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I would rather see my books get pirated than this

janefriedman.com

251–260 of 517 posts

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

#251
post #149

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…

> Delightful experience. compare this with the piracy option: search for torrent or download link, click, wait for download to finish. Upload to device. Read and enjoy.

As a wise man once said

> piracy is almost always a service issue and not a pricing issue

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

#252
Many of us would pay authors more than their licensed take from the digital publisher, if there was an honesty box. it's low cents in the dollar for almost everyone from kindle.

I know an authors agent and they told me negotiating with the majors in digital publishing is a nightmare. They all miss the old world of paper a LOT.

Patreon and like says to me that direct connect is a strong tool in the right hands. Bands know this: the merch thing is huge. Not everyone can be Taylor swift making $mil per stadium. Again, the digital plays don't make the money, like for kindle its small cents per thousand plays, if you are lucky.

I went to tidal over the others because I'm told its at least partly owned by musicians. I am sure its big sharks feeding of smaller sharks, but at least its fish.

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure you can't buy Kindle books with Amazon's iOS apps because Apple wants a cut.

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…

Presumably that's because if you're buying groceries or whatever it doesn't compete with Apple. You can actual buy physical books in the app, it's just ebooks that it freaks out about.

I'm curious if giving books for free (eg Libby) is allowed, or if they've gotten a special exemption

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

#254
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.

> 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.

Honestly, I would have given up at the very first step. It clearly says that the content is available, but vendor is explicitly refusing to serve the content.

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

#256
post #149

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…

> Delightful experience. compare this with the piracy option: search for torrent or download link, click, wait for download to finish. Upload to device. Read and enjoy.

Just text the book title to Telegram bot of Z-Library. Under 5 seconds, you have the book.

Tap the share button to email the book to your Kindle email address.

If the Kindle has wifi on, the book automatically appears under another 10 seconds.

The whole process takes less than 30 seconds.

I buy Kindles specifically for this feature of being able to mail EPUBs to Kindle. When or if it is no longer possible, I stop buying Kindles.

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

#257

>I did file a report with Amazon, complaining that these books were using my name and reputation without my consent. Amazon’s response: “Please provide us with any trademark registration numbers that relate to your claim.” When I replied that I did not have a trademark for my name, they closed the case and said the books would not be removed from sale. I see you had a typical customer service experience with Amazon.…

Names (and faces) are a "publicity rights" thing, usually not considered to be part of intellectual property law proper (but entertainment law instead).

In many cases it is regulated by state law, rather than federal law.

It is basically a slam dunk, if she were to take them to court and if they weren't Amazon who can just grind her down with years of litigation and tricks.

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

#258

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?

> 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? The vast majority of reputable studies on software/music/games piracy have found that piracy boosts sales, and significantly. This is why you seldom see these studies, because the powers that be don't want you to know that. A few breakout songs in the early 00s wouldn't…

>The vast majority of reputable studies on software/music/games piracy have found that piracy boosts sales

Cool - what do the studies on books show? I mean it might boost sales, I can definitely see how it might, but just because things that are very different from books get their sales boosted does not mean that books do.

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

#259

Can you actually make real money at this? As it seems trivial to generate tons of books on niche topics if it is.

You don't even have to generate the book until after it's sold.

The "don't need to have it to sell it" is how we got "Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies": https://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

A bot with a good reputation adds a listing at 1.27x the price of a worse-reputation listing. Another bot had a conflicting strategy: selling at 0.99x the price of the next cheapest.

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

#260
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?

So I should be contempt with 1/1000th of all literature? Especially when authors often barely get anything out of their books’ sales, for example science textbooks/research articles.

Thanks, I’m more than fine with torrenting, especially when digital copying is not stealing, it has no material consequence. If someone downloads content illegally they wouldn’t have bought either way, the net sum of knowledge/pleasure increases in the world.

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