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I would rather see my books get pirated than this
271–280 of 517 posts
Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Service _is_ a pricing issue: pricing is about the valuation of a service.
If the price doesn't outweigh the benefits of the service, people will not use the service.
Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this
#273Earlier 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…
> 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.
...
> i use the app for all my Amazon shopping.
Because Apple allows it. It's their prerogative, after all, not Amazon's.
I mean, really, if your employer told you that the only way they can pay you is if you used their in-house payment system that took 75% of your pre-tax earnings as a commission, you'd go elsewhere too.
Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, until someone creates a website that just ships the products they say they have, and people type in the URL for the site directly and shop there? If online shopping were truly such a terribly scammy UX in 100% of cases people would stop using it or shift to shopping from trusted sellers who recognize the tremendous amount of value they can capture by not scamming people.
Imagine like an LLM trained on everything you've ever done since birth included as part of the data set. and then one of those for each other person in the world. they could slice and dice you into a thousand different groups. at some point technology is going to stop being something that we interact with through a screen and a keyboard. Google maps will be there, where ever you go, all the time. No more getting lost…
Well, currently the top LLM fails at repeatedly generating a stable set of pretty simple regexes for me, so where pretty far from a full-blown LLM dystopia at this point.
Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do the ends justify the means, matey? Commenter's point was that it's obviously easier to pirate. This is exactly the point; As an author, I'm upset that the system is like it is, I'm not upset at the many people who are undoubtedly going to pirate my work if it's difficult to get, whether it's right or wrong. No Author finishes their work and declares, "Now, let me make this as difficult as possible to purchase."…
>No Author finishes their work and declares, "Now, let me make this as difficult as possible to purchase." It's the PLATFORM. IMO, the logical conclusion here is obvious: copyright should provide the author with the right to money, but not with the right to control actual distribution - we should be legally allowed to send the author $X in the mail and then torrent the thing. This notion that the author should contro…
> every ISBN should have the author's bank account number next to it and obtaining a copy of the ebook should be as simple as sending $X to that bank account, then finding a torrent by ISBN.
which is fine, except what happens if the author sold the rights to another company that then demand a different set of condition?
Or are you saying that the owner of said copyright does not have the right to decide such (for example, they would want to decide that the works is only available as part of something else sold)?
Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do the ends justify the means, matey? Commenter's point was that it's obviously easier to pirate. This is exactly the point; As an author, I'm upset that the system is like it is, I'm not upset at the many people who are undoubtedly going to pirate my work if it's difficult to get, whether it's right or wrong. No Author finishes their work and declares, "Now, let me make this as difficult as possible to purchase."…
>No Author finishes their work and declares, "Now, let me make this as difficult as possible to purchase." It's the PLATFORM. IMO, the logical conclusion here is obvious: copyright should provide the author with the right to money, but not with the right to control actual distribution - we should be legally allowed to send the author $X in the mail and then torrent the thing. This notion that the author should contro…
This is an interesting idea but one that will, if anything, increase piracy. Given a torrent link and a bank account number, how many people will think "let me try the book first for a bit, if I like it I'll pay" and then never come around to pay? Or even not care about paying at all, nobody will notice or be able to track, so you're basically safe from law enforcement.
Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's arduous relative to today's standards and relative to piracy.
Carrying those books wasn't arduous, except when I travelled around Asia and decided my main bag should be books. Big books. Almost ruined my back. Words have meaning. Arduous it ain't.
Tiresome doesn't necessarily mean physically tired. Words do have meaning, and you would know if you read those meaning to understand the idea being presented.
Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do the ends justify the means, matey? Commenter's point was that it's obviously easier to pirate. This is exactly the point; As an author, I'm upset that the system is like it is, I'm not upset at the many people who are undoubtedly going to pirate my work if it's difficult to get, whether it's right or wrong. No Author finishes their work and declares, "Now, let me make this as difficult as possible to purchase."…
>No Author finishes their work and declares, "Now, let me make this as difficult as possible to purchase." It's the PLATFORM. IMO, the logical conclusion here is obvious: copyright should provide the author with the right to money, but not with the right to control actual distribution - we should be legally allowed to send the author $X in the mail and then torrent the thing. This notion that the author should contro…
But then you are cutting out the publisher, who spent a significant amount of money and an overwhelming amount of hours doing things like, “pressing upload”, and, “collecting payment”.
I kid, they are payday loan services for authors.
Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this
#279Earlier 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?
Apple prohibits Amazon from selling books on the iOS Kindle app, trying to force people to buy it via Apple Books instead.
Apple is not prohibiting anything. This is purely Amazon's decision. They make customer's life hell to save money.
Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who can afford to do so will perhaps just pay 2x to 3x to shop a more limited selection from personally curated stores.
Unfortunately if you so create a new product or service it’ll be really hard to find you this way and it might require a lot more money and effort to reach out to the audience.
Oooooh, custom search engines.
Amazon would hate this, but make a deal with shopify to speed up spidering their sites. Then, spider all other retailors.
You put in a product id/name, and it only shows results from amazon, shopify sites, and vetted retailers.
The manual curation part, is vetting the retail site. Walmart would be a problem(for example), unless it was easy to tag 'sold by walmart'. Amazon's filter would only include shipped by amazon stuff.
So like 'hanes t-shirt', and you get 7 links, from 7 sites, all woth prices and shipping cost estimates.
Amazon has horrible pricing, bordering on predatory for some things. Maybe I'll do this, I'm bored this summer.