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I would rather see my books get pirated than this

janefriedman.com

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

#461

Post by red-iron-pine »

userbinator wrote: post #98
spicyusername wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people have a lower tolerance for this than that, and will just go back to relying on personal recommendations and other reliable forms of curation.

Unfortunately, "personal recommendations" seems to mean "influencers" these days.

lifestyle marketing. goes hand in hand with the AI stuff, really.

if 90% of the market is bullshit, the key is to find the people you trust and want to be similar to.

"This is who I am, and who I'd like to be, and this is what they do and use".

And admittedly, a lot of these oft maligned influencers are actually trying on the makeup on camera, eating the food, etc. Not a random bot but a human.

We'll see if GPT and Midjourney are able to hack that, too.

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

#462

Post by extraduder_ire »

VincentEvans wrote: post #128

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…

> “This app does not support purchasing of this content”.

Apple really want that 30% cut.

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

#463

Post by e12e »

grogenaut wrote: post #424
e12e wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a kids device they (and you) don't want your kid to be sent 50 shades of gray accidentally. It's just a book. I'd hope most parents would rejoice if their kid read well enough to get through that, or Mein Kamp.

Look I had to pick a title that would resonate with people on what they might not want their kids to read. I'm sorry I offended you that people might want to censor the materials a child might read but it's a very common use case, so much in fact that there have been class action lawsuits against companies like amazon/apple/google/sony/microsoft for not allowing parental controls (and not locking the kids out of buyi…

> I'm sorry I offended you that people might want to censor the materials a child might read

No offense taken - I'm not sure why you think that.

I suppose people do want to limit what books children read - I still think that's generally misguided - but your points on people actually wanting parental controls are well made.

I still think parents would be better off celebrating reading comprehension than censoring books (Now discussing books with your child is a different matter).

At any rate I guess the prevalence of trash/spam on Amazon is higher than your average library - so there's that...

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

#464

Post by nofunphil »

warkdarrior wrote: post #147
photonpsd wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only "official" books that were written by the author would come accompanied with a token that verifies it; to side-step marketplaces (at least on physical copies), publishers could embedded an NFC chip into the book, consumer taps it with their phone to auth it; token also gets access to special discord, early release of author's next book, etc

How does one validate that the NFT was issued by the real author and not a scammer issuing NFTs in the same name?

Via a 3rd party NFT minting service. In order to create the NFTs the original author could set up an account with the 3rd party, KYC herself and then mint tokens for every book she sells. 3rd party verifies/authenticates the book + NFT

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

#465

Post by yomlica8 »

Izkata wrote: post #206
RajT88 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newegg as well.

Newegg is now an amazon-style marketplace, with stuff they sell mixed in to the rest same as how AmazonBasics is mixed in to the rest.

Newegg is a shadow of its former self, but it is still possible to turn the 'sold my newegg' knob on relatively easily. It seems impossible to do that with Amazon. Walmart online you can do it but you'll have to watch it like a hawk as it gets aggressively disabled again.

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

#466

Post by nofunphil »

LexiMax wrote: post #204
scrum-treats wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NFT/NFC is locked so the tag is immutable, and only the seller and Amazon have the public key. Barring some hack on the NFT/NFC tagging software (which could happen in theory), you'd need both the private and public key to create a counterfeit object, along with a MFA token of some sort (e.g., biometric data, another OTP like Yubikey). And this would be true for every physical and/or digital print.

If I'm following your idea correctly, a prerequisite would be that we as a society would need to make it impossible to publish a book, digital or physical, without an attached NFT. It's also worth mentioning that the OP of this comment thread promised a solution that any author could implement without Amazon's involvement, presumably because Amazon is disinterested or disincentivized to care.

No. Not necessary. You only need the verified NFT linked to “authentic” books. 3rd party service does minting and verification. It’s the same strategy luxury fashion houses are using with tagging physical products with NFTs for authentication

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

#467

Post by nofunphil »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #248
scrum-treats wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NFT/NFC is locked so the tag is immutable, and only the seller and Amazon have the public key. Barring some hack on the NFT/NFC tagging software (which could happen in theory), you'd need both the private and public key to create a counterfeit object, along with a MFA token of some sort (e.g., biometric data, another OTP like Yubikey). And this would be true for every physical and/or digital print.

Wouldn't that require the NFC tag to have a HSM / secure enclave? If the tag just contains a signed token, they'd just copy it, but sticking a secure enclave in an NFC tag is... probably doable, but not cheap or easy. (Or if I'm wrong please correct me, because cheap/easy secure enclaves would be interesting, or I might be missing some detail of how you'd do the NFT side)

No. The NFC chip plus the unique NFT makes it impossible to copy

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

#468

Post by mavhc »

memefrog wrote: post #335
mavhc wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a shame if your digital goods were accidentally destroyed by my associates, a fee, of perhaps 30%, would ensure this terrible tragedy would be avoided. They provide no service, hopefully soon it will be illegal.

Illegal to do what? Charge people fees for what they do using your platform? On what possible basis can you make it illegal? It's Apple's app store for software that runs on Apple's phones. Nobody is forced to use an iPhone. They're expensive luxury products.

Use your dominance as a platform provider as leverage to extort extra fees for doing nothing.

https://competition-cases.ec.europa.eu/cases/AT.40437

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

#469

Post by mavhc »

throwaway290 wrote: post #294
mavhc wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon don't want to pay Apple's ransom, Apple has no part in the transaction, has no costs, yet is acting as the Mafia, demanding their cut if you operate on their territory. Giving in to Apple's crimes would be immoral.

Crimes? It's market economy, man. Apple created great phones. Think Apple and its phones are bad? Don't offer your app on them. Oh but everyone uses these phones. So if you're amazon you now offer the app in a half-assed way to capture customers but avoid giving Apple money for further improvement of their phones... Cool beans! Way to take care of your customers.

That's the point, if a lot of people use the platform you can't ignore it, so you're forced to either offer a bad experience or pay the extortion fee, EU will have to fix it I guess

https://competition-cases.ec.europa.eu/cases/AT.40437

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

#470

Post by tornato7 »

kccqzy wrote: post #244
tornato7 wrote: post #29

Just some of the problems authors already faced online (I'm related to one): - Google indexing and republishing all of their work for free on Google Books (finally resolved after a huge Class Action suit where the authors were awarded a few $$) - List your book on Amazon for $20 and a "third party" reseller will immediately hijack your listing with a poorly printed knockoff copy for $19 - Widespread piracy of Kindle…

> It's very difficult to make money writing books these days. Go read some autobiographies or memoirs and you'll find well-to-do authors and their lavish lifestyles.

That's just survivorship bias. You only read about the very few authors that found success.

The Author's Guild survey of 5,000+ authors[1], the largest such survey ever conducted, found an author's median earnings is $6,080 per year.

1. https://authorsguild.org/news/authors-guild-survey-shows-dra...

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