200
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the ends justify the means, matey? Have you considered accessing freely-licensed content instead, and supporting authors who believe in the freedom movement, such as Creative Commons? How would you feel, if you were an author, and people openly advocated piracy, such that you were deprived of sales, and earning an honest living?

> deprived of sales but the post above explain an arduous process for a purchase, and i would expect that there's not an insignificant number of people who would've given up in the middle. So do you also feel that you need to make the same complaint of a lost sale to amazon? Why target pirates specifically? Whether they _consumed_ content or not, is irrelevant - in both scenarios, you would've "lost" a sale.

Have you considered accessing freely-licensed content instead, and supporting authors who believe in the freedom movement, such as Creative Commons?
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